User talk:Dan.M.McLaughlin

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You asked about an ISBN I changed in the "Peltast" article. I first found this ISBN in the Norwegian Wikipedia, where this article had been translated, including the book citation (see no:Peltast and also ru:Пельтасты). The old version of the article specified ISBN 0-7841-0109-8, which is dead wrong. The checksum doesn't compute. Using that ISBN I was unable to find information about the book in any catalog or bookstore available to me. However, I was able to search for the author, title, publisher and year (Peter Connolly, Greece and Rome at War, Macdonald, 1981) on http://worldcat.org/ and found the alternative ISBN 0-356-06798-X, which actually does work. Sometimes publishers make a mistake and print the wrong ISBN on a book, even though the error tends to be in one or two digits. Library catalogs typically provide a corrected ISBN, but allow searches also for the bad one. Thanks for pointing out that the real ISBN should be ISBN 0-7481-0109-8 (see how -7841- was -7481-!). The ISBN checksum was designed so that swapping two digits could easily be detected, thankfully! I will change to that number. However, the OCLC catalog says the publisher and year should be "Black Cat, 1988" rather than "Macdonald, 1981" for that ISBN. Which publisher name is printed in your book? --LA2 00:46, 2 October 2007 (UTC) Answered on --LA2