On 22 Jul 2010, at 21:00, Jakob wrote: > Jodi Schneider wrote: > >> Interesting. I'd really like ID's to be not only comprehensible but >> also to have a fair chance of being directly inputtable by humans. > > Usual bibliographic catalogs do not provide a mnemonic key as soon as > their size is more then a few hundred entries. There are various IDs > like ISBN and OCLC number but there is no large-scale system that has > simple identifiers. Why do you want to type in the ID by hand anyway? > What is the use-case?
I am looking up a paper that is cited somewhere else. > >> For instance, on Wikipedia, if I know that I am looking for the >> article on "citation signals" I can type the URL directly, without >> searching. >> >> In my ideal citation-wiki-in-the-sky, you could get to the citation >> directly in this way -- and sensible disambiguation pages would be >> automatically generated. > > Why do you want to directly work with fragile identifiers? Every > modern web application provides auto-suggest: you type in a keyword, > title, author, anything and get a list of publications and a link to > create a new one. Sure, that's fine, too. That's a kind of automatic disambiguation -- and better than what I proposed. > Then you select a publication from the list and its > ID gets copied into your editor (an ideal editor would also send a > pingback to the citation database to know where a publication > identifier is used). Done. um, sometimes the 'editor' is my brain, not software. > > I also like mnemonic identifiers, they are useful if you have to read, > memorize and type in them. But if your workflow is truly digital then > their limitation is just a burden. I would value uniqueness and > stability much more then readability - and you cannot get both! Another reason to optimize readability is SEO. But you're right, it depends very much on who is using this, and how. :) -Jodi > > Cheers > Jakob _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
