LibraryThing: Yes, they have wank, too.
LibraryThing: a place to list your books, talk about books, and have meaningful discussions about whether Book A is the same as Book B.

One of the features of LT is that five different people can enter five different editions of a book into their catalogues, but thanks to the combining function, those five books show up as the same work. That means reviews for a Penguin edition of Pride & Prejudice are linked to reviews for a Tor edition are linked to reviews for the Barnes & Noble edition are linked to reviews for the Bantam edition, plus the French translation or the Klingon translation or whatever. It makes it possible to have 'connections' - to see what other books people own that share connections with you. Plus other things.


Combining books into works isn't always automatic, though, so there are lots of people who take it upon themselves to do it. And then you get bad combinations, so someone else will come through and separate a work. This can get really messy, say if someone combined a regular P&P plus Pride & Prejudice & Zombies plus a P&P: Vol 1 and P&P: Vol 2 and then maybe an edition that has both P&P and Sense & Sensibility. Everything has to be separated out, then like combined with like.

But whether works are the same work or not can be pretty vague. So Tim Spalding, the guy behind LT, came up with what's known as the Dinner Party Rule: if someone were to announce drunkenly at a dinner party "_____ is my favorite book ever!" and he's talking about edition X, would a conversation about the book with someone who owns edition Y cause any confusion? (er, more or less. I'm bad at explaining it.) So an abridged version isn't the same as an unabridged version, but the translation and the original language versions are the same. Got it?


It's a recipe for wank, and it didn't fail.

See: Are Norton Critical Editions the same as regular editions?

It all started with rorrison saying "some idiot went and combined the NCE with the plain edition, even though there was a notice saying DON'T DO WHAT YOU'RE ABOUT TO DO" and then turns into a small debate over whether the idiot was right or not, but mostly people were strongly separatists, or only mild lumpers.

I LOLed and commented on that, and then BAM the thread asploded with people strongly in favor of lumping showing up to argue with the people strongly in favor of separating, and the argument has gone nowhere for several days now, and it keeps growing.

And it's not limited to the NCEs, either. We now have a bit of a debate brewing over the Chicago Manuel of Style editions and where Upstate New York begins. Plus another, almost identical thread that also began today: "If anthology X has 10 stories and anthology Y has 9 stories, but they only have 4 in common, are they the same work? And are they the same according to the Dinner Party Test?"


The best part about all this? And the thing that makes me shake my head and laugh at everyone arguing in those threads? No matter what is ultimately decided, someone else will come through and combine/separate the works based on their own preferences. (And then, of course, someone else will try to fix it, before it gets changed again. Like wiki editing wars. It happens all the time!)