WiktionaryZ currently supports multilingual free-text attributes and will support other data type attributes in the future. The data you can associate with a WiktionaryZ entitity will likely depend on what class that entity belongs to. For instance, if an entity is of type person, you could associate a birthdate, death date, place of birth, place of death, first name/last name (though that might be handled on another level), etc. If the entity belongs to the class "publication", you could associate references to specific edition; if it belongs to class "author", you could associate publications, and so on. In this generic model, a reference is just one instance of an entity whose associated data you might want to display in a Wikipedia article. So we would probably come up with a special type of template that can fetch data from WiktionaryZ and insert it into a page layout. Then you could, for instance, use <<person:Jimmy Wales>> to display the person data about Jimbo, or <<country:Germany>> to make a nice country infobox. Then again, you could also do <<ref:The Origin of Species|author=Charles Darwin|class=book>> to show _any_ book edition of Darwin's work, or <<ref:The Origin of Species|ISBN=whatever>> to cite a specific edition. If the title is not ambiguous, you might even only have to do something like <<ref:The Cosmic and the Comic: Einstein's Scientific Spirituality>> and all the properties would be derived automatically from that. In fact, the WiktionaryZ model very much matches the work/expression distinction, though we use the terminology the other way around: an expression refers to _any_ possible meaning of a string of characters, whereas each meaning ("work" in this context) has its own defined meaning ID and can also be disambiguated by its relations and other associated data (for publications: author, year, various codes, etc.). One advantage, in my view, is that we do not require people to pass around codes and numbers unless they really need to and want to, and even then, we retain the expression (work title) in the wiki source text, making it easy to see what a particular reference is about. Erik _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

Citations and verifiability are absolutely essential to the credibility of Wikipedia and its sister projects. Nevertheless, a person undertaking to substantiate his contributions should not need a professional librarianship background to do so. Any manner of clearly identifying the source should be acceptable.