I have been working with Sam and others for some time now on brainstorming a proposal for the Foundation to create a centralized wiki of citations, a WikiCite so to speak, if that is not the eventual name. My plan is to continue to discuss with folks who are knowledgeable and interested in such a project and to have the feedback I receive go into the proposal which I hope to write this summer. The proposal white paper will then be sent around to interested parties for corrections and feedback, including on-wiki and mailing lists, before eventually landing at the Foundation officially. As we know WMF has not started a new project in some years, so there is no official process. Thus I find it important to get it right. The basic idea is a centralized wiki that contains citation information that other MediaWikis and WMF projects can then reference using something like a {{cite}} template or a simple link. The community can document the citation, the author, the book etc.. and, in one idealization, all citations across all wikis would point to the same article on WikiCite. Users can use this wiki as their personal bibliography as well, as collections of citations can be exported in arbitrary citation formats. This general plan would allow community aggregation of metadata and community documentation of sources along arbitrary dimensions (quality, trust, reliability, etc.). The hope is that such a resource would then expand on that wiki and across the projects into summarizations of collections of sources (lit reviews) that make navigating entire fields of literature easier and more reliable, getting you out of the trap of not being aware of the global context that a particular source sits in. To give all a more concrete view, here is an example from some software that I have implemented in our lab called WikiPapers. Please take note that while this is a scientific literature example, the idea is general to *all publications ever*. Also, while I have implemented a feature-full version of a WikiCite, it's important to point out that for the WMF project we will need a new extension that handles the needs of the project exactly, and in PHP (I use Python :). The name of the wiki article is a unique key that is a combination of the author names and the year, in the following format: Author1Author2Author3EtAl10b. This works for scientific articles, but we may find we need to modify the key for other kinds of sources. The content of the wiki article is composed of an infobox constructed via the Citation template, and any other text and media the community determines it is useful and legal to include in the article. Example article: Screenshot of how this infobox renders on our wiki: http://grey.colorado.edu/mediawiki/sites/mingus/images/0/0e/KangHsuKrajbich… Title: KangHsuKrajbichEtAl09 {{Citation |publisher=SAGE Publications |dateadded=2010-07-17 |author=Kang M.J. and Hsu M. and Krajbich I.M. and Loewenstein G. and McClure S.M. and Wang J.T. and Camerer C.F. |url=http://pss.sagepub.com/content/20/8/963.full |abstract=Curiosity has been described as a desire for learning and knowledge, but its underlying mechanisms are not well understood. We scanned subjects with functional magnetic resonance imaging while they read trivia questions. The level of curiosity when reading questions was correlated with activity in caudate regions previously suggested to be involved in anticipated reward. This finding led to a behavioral study, which showed that subjects spent more scarce resources (either limited tokens or waiting time) to find out answers when they were more curious. The functional imaging also showed that curiosity increased activity in memory areas when subjects guessed incorrectly, which suggests that curiosity may enhance memory for surprising new information. This prediction about memory enhancement was confirmed in a behavioral study: Higher curiosity in an initial session was correlated with better recall of surprising answers 1 to 2 weeks later. |title=The Wick in the Candle of Learning |bibtex type=article |number=8 |volume=20 |owner=Sethherd |journal=Psychological Science |year=2009 |cites=O'ReillyFrank06,Cowan95,Wise04,Fuster80,Panksepp98,KakadeDayan02b,DelgadoLockeStengerEtAl03,BrewerZhaoDesmondEtAl98,DelgadoNystromFiez00,Beatty82,Baddeley92,Waanabe96,Roland93lm,DelgadoNystromFissellEtAl00,WagnerSchacterRotteEtAl98,SeymourDawDayanEtAl07,ODoherty04,BandettiniMoonen99,ODohertyDayanFristonEtAl03,RogersOwenRobbins99,KnutsonWestdorpKaiserEtAl00,CircuitryMemory,OReillyFrank06,Watanabe96a,BrewerZhaoGabrieli98,WagnerSchacterBuckner98,RogersOwenMiddletonEtAl99,Baddeley86,Watanabe96,Rolls96a,PallerWagner02 |cited_by=Author1Author2Author3EtAl10,etc... |pages=963 }} Then, any other WMF wiki, or any other MediaWiki, could cite this universal entry by simply typing {{cite|KangHsuKrajbichEtAl09}} Additionally, if a technology such as Semantic MediaWiki is used (as it is in WikiPapers), arbitrary lists of collections of literature can be generated by constructing simple queries that are boolean combinations of template properties. Given that SMW does not scale well, I have a plan that uses Lucene instead for fast, scalable dynamic generation of collections of citations. Imagine the possibilities.. Feel free to provide your feedback on this idea, in addition to your own ideas, in this thread, or to me personally. I am especially interested in the potential benefits to the WMF projects that you see, and to hear your thoughts on the potential of this project on its own, as that will feature prominently in the proposal. Additionally, what do you think WikiCite would eventually be like, once it is fully matured? Brian Mingus Graduate Student Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab University of Colorado at Boulder On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 11:22 AM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote: