Not sure if anyone is interested in this, but:

Wouldn't it be nice to have a collaborative data-base in which people can input information about the novels/manga etc. they read? And with information I mean information interesting for Japanese learners, like:

Kanji difficulty
Amount of furigana
Vocab difficulty
Recommended JLPT level
Text density (in case of mangas)
Length of stories
Is there a anime/movie version?
Study resources available (anki decks, smart fm, spreadsheets etc)

Plus additional info to find stuff you like:
Genre
Link to information
Targeted audience
Personal or "official" Rating
Author
Whatever

Now there are a lot of topics on various websites where all information is spread out on. It's easy to miss out on things you might be interested in.
If there are any free online services to create these databases, then I wouldn't mind starting myself with it. However, I cannot do any programming.

Yes, yes it would. If there's enough interest, I would consider putting up a site that does that, but it would -not- be pretty. I'm a programmer, not a designer.

Actually, http://grubba.net/ looks like you might be able to do it on your own. I haven't tried it, though.

Just use the wiki bombpersons set up. Add an entry as an example that everybody else can copy when adding a new entry.

Sounds like a good idea, it could also link to anki decks, word lists, and other related resources too. Maybe it could also be linked to the website proposed here?
It would be awesome and make collecting sentences much easier. I imagine you could put tags on a sentence or use something like http://www.freebase.com/ to make sentences related to a particular manga / book / film. Then the site could automatically build an anki deck with all the sentences that people have previously mined from it. An anki plugin would make it easy for people to upload all of their sentences to the site, so you wouldn't have to bother putting them in by hand. It would be like a collective source of everyone's anki decks. It would be the ultimate source for example sentences!

wccrawford Wrote:Yes, yes it would. If there's enough interest, I would consider putting up a site that does that, but it would -not- be pretty. I'm a programmer, not a designer.

Have you ever used Django? I have a basic test site running (you can add sentences and browse through them, with media), but I'm still learning how to use it so it's still very basic. I could upload it to a github if you'd like to help out.

You can take a look at:
http://github.com/bombpersons/ankiResource/tree/master

It looks like the grubba site is something I could set up. I would have to make it accessible for multiple users and somehow make a field with links to resources, which will have to be stored and "uploadable" to somewhere. With that I would need help. The rest would simply be fields that people can fill in. Once it's done it should be something that doesn't need too much moderating.

Honestly I think that I am not the right person to do this technically (I would rather be a contributor, now that I am starting to read more Japanese stuff), but I will set up an account in a few days if nobody initiates a better alternative.

Difficulty is a very subjective thing. The idea of the database is nice in theory but I doubt its usefulness in practice.

Isn't it easier to simply try different things and see what works for you or to ask for specific recommendations?

In this case difficulty is subjective to a certain extend. There is furigana or no furigana. A book has kanji or not. These things are not subjective. The in-between levels (how difficult are the kanji etc.) won't be perfect, but can be controlled by assigning them to things like JLPT level. If something is rated JLPT 2, it might be turn out to be a little to easy or hard for that level, but it will definitely be too hard for JLPT 4 students.

For me it is interesting now that I am looking for things to read. For example, I found an interesting book in a hostel, collection of very short stories (about 4 pages each). They were fairly easy to understand, despite the fact that there was only furigana for the occasional word. I am sure nobody else here knows about this book (食べられた男), but this way they can. And they can get an idea of how hard it is before they buy it (amazon etc.).

they are things that people are already informing each other of in various threads, but now easy to look up.

of course it's not a full replacement for those threads BTW.
Recommendations and advise could (and should, i think) still be given like they are now.

I'm not really into python, so I haven't used Django. I don't really like CMS's anyhow... They're too hard to truly customize. If they have a huge community and tons of plugins (and especially the plugins that do what you want) then they are fine, but if you have to create a new plugin, they are too painful. It's easier to just start from scratch, for me. Especially on a project as pointed as this.

However, I think the Wiki idea is better yet. It's more freeform and less searchable, but it's a lot easier to create and modify as needed. If there's a wiki that allows tagging of pages, a set of standardized tags could solve the search problem easily... If not, a the set of appropriate tags could just be placed on each page. It'd be a bit of work to set up and standardize, but would be a great resource for learnings.

I'd be willing to help out adding reviews of things I've read and/or own. (Obviously I'll have less info to post about things I just own and haven't read yet, especially since much of it is above me at the moment.)

wccrawford Wrote:However, I think the Wiki idea is better yet. It's more freeform and less searchable, but it's a lot easier to create and modify as needed. If there's a wiki that allows tagging of pages, a set of standardized tags could solve the search problem easily... If not, a the set of appropriate tags could just be placed on each page. It'd be a bit of work to set up and standardize, but would be a great resource for learnings.

Mediawiki has a plugin called Semantic Mediawiki:

Quote:Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) is a free extension of MediaWiki – the wiki-system powering Wikipedia – that helps to search, organise, tag, browse, evaluate, and share the wiki's content. While traditional wikis contain only texts which computers can neither understand nor evaluate, SMW adds semantic annotations that bring the power of the Semantic Web to the wiki.

It enhances the search function so that you can easily find the answer on "What are the hundred world-largest cities with a female mayor?". It relies on that the users manually tag what kind of information a string or a number is, e.g. a page of a country have the name, population size, language, capital, etc. tagged.

The RTK Wiki is located on wikia.org which uses Mediawiki. Seems you only need to make a request to activate the extension.

hmmm. A wiki doesn't sound bad either. Though maybe it would become too bloated for my taste. I figured that all the user has to do was fill in a simple form with choices (and maybe a few notes if desired). This way it would be fast and accessible. If people need to make wikipages, well, there would almost be too much freedom. A good initiative, but different from what I had in mind.

I will go traveling for a month next week. I guess I will see if there is any interest (new posts with opinions/suggestions) after I come back.

In the end: a system like this will only be as good as the content that people provide for it.

I'm trying to work this into anki-resource. You'll be able to search for different media (books / manga / etc), view difficulty (perhaps an average of user votes), view sentences with similar tags, etc