"Include in statistics" Collection setting

Currently the only collection options are "include in connections" and "include in recommendations". I'd like a more general "include in statistics" setting as well.

Yes please!

Yes, I would like that too.

In theory, yes. I'd like to see more user discrimination about where data about works in collections are used.

What statistics did you have in mind though, Zoë?

I first thought about it with respect to the group zeitgeist, and it occurred to me again yesterday for Tag Mirror.

I'd personally like it to apply to the tag counts on our profile page, too, though I suspect that one won't happen. I've ended up changing my "unread" tags to "not read" for discarded books so that the total isn't inflated.

I'd welcome anything that would downgrade the prolific wishlisters on MWYB lists.

>6 LolaWalser: "Music With Your Baby"?

I agree in supporting the marginalization of wishlist data, including (especially) my own. Having been given a Wishlist collection, I've gone ahead and used it. But it frustrates me in many ways. Here's a really minor one:

Just in the last 24 hours I've acquired a couple of books that I had wishlisted long ago. So I changed their collections from Wishlist to My Library. But they don't show up in Recently Added on my homepage, and they won't appear for "connected" users who might be looking at my recent activity.

The fact that 'wishlist' is basically not functional as one at all in any way that is different from when we used tags to do it is pretty frustrating to me as well.

4> Ditto.

I get around the wishlist snafu by adding my new books normally and then when I get the duplicate message I go in and delete the wishlist version.

I'd like to exclude certain collections (Read but unowned or Wishlist) from my book total on the home page. Would that be one of the effects from including/excluding certain collections in statistics? Or am I missing the point?

>11 jseger9000: Yeah, that's exactly the sort of thing I'd like it to do.

> 10 A workable kludge, though at some cost of effort. I can't believe it didn't occur to me.

> 11, 12 I don't understand what you mean by "book total." All Collections should be All Collections, including every book cataloged for whatever reason. My Library, on the other hand, will work for a general total that excludes other specific collections, such as Wishlist and Borrowed. I use it that way, anyhow.

On the profile page it lists each collection with the number in each concluding with All Collections and the grand total, which seems reasonable to me. But on the Home Page under Your Zeitgeist it just says Books followed by the total of all the books in all your collections. I can see why someone might think that this number is misleading.

>13 paradoxosalpha: Yeah, it would definitely be easier to have things based on Your Library. Unfortunately, not everyone even uses Your Library.

#14 - on the Home Page under Your Zeitgeist it just says Books followed by the total of all the books in all your collections.

Exactly. Not the most urgent feature ever, but if Zoe's feature request did that, hey, It'd be a bonus for me.

I have to step in here and say that I must be different because I do not use "Your Library" as the total of all my books. For me, it is only my reference books - cookbooks, textbooks, etc. - books I don't really read, I just refer to when I need information.

I would like to exclude wishlist from the total in collections, because I don't have them, never read them so they really are just a wishlist.

> 14, 16

Ah: "Books" in Your Zeitgeist. Well, I think that is in fact an accurate statistic of total books cataloged. All of the Your Zeitgeist numbers have to do with site usage, rather than statistics of the user's particular library. Would you want CK Facts or Author Pics to exclude ones for books associated with your Wishlist? I wouldn't want to exclude any particular collections from Books in Your Zeitgeist either.

I wouldn't want to exclude any particular collections from Books in Your Zeitgeist either.

But I would and if Zoe's idea came to something, we could both have our way.

Also, if certain collections could be excluded, then I could make a new collection for books that I do not own so that I could upload covers for them (a feature I've been agitating for for a while). Now just because I'm nerdy enough to spend my spare time uploading covers for books I do not own/have no interest in doesn't mean I want my recommendations to be based on them.

> 19 But I would...

You would want "CK Facts or Author Pics to exclude ones for books associated with your Wishlist?"

The Recommendations algorithm is a totally different issue from "include in statistics" as discussed so far in this thread.

Actually, I just want books from certain collections to be excluded from Books in Your Zeitgeist or alternately, to have the number that populates in that field come from some other collection.

> 21

What if it said "Books cataloged" instead of just "Books"? That's what's really going on there.

I would just like that field to reflect books I actually own.

Like I said, this is not a major thing for me. There's lots of other stuff I'd rather see first.

But if Zoe's recommendation went through, I'd see a positive from it.

> 23

Okay, but I don't see the particular value, since "books I own" can be a collection of my choice (and is in fact My Library in my own catalog), and those collections display on the homepage in the Your Collections module.

In my own homepage, I've have Your Collections at the top left (not sure if that's its default position), so the Books number in Your Zeitgeist has a lower profile anyhow.

I'd like the number in the red box below:



to reflect the number from Your Library rather than All Collections.

Is there a way to do that now?

>25 jseger9000: Nope, I don't think so.

> 25 a way to do that now?

I don't think so.

No, but there ought to be.

Hence this feature request... so we could choose which collections we wanted to include in statistics like this.

Exactly and thank you.

That's a much more reasonable request than previous versions which have requested allowing people to entirely disable All Collections entirely. I don't see any problem with this version!

Of course, the boxed number is only visible to you, since it's on your homepage; the numbers are clearly spelled out by collection on the profile, but All Collections is there as well. Would you have any objection to leaving the profile totals as they are, so other users can still browse your library?

Thirty-second-ed. I'd love to be exclude my "wishlist" and "interesting" and my "previously owned" and maybe my "read but unowned" books from statistics ...

>31 lorax: Nope, I wouldn't object to leaving the profile totals as they are.

I've concluded that I just won't be using LT's Wishlist feature, but I'd still like more control over my other collections. Initially I had expected Your Library to be the "default" collection for most things (group statistics, etc.), but it seems like it's not being used for anything since too many people don't use that collection at all. So we're left with either All Collections, which is too broad in many cases (e.g., discarded, unread books or books inherited from other family members that don't necessarily reflect my own tastes), or Include in Connections/Recommendations, which have very specific purposes--I know I've tailored them to get the sort of connections and recommendations I want by excluding a large proportion of my books, so I wouldn't want to see all statistics based on them.

#31 - Would you have any objection to leaving the profile totals as they are, so other users can still browse your library?

No objection at all.

If I understood the feature as requested by Zoe, I would be able to exclude say Read but unowned or Wishlist collections from the total reflected in that box on the home page. I would like the number on my home page to reflect books I actually own, since that is the number I see most aften. I don't have any objection to anyone browsing any of my collections.

Currently, I don't use Wishlist because I could list hundreds of books there, but don't want to distort that home page number.

I guess the real question is, what features exactly would this affect? Time for some polls.... (Please add more)shown in message 25

e.g., most popular books among people in a given group

Side benefit: less calculating required

(I'm guessing this is a more controversial one)

For the group zeitgeist page I'd like to see both the most popular books owned or read as well as most wishlisted books. I guess that brings us back to the controversial Read and Owned collections.

>40 jjwilson61: Yeah, that would be ideal. I definitely agree that the group zeitgeist should have a wishlist section as well. But in the absence of Read and Owned collections, if we have to choose some set of books to pretend are read/owned, I think it should be done via this include in statistics option.

Oh, and one more important poll:

Yes!
Its really quite annoying to me that Collections promised this kind of differentitation, but never managed to impliment it. I've since used the Wishlist collection, and catalogued books my OtherHalf likes to read, and its very difficult to tell how 'true' some connections and statisitcs are for my reading tastes.

The biggest problem with "My Library" is that you ahve to be very careful about which collections you add a book to, and what the settings are for each one.

>43 reading_fox: I think MWYB should be based on Include in Connections (as it is now, but working both ways); what else is Include in Connections for?

I concur with Zoe.

Now that Tag Mirror is back, I'd really like to see this feature.... So much noise :(.

Yes, I'd love to be able to see the different tag representations for different collections (along with the basic stats suggestion in the original posting).

Related to this would be the ability to select a collection and find other members' collections based on books from your collection.

I like Harry Potter and felt it was important to catalog the Star Trek/Wars books but so many people have these that their collections are seldom representative of the books I care most about. Being able to do this at the collection level would be very helpful.

I like the idea of being able to define for each collection whether it contributes to statistics (collection size, recommendations, etc.). This way I could use wishlist with a clear conscience and not worry about distorting these other factors. I suppose that the question is whether it's an easy addition or something that is a database/processor hog.

James

The recommendations and connections options are already there, when you go to Edit Collections.

I'd like to exclude the Wishlist from ALL my stats (Recently added, tags/authors mirrors, etc)

#50 - I'd like to exclude the Wishlist from ALL my stats

Yes please. I do not use Wishlist because you can't.

And that feature should be extended to ALL collections. People have different uses for different collections after all. For example, I would like to be able to exclude the book count of Wishlist and Read but unowned from All Collections.

I would like to be able to exclude the book count of Wishlist and Read but unowned from All Collections.

So, in that case, where would LT put them? "Wishlist" and "Read but unowned" are collections too.

But I do agree I would prefer to have those not count in any statistics.

Right. All Collections means All. You can't exclude some collections and still call it All Collections. I think something could be done with how it is displayed on the Profile page though.

Every time I bring this up I get a drubbing.

I understand that All Collections includes 'All'. But the LT home page uses the number for All Collections as the number of books. I don't like that. If I had a library of 15 books and a wishlist of 200, why should the home page show that I have 215 books?

I would like to be able to exclude the book count from certain collections from the total in All Collections.

Or, choose to have the home page pull the book total from My Library or somewhere other than All Collections. Either way would work for me.

54: I think it might be easier to simply change the wording in the places where LT references total number of books in catalogue. Instead of my homepage saying "1,863 books", for example, when I have nowhere near that amount in my home, it could say something like "1,863 books catalogued". That simple difference would be much, much easier then changing the very meaning of All Collections, and I think it was satisfy (most) of the concerns about this.

55> Yes, but then we get a whole different set of people who want it spelled either "cataloged" or "catalogued"! :D

55> I'd like it to also say "you have 999 books in Your Library" (or perhaps "the Your Library collection").

I'm certainly against All Collections, but I don't think that discussion is ever going to get anywhere. It will probably be much more fruitful to focus on specific instances where All Collections is used, and choose other collections to use there instead. But there will never be any agreement about particular collections (some people don't use Your Library, for instance), so I think a flexible "include in statistics" option would be best. Then your homepage would count only the collections you wanted to include, etc.

>54 jseger9000:: Not meant as a drubbing. Sorry.

Like I said, I too dislike that it's so prominent.

#59 - No problem. I only now realized that this the same thread that I had mentioned this idea previously. See my post #'s 23 and 25

I'd really like it if we could exclude certain collections from showing up in various places, and I'd also like the ability to disaggregate statistics by selections. Like others, the main collection I'd want to exclude would be wishlist, and it would be nice if the site simply treated that collection differently, or provided a way of designating collections as wishlist collections (even if they had another name), and then treating them differently.

Places where I would want the ability to exclude certain collections, especially wishlist (or better, for the site to simply treat those differently, for everyone):

- statistics, as they show up for for other people (or disaggregated at least, with wishlist as a separate area of statistics)
- recently added module on profile page
- RSS feeds for recently added
- numbers used to compare my library with others' (on their profiles or mine)

I'm probably forgetting something else.

(Though my library's private now, my intention is not to keep it that way always, but the fact that I don't want my wishlist public is a big reason why my library's currently private; maybe private books will solve that problem, if it ever works, but I also generally don't like the misrepresentation of my or other peoples' libraries that comes from the wishlist collection.)

Bump. It seems like the new format system will encourage us to catalogue more non-book items, but I'd only want to catalogue, say, theatre programs if I could exclude them entirely from statistics.

Well, I appreciate the bump, anyway....

I know it was much-discussed years ago, but things change so I'm bumping this thread in case there's a possibility of giving us more control of how are statistics are gathered, and (very specifically) I'd still love to be able to exclude my "wishlist" books from my "recently added" display (and from most other functions, but "recently added" is the big one)

LOL. Make a comment and suddenly everyone feels the need to get contradictory. Cool.

>65 anxovert: I, and I know at least some others have said they do as well, use a second private account exclusively as a wishlist. That keeps it from being public, from screwing with my stats, from connecting erroneously to other members, etc etc. It's really the only option afaic for using the wishlist.

I just keep my wishlist off LT. It's a list of works, not of books, so it'd fit uneasily into LT's structure anyway.

I'm fine with the wishlist as it is. There's nothing about it that bothers me on a regular basis. I certainly don't hate it, and I can't think of anything off the top of my head that I would want changed about it. Just offering an alternative point of view.

(Other people may have suggestions or requests that I would agree are reasonable, I'm not saying it's perfect, it's just that what really bothers other people doesn't bother me.)

>66 .Monkey.:

I do not hate the wishlist. I'd say there's a vocal minority that does, and they have a point, but certainly not "everyone", or even close to it.

I don't hate it either. It's there to remind me to look for or buy certain books. That they might *gasp* connect me to people who are also interested in them and might, *omg* have actually read them and possibly have even *gulp* reviewed them is just a bonus. I mean, liability.

I too find the wishlist ok in its current form. I don't think it's how I would have designed the feature, but I use it, and it has some value for me. I don't hate it.

My wishlist has always resided at Amazon, cause it makes more sense to me to have a wishlist where I can obtain those books (or receive as gifts) It's also cause there's no way to remove the wishlist from the statistics here.

So I'd like the remove from statistics feature.

Ultimately, it's LT's loss. Their business model consists of selling our data to libraries, and they really don't have great data for newer books.

When Collections came out, I didn't have an online wish list anywhere; I was hoping to use LT for that, but Tim was more interested in arguing that my perspective was crazy than in trying to design a feature that would make more people happy.

So I started an Amazon wish list instead, which at last count had more than 1000 items on it. And I'm not the only one.

There's no way Tim is going to change his mind on this now; that's not how he works in general, and LT development as a whole has been mostly stagnant for years anyway. Oh well.

I use the wishlist and don't see anything wrong with it.

I stopped using the wishlist collection years ago. There are just too many places in the app where it makes it look like I own or at least have read the book.

I would love to keep the wishlist separate from the rest of the collections. I wonder why it is so difficult? Could one have a box to check to opt in or opt out in having it count towards your library? In fact this is my one and only "pet peeve" about LT. Otherwise, I love it.

>76 krazy4katz: It's not difficult. It's a deliberate choice based on Tim's philosophy that the current system is the correct system, and anyone with a different perspective is just misguided.

>75 jjwilson61: I feel the same way. I was initially excited by the idea, because I like to keep track of books I might be interested in, or works by authors I love but don't have yet. And it is largely a "work-level" interest, not an "edition-level" interest, so I thought LT would be perfect for creating a list that was not ISBN-dependent.

But then I realized all those "interests" were showing up in my total cataloged books, which is not what I wanted at all. If LT is about cataloging books we have a relationship with (owned or not, read or not yet), then "wishlist" seems like the most tenuous and ephemeral of "relationships." At least for me. Sort of like keeping an actor's name in my address book because I like some of their movies.

As it stands, I stopped adding to wishlist after my initial import, and just move books out of it as I acquire them and/or decide I'm not interested after all.

It seems to me that it should be simple enough to base all stats (and “recently added” feeds) on the “Your library” default collection all users have.

I’d be interested in hearing the benefits of the current, all-inclusive, system from somebody who likes it.

>79 anxovert: But not everyone uses Your Library the same way. Not everyone even has it active. Plus lots of people read books from the library and whatnot, which many don't add unowned items to Your Library, but why wouldn't they want things they've read to be in their stats?

I don't at all think Wishlist should be included, and I think the system ought to be changed, but it is not nearly so simple as "just use Your Library instead."

79 - go read 70. Plus I understand when I see someone has added a book to Wishlist or some other designated collection what it means.

>81 Bookmarque:: >70 Bookmarque: has a valid point about seeing other people who have those books and being able to read the reviews, but couldn't that be true without having them in "Your Library".

They're not in My Library. They're in my Wishlist.

I guess I meant it would be great if they didn't contribute to statistics about me.

This is what I don't understand. So what? It's a number on the internet. Anyone familiar with the site knows how collections work and how most people use them, so I don't understand the anxiety around this. As far as I know there are no prizes or awards for cataloging, so as long as you know where your stuff is and other people know where your stuff is by looking at your collections, what difference does it make?

I have so and so many books entered. Some of them we own. (Some I have read, Some my husband has read, some are waiting to be read.) Some We used to own, but we have thrown away, Some I have borrowed from libraries or read as e-books. Some I remember reading long ago. A few are in my wishlist. But all of them are books I entered. The total says nothing about how many books I own. Or how many books I have read. I make no such assumptions about others either.

I noticed that most of the people here who've said they're fine with the Wishlist collection as is have relatively few books in that collection (less than 250, or less than 10% of their total). The sample size is obviously small, but I think this may be relevant. The more selective you are about adding books to your Wishlist, the stronger the connection you have to them; and the smaller your Wishlist is in comparison to your library overall, the less it dilutes all your other statistics.

Even I've catalogued 8 books in my Wishlist, books by favourite authors that I might as well have bought. But this doesn't mean the system works for me as is; I have 1000+ other books of interest that I track on Amazon because I don't really have a strong connection to them and I don't want them to overwhelm my real books.

I too would put a lot more books in Wishlist if it wasn't added to my Library. I do put books in that I have read but do not own. I guess this just takes it a bit too far for me.

I'm mostly concerned with wishlist books appearing in my "recently added" feed and it seemed to me that having "Your library" cover all the books actually in each users library was a simple solution, but I concur that we all use the site differently and I shouldn't make such assumptions based on my own usage.

I have about 500 books in my wishlist. They come and go regularly without ever making it to my library, but they mess up my "recently added" display and I'd like to be able to fix this somehow.

>89 anxovert: As I said a while ago, the simplest workaround is to just make another private account for wishlist use. Even if Tim decided to implement something along these lines (and that's a mighty big "if"), it would be a very long time before it actually happened. Not using the wishlist of your account is literally the only solution of "fixing this."

Understood. I'm reluctant to pay for another lifetime membership just for my wishlist but it might yet come to that. :)

If you sign up via the app, it might still give free lifetime. Otherwise there's events (like the one we just had) where Tim gives it away. Also, iirc, you can pay as little as $1 for a year.

It isn't so much the amount as a policy of not paying for things I don't need, and I don't need this to be fixed. I'd like it to be fixed and I haven't personally made mention of it for over five years. As I said in my post above, things change and it was possible that that someone on the LT team was on board with a more segregated wishlist. Since nobody official has leapt into the fray I'll probably bring it up in another five years :)

Hey I paid for one acct, I took full advantage of Tim's giving it away free for my other. I mean he does at least one thing every year where he gives it away, my normal account is due free lifetime about a dozen times over from various games/incidents, lmao, so I don't think there's anything wrong with that. ;) But yeah, it's quite unlikely to change, unfortunately. Tim rarely changes his mind about things once he's made a decision, heh.

Another workaround is to use the lists feature for wishlist books. I've just started doing that recently and found it works really well (for me).

>95 Herenya: Interesting idea! Thanks! k4k

>87 _Zoe_:

I noticed that most of the people here who've said they're fine with the Wishlist collection as is have relatively few books in that collection (less than 250, or less than 10% of their total).

I think that's a good observation, and you're spot-on. Some people tend to use a wishlist, whether here or elsewhere, almost as a bookmark - "find out more about this book someday". Where I tend to use it as "This is something I want to buy or read".

I bet Tim would give out a free lifetime membership to anyone who already has one and wants another for their wishlist; he's giving them out like candy. Anyone do the Valentine's Day hunt? If you found five hearts, you get an upgrade - I bet they'd apply it to a different account if you asked.

>97 lorax: I admit I've been following the discussion on Wishlists with interest, although I have no pony in the race. When I first arrived here, I had multiple books in the wishlist, until I realized that it affected other things. I agree that it's wrong to consider books that you *wished you had* as part of the collection of books you do have. Once I realized that was the case, I removed the books in it (pasting them all into a local file). Over time, if I've been looking for a book, I've used the Wishlist to help with the search. Currently, it only has an amusement in it, and not an actual book.

Tim ought to cooperate with this one (yes, I already know the likely response from that quarter). The reason you wish that you had a book is because you *do not have it*, which is the whole point of listing books that you wish you had.

So it goes.

If we have collections broken out under the heading All Collections, separate silos clearly labeled; ones called Read but Unowned and Wishlist, ones called Currently Reading and My Library...how is it that people think these are all books that a person has? What leads you to believe that my Collection of Kicked to the Curb are books that I still have?

>99 Bookmarque:

As I understand it, the concern isn't about confusion when browsing someone's catalog; it's about someone seeing wishlisted books showing up under Recently Added, or as a shared book, or whatever.

Since I only wishlist books that I actually am interested in, this is not a major concern for me, but people who use wishlist as more of a "save for later, look into this" list are reasonably annoyed. I don't care whether someone thinks I physically own, or have read, a particular book, but someone thinking I was interested in a random book because I'd happened to flip through it once would in fact be annoying.

The worst one is the list of books you should borrow from someone, which if you have a book on your wishlist will not be in that list which is the opposite of what makes sense.

>102 jjwilson61:

That may be more of a problem with the name than the functionality. I mean, most cases you can't actually borrow the books - the utility of the feature is that it alerts you to books you might be interested in. Books on your wishlist you're presumably already alerted to.

>98 Lyndatrue: My wishlist also contains only that same amusement :-)

>103 AndreasJ: But if people put all kinds of things on it, not simply GET THIS! if seen somewhere!!, but things with a minor interest, that one heard of in passing, and knowing that someone whose library you have much in common with had it, could easily give it a boost on the priority list.

>102 jjwilson61:

That's only a problem if you interpret the name overly literally. And I say that as someone who is extremely inclined to over-literal interpretation. It pretty clearly means "Books in this person's library that you don't have in yours that you might be interested in", but that's a bit wordy.

Three months into using a "list" for my wishlist to keep wished-for books out of my stats and "latest additions" selections. It works quite well, but options for sorting lists are limited, and I can't add a book to a list if it isn't already on LibraryThing.

Still, it beats the no-you-can't-have-a-wishlist policy of Amazon Australia :)

I keep my wishlist on 5x8" sheets folded into my shirt pocket calendar. So I'm a throwback. I have a 4 month old Samsung Galaxy android which I could use for this prupose, but I'm too old to be nimble with my fingers when entering a book. When I write a book down, besides author and title, I always include the subtitle; and sometimes mark the type (CD, SF, child, buy, wife's name) -- about 20% of the total.

I do have a small wishlist in LT, sometimes for a great library book which I eventually want to buy, but excited enough to want to do a book review.

Two months further on and I'm scrapping my "list" as wishlist as too limiting. I miss being able to sort and tag my wishlisted books.

And so I have registered a second lifetime account, solely for use as a wishlist. I spend enough time here to warrant the extra expense :)