<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiCite/Shared_Citations>
And, if all that those who developed projects, and services, under the umbrella of
“Wikicite” for the past few years, have helped contribute to a process that got us to a
space where the value of, and a plan for, a Shared Citations project is clear, than I will
call it all a success.
For me Wikicite has always been about expressions of shared understandings of the
importance and usefulness of citations, to Wikipedia. Including the ability to access the
cited material with a click and to study and otherwise analyze those citations. It has
been a support structure for experiments and collaborations. And that has been of value
in and of itself.
In the meantime, the Internet Archive’s Turn All References Blue project will continue to
add links to Wikipedia articles, connecting to archived Web pages and Papers and digitized
books… efforts that I have always thought were inspired by and part of other “Wikicite”
efforts, even it they were not focused on Wikidata. I guess, in that way, Wikicite is
what any of us want to make it. And, I fully expect the outcome of those efforts 5 years
from now will surprise most of us. I think the best days of Wikicite are ahead of us.
I will also share that, from the Internet Archive’s perspective (including Open Library)
collaborations with other Wikipedians and the Wikimedia Foundation(s) has never been
better.
Now… as for the use of Telegram… well… that is another story altogether ::-)
Long live Wikicite!
- Mark Graham
Director, the Wayback Machine @ the Internet Archive
(917) 697-0110
On Feb 14, 2021, at 10:00 PM, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hoi,
I totally agree. But you mistake the messenger for the message. It is not my message; I
bring it. You can verify my credentials by looking at my contributions.
The problem with both Wikidata and Wikicite hiding on Telegram is that for reasons they
deem to be significant we have lost the conversation and lost their conversation with
others. There is also a Facebook environment where people talk about Wikidata et al...
It is all well and good that there is this grant that comes to a conclusion but the fact
of the matter is that people aim to start removing items because they deem the quality of
the scholarly works these items represent too poor. This is possible because they see no
application for that data,
I am adding papers and books all the time, the books I link to Open Library because our
objective should be for people to read. I add citations to scholarly works when I consider
those works important, I disambiguate author strings to give more weight to both the
author and the works involved. It has value because PigsOnTheWing and others are linking
references in Wikipedia to Wikidata items. It has value because Scholia templates refers
to these authors, scholarly works and, Scholia knows in what Wikipedia articles a paper is
used. The tools that were available to do all this have largely gone away so effectively
we are in a poor state to improve on what there is.
But in the final analysis WikiCite is dead when once poked it does not react. Its
contributions have no value when that value is not understood and removed. A Dutch poet,
Lucebert, famously said "alles van waarde is weerloos". Liam I see the work that
I put in come to naught and you accuse me of bringing a message that "is not
appropriate". What I see is that the message of WikiCite is being lost and I now
understand that WikiCite is coming to an end as well. What we need is to expand on what is
achieved, not as a stamp collection but as a data collection that with associated tools
invites people to do further reading. A collection that makes plain that the science on a
subject has aged. Our work needs an easy application. To do that we have to collaborate
with partners like Open Library, Internet Archive, ORCiD, Crossref and to be honest I
think we suck at it.
Thank you,
GerardM
On Sun, 14 Feb 2021 at 23:30, Liam Wyatt <lwyatt-ctr(a)wikimedia.org
<mailto:lwyatt-ctr@wikimedia.org>> wrote:
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/HEWPXpqR0U74yDtK <https://t.me/joinchat/HEWPXpqR0U74yDtK>
While 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
<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-escholarshi…
<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
<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
<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]
WikiCite <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiCite> Program Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
On Sun, 14 Feb 2021 at 15:44, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com
<mailto:gerard.meijssen@gmail.com>> wrote:
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
[1]
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Project_chat#Cleanup/Import_of_scien…
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Project_chat#Cleanup/Import_of_scientific_articles_and_our_notability_criteria>
[2]
https://scholia.toolforge.org/work/Q105451449
<https://scholia.toolforge.org/work/Q105451449>
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