David wrote:
> There's a difference between a project to centralize the various
> references in Wikipedia, and an attempt to build a universal
> bibliographic database. The first is a reasonable project, though I
> think everyone involved has underestimated the extent to which
> normalization and manual aggregation will be needed.
Well said. Reminds me on Erik Möllers Wikimania talk about Free
Knowledge projects beyond the Encyclopedia: You need a clearly
articulated mission. There already are many projects to create a
universal bibliographic database (Worldcat, The Open Library,
LibraryThing etc.) and all either failed or have a specific scope. A
wiki-based bibliographic database for sources in Wikimedia projects
("citations version of Commons") is a reasonable scope, I think. "Lets
just collect all bibliographic data we can get onto a gigantic pile of
data" is not. Let's better focus on real use cases, such as citations
in Wikimedia projects.
SJ wrote:
> I like the French model of using "Article name (Authors)" as a key.
> Perhaps with "Article name (Authors, Year)" if needed to disambiguate.
> This shares a design principle with the move away from CamelCase to
> freeform article titles: one should be able to insert an article name
> into a natural sentence, and link the appropriate section of the
> sentence, and have it take you to the appropriate article.
With free form titles there will be no general 100% schema (there are
always exceptions) but a general rule to start with is needed. There
at least 32 ways to combine only title and authors: which to put
first, which character to separate author names, order of names and
name-parts, ways abbreviate etc. - and this are only the possibilities
if its a simple English title with English author names!
If you are looking for a method to define one schema please have a
loot at the Citation Style Language and use or define a citation style
in CSL so users of Zotero, Mendeley and other bibliographic software
can automatically create a key from given bibliographic data.
> To DGG's question: in the long run, the scope of "all cited works" can
> be captured in such a project, at least for the works cited on a wiki
> Project -- anyone making a new citation would either find it already
> in the project or would add it. Whether this covers all works cited
> by active academics of scholars depends on how effectively we draw
> them into our community and help them see where an extra minute of
> work on their part will help thousands of their readers, reviewers,
> and reusers.
Again: there already *are* communities that collect and share
bibliographic data - why should they move to a new project with
unclear mission and unusable software (we need much more then Liquid
Threads) that was never created for this task? Everyone talking about
a Wikimedia project with bibliographic data should *at least* have a
look at Zotero, CSL, The Open Library, and LibraryThing first and make
clear then what a new project should copy from this existing projects
and what should be done differently. Please do not reinvent a wheel
that nobody beside some Wikimediacs want.
Don't get me wrong: I also want such a free bibliographic wiki
database. But to attract more then a little fraction of the declining
number of Wikipedia authors we need a clear mission and usable
software for this task - I seen neither the one nor the other.
Jakob
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