Hello Brian,
Brian Mingus writes:
I wouldn't go so far as to say nobody is working on these ideas. We recently submitted a project proposal to the Foundation along the lines of community documentation of scientific (and other) sources.
You are right to call that out -- and your proofs of concept for documenting scientific sources are the best I know of, in the world of open code.
And I believe AcaWiki is working with you now, yes? I thought of your project more as summary and literature-review, rather than a global WikiCite... something that might one day delegate its citations, primarily of scientific topics, to a universal WikiCite. (Correct me if I am wrong.) And I don't think anyone is working on a "wikitextrose" equivalent.
To recap: the fundamental basis of this general idea is a centralized wiki that contains citation information that other wikis can then reference using something like a {{cite}} template or a simple link. The community can document the citation, the author, the book etc.. 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.
I like that formulation a lot.
We continue to hope that the Foundation is willing to work with us to draw up a project proposal that works for them, and we have also offered some programming time (I have already put in hundreds of hours).
Which reminds me: we need to fix our project-proposal process.
This sounds like a promising project. Did you ever post a version of the above to strategy.wikimedia.org? I thought that you were going to work with AcaWiki in the short term and see what you had in common.
David, the Open Library plugin you mention also sounds excellent for solving the larger "every citable source in the world" challenge.