Dear Gerard,
Firstly, let me state that I do not think it is appropriate that many individuals' work should be described so dismissively as you have done in your message. The ability to bring together the good-faith efforts of many people toiling-away (often by themselves as volunteers) in the many disparate corners of the wikiverse to make a coherent whole, is a valuable *feature* of our movement. Please do not denigrate the valid work of others as mere 'pet projects' that will 'destroy' your work. Raising UP some area of work for attention is good, but please don't do that by pushing DOWN others.
With regards to the wider topic of *is WikiCite active* or still alive:
This depends a lot on your definition of what 'WikiCite' is...
- For some people WikiCite means creating WD items about scholarly journal articles and (arguably more importantly) the inter-connecting of these items to each-other to other WD items. Lots of people have done lots of interesting work in this field, and it continues. We are all aware of the debates about what the technical and project-scope limits of Wikidata about this topic - and these are good debates to have, in order to keep our eyes 'sharp' to the needs, risks, and possibilities of our projects.
Either way though, this is a thing which is active.
- For some people WikiCite is the community of people who are working on those kinds of issues - the people in the WikiCite mailing list, on talkpages, and various social media groups, and in the associated WikiCite telegram group:
https://t.me/joinchat/HEWPXpqR0U74yDtKWhile the WikiCite mailing list is low-volume, the telegram group is quite active. (as are various other fora which are not specifically designated for WikiCite-type discussions but are nonetheless related).
- For some people, WikiCite means a conference series of that name to discuss citations in Wikimedia. There were three physical editions (2018 - Berkeley, 2017 - Vienna, 2016 - Berlin). On this October just passed we held a virtual conference in parallel to the WD Birthday events.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiCite/2020_Virtual_conference This had
32 hours of presentations delivered by 82 speakers, over 3 days, in 14 sessions held in all timezones, and hosted in 5 languages (with individual presentations from a further 2 languages), broadcast onto 9 different social media channels live, and now also archived on Commons.
I would consider that to be active.
- For some people, WikiCite is the offering of community grants for work relating to citations in Wikimedia (broadly defined). In the current round, there are 23 grants funded under the heading of WikiCite (some of which are already concluded). These are described here: https://diff.wikimedia.org/2020/10/22/wikicite-awards-23-grants-escholarships-to-improve-open-citations/ They feature a variety of focus languages/countries and wikiprojects (not just Wikidata). They are diverse in their purpose: some are software development, some are about documentation of workflows, some are about translation/localisation of tools, some are about cataloguing and digitisation of rare source materials, some are about training events, some are content creation in areas with low Wikimedia coverage.
I am also proud that this project allowed the creation of the wikiverse's first living-allowance grants: "eScholarships" to stay at home during covid and be financially supported for a few days to do valuable wikiwork, with a value defined by living-location calculation rather than purchases, and no receipts required. I feel this is an innovation in Wikimedia grantmaking that WikiCite developed which speaks directly to the idea of equity in funds dissemination, and therefore the strategic goal of knowledge equity.
I consider this to be very active.
- For some people, WikiCite is the name of a 3 year grant - from the Sloan Foundation – to fund the previous two things I've described (and funds me part-time, previously Dario Taraborelli, to coordinate them). This grant is coming to its conclusion in the middle of this calendar year. I will be creating the final report for the Sloan Foundation about that work and publicising it in due course, and it will eventually live alongside the previous reports:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiCite/administration#Annual_reports Originally this grant was to focus primarily on in-person events. Naturally, we had to change that focus in 2020, which required radical rethinking on our side, and flexibility on Sloan's side. To conclude this grant, the steering committee and I are currently scoping for commissioning a research report into the "state of citations" across Wikimedia, which we hope will provide a valuable snapshot into the state of our movement's use of citations at this time.
So, in that, I consider this to be active. Although, of course, once the current grant concludes this aspect of WikiCite will formally conclude too.
- For some people, WikiCite meant a roadmap towards creating a 'bibliographic corpus' of citations - with various options for how (and where, and at what scale) to do that. This was most 'formally' stated in the form of several options devised in 2018.
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiCite/Roadmap The existence of this document is sometimes mistaken to imply that specific staff and hardware resources had been allocated, by someone, to build "it". That is not the case - the WikiCite grant (described in the previous point) was to support events and outreach, not software development. I am currently trying to develop a future roadmap - which I won't go into in this already long email. Nonetheless, as you've stated in your original message, many things have changed in the wikiverse and in the wider bibliographic industry since 2018 which have helped increase the amount and the interconnectedness of citations (on Wikidata and elsewhere). The grant named "WikiCite" can't/doesn't take credit for those changes; nonetheless, there is momentum in the academic world for Open Citations - which is certainly positive!
And in that final sense, the goal of WikiCite to support Open Citations is very active :-)
| Liam Wyatt [Wittylama] |
Hoi,
At some time Wikicite was alive and well. Now people at Wikidata state that given that the roadmap of Wikicite has not been updated for a long time, it is presumed dead. [1] As a consequence it is all too easy to ask for the "cleanup" of the existing scholarly data and imho mis-representing what has gone before.
In the years since the last WikiCite roadmap update, a lot has changed.
- Magnus rewrote many of his tools in RUST, including the SourceMD tooks, it made no difference for the community
- Elsevier has opened up its references; they are now available at Crossref.
- Scholia now knows where a paper is used as a reference in particularly the English Wikipedia
- Scholia templates exist on many subjects and scientists in the English Wikipedia
- Wikidata is now used to improve the information of the papers used as references with information from Wikidata
- There was an initial run linking books know by their ISBN from Wikidata to Open Library.
Personally I still add papers, one at a time, and use them as "cites work" references. For books I add the books and often link to Open Library.. I care about ecology, rewilding and when I feel compelled to work on a specific paper, I will. [2] When I come across a scientist who is in the news, I will use the author-disambiguator to link to its papers.
The last I heard about plans for Wikicite was what to do next centred around the notion that we "could" have all the papers in a Wikibase. As far as I am aware, whatever happened is not generally known and it may be a lot but I expect nothing much; I prefer to be surprised.
When these people who have their own pet projects get their way, it will destroy all the work that has been done. It will destroy mine. The notion that it will be for the better can be understood from their perspective. My problem is that it will make Wikidata only more biased. When you compare any subject that has a worldwide validity, its coverage is dominated by what we know and it is North American, European. You are unlikely to find any city of Africa with all its mayors. We do not know all the national ministers for the twenty first century and obviously not for the twentieth century of the African countries.
For Wikicite is to be alive and well it needs to have a goal. For me it is for the all the references to scientific papers to be known in Wikidata, including the papers they cite, including its authors. This will provide a rabbit hole where people can find additional material on a subject. In addition it will show when the science referenced in a Wikipedia article is out of date. It happens and old ideas are jealously protected.
So what will it be.. Is there live in Wikicite?
Thanks,
GerardM
Meta: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiCite
Twitter: https://twitter.com/wikicite