we had a productive “strategy meetup” at Wikimania with a group of about 20 people, to talk about the future of WikiCite and a roadmap for source metadata in Wikidata more generally.

The motivation for this meetup was a set of concerns around scalability and “growing pains” around bibliographic and citation data in Wikidata, as well as the need (that many in the community have expressed) for a clearer goal, value proposition, and scope for WikiCite. 

The result is a series of notes fleshing out 4 possible scenarios for the future of bibliographic data as structured data—from a centralized scenario to a fully federated one—discussing their possible risks and benefits at the technical, social, and governance level:

The question these notes try to address is whether Wikimedia should aim to build a “bibliographic commons”, and if so, what it would look like, and where it should live. 

This document is not a formal proposal or an RfC open for a vote, but a conversation starter to evaluate what type of future makes most sense for this data and the communities and stakeholders that will benefit from it. A shared understanding on what we’re building towards is also going to help us inform the program of the upcoming WikiCite 2018 conference in November (the application process will open in a few days).

If you wish to share your thoughts on these four scenarios, please chime in on wiki, rather than replying here, to avoid thread splintering (I’m cross-posting this on a few mailing lists).

Dario

on behalf of the meetup participants