Hi Chitu,
Some reactions inline.
One of my most important functionalities would be
automatic citations
into papers that I'm working with. I haven't used a wide variety of
citation managers, but the functionality in EndNote and Zotero is
what I'm talking about; I just don't see how a MediaWiki instance
could do that, unless some standardized bibliographic information be
embedded into each article page to begin with.
Agreed. What I envision is that we write a script which would export the
bibliographic data into whatever formats people prefer: BibTeX (my own
preferred format), Zotero, EndNote, whatever. I'm happy to write this
script for relatively sane formats. This would then let people create
citations in the way they usually do.
Moreover, as Dario and Felipe explained, while far
from perfect, the
search capabilities of dedicated bibliography managers is far
superior to what I presently see in MediaWiki.
(I don't know the details of MediaWiki search well, so some of the
following may not be quite right.) What MediaWiki would give us is
fulltext search. So while it would be easy to search for "John Smith",
and that query would find papers authored by John Smith plus perhaps
other stuff; however, one cannot search for "author = John Smith" and
get only results where the author field matches John Smith and no others.
However, it does seem like Semantic MediaWiki has this type of search
and otherwise behaves much like plain MediaWiki.
Maybe you or others could say more about what types of search are
important to you?
AcaWiki uses Semantic MediaWiki, I believe. However, I have some
reservations about it:
* Is it sufficiently stable? (e.g., the FAQ says they "just launched"
but the page has not been edited in two years.
* The focus on "summaries" worries me, and the target audience is
laypeople? We're talking about an annotated bibliography targeted at
researchers, which is a different audience.
* I don't care for the user interface (this is a mix of personal opinion
and professional opinion as an HCI researcher).
As-is, I'm not very interested in AcaWiki. But, if there is an
opportunity to make significant changes, then it seem plausible. I would
want to know about hosting, backups, etc. make sure that it is a
reliable platform.
There also appear to be various options for Semantic MediaWiki hosting:
Wikia, Referata, etc. It would be nice to not have to deal with the
sysadmin aspects of the project.
One final note on bibliographic software: many of these claim to do
automatic import of a reference simply by pointing the software at the
publisher's web page for the references. But I have never seen this work
correctly; always, the imported data needs significant cleanup, enough
that personally I'd rather type it in manually anyway. For example,
titles of ACM papers aren't even correctly cased on the official ACM
pages (e.g.,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1753326.1753615)!
Bibliographic software then also typically does not include the proper
metadata for automatically lower-casing titles in citations. For
example, the title "Path Selection: Novel Interaction Technique for
Wikipedia" should be lower-cased as "Path selection: Novel interaction
technique for Wikipedia". But so often I see papers with "Path
selection: novel interaction technique for wikipedia". It's embarrassing.
But, if we were writing our own (e.g.) MediaWiki -> BibTeX export
script, we could automatically note that "Novel" should be capitalized
(because it begins the subtitle) as well as provide for people to
indicate explicitly title words that should remain capitalized. (In this
instance, the proper BibTeX export syntax would be "Path Selection:
{Novel} Interaction Technique for {Wikipedia}".)
Would it be feasible to have both, and use them
concurrently so that
researchers could use one or the other, or both, as they prefer? I'm
thinking of something like this (for purpose of illustration, let's
call the chosen MediaWiki instance MW and the chosen dedicated online
shared bibliographic tool BT):
Bi-directional synchronization is hard to get right, particularly when
the two sides have different data models. I think we are much
better off declaring one or the other to be the master and the rest
should remain read-only (i.e. export rather than synchronization).
To be clear, I'm offering to do the following things:
1. Help define a reasonable starting summary template for papers.
2. Build the proper MediaWiki infoboxes and whatnot to realize what we
decide from #1 (perhaps concurrently to that discussion, to facilitate it).
3. Write a script to import some sane text-based format to this
MediaWiki instance. (I assume Zotero can export such a format.) This
would be run once or a few times for initial import, not regularly for
synchronization.
4. Write a script to export the MediaWiki data to BibTeX and one or two
other sane text-based formats, and arrange for it to be run frequently
so people's paper citations stay up to date.
5. Read and annotate papers.
6. Help with follow-up work (synthesizing, writing survey, etc. etc.)
Reid