Sunday, October 29, 2006 Dear Mr. Sanger:
I have participated in the Citizendium forums (as Anthony.Sebastian) and have suggested in the technical forum consideration of incorporating a bibliographic database manager (BDM) in Citizendium. I received favorable responses. Incorporating a BDM, like Reference Manager, Endnote or Pro-Cite, would greatly assist author/editors in including source-citations in the text, and in generating reference lists. Most academics I know depend on the functionality of BDMs. Citizendiums BDM would allow authors/editors to cite while they wrote, automatically generate reference lists, and search of many online database from outside sources (e.g., Library of Congress, individual university library catalogs, PubMed, Agricola, LexisNexis Academic). An enormous number of such databases exist (e.g., see http://www-sul.stanford.edu/catdb/alldata.html#l), giving author/editors access to millions of citation-sources for documenting their articles. Citizendiums BDM would allow easy copying of citation-sources (articles, books, websites, etc.) from those databases to an article's individual database. Citizendium needs to make it easy for an author/editor to render her article scholarly and authoritative, to maximize the quality and instructiveness of the article, to facilitate completing the article, and thus to facilitate the growth of Citizendium. Below, see a letter I composed to the president of Thomson ResearchSoft, maker of the three major BDMs, urging him to contact you to consider the possibility of incorporating the functionality of Reference Manager into Citizendiums writing tools. I would not transmit it without your okay. You might want to consider a different approach if the BDM idea appeals. Sincerely yours, Anthony Sebastian, M.D. Professor of Medicine UCSF To: President of Thompson ResearchSoft Dear Sir: You undoubtedly have heard of Wikipedia, the online, user-developed encyclopedia. The premiere science journal, Nature, gave it high marks in comparison with Encyclopedia Britannica. Now, the originator of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger, has started a new "version", Citizendium, targeting more authoritative articles. See his introductory essay: http://citizendium.org/essay_shorter.html. The start-up team has not incorporated a bibliographic database manager in their writing tools for authors. That oversight will make it much more difficult for expert authors to reference their articles comprehensively. I believe they should incorporate Reference Manager in Citizendium. I would expect a mechanism of incorporation that precludes private use of the program, so that it would have no negative effect on your sales of the product. Indeed, as users become familiar with the use and advantages of Reference Manager (e.g., Cite-While-You-Write, internet searching for sources), they might want to purchase a copy for their own use. In any event, your company would get a lot of public exposure and free publicity. I would urge you to contact Mr. Sanger ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) and discuss possibilities. Yours and his technical teams could work out the security issues. Perhaps you would consider donating the product functionality, once you see the potential of its success in establishing an authoritative, constantly updated online encyclopedia. Anthony Sebastian, M.D. Professor of Medicine UCSF _________________________ Anthony Sebastian, MD [EMAIL PROTECTED] [preferred email address] _______________________________________________ Citizendium-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.purdue.edu/mailman/listinfo/citizendium-l
