Hi everyone,
I see two distinct lines forming from this thread. Most people are advocating a MediaWiki instance dedicated to semantically rich shared summaries of scholarly articles (primarily Wikipeda-focused, but such a platform could obviously be used for any kind of scholarly article). However, Dario and Felipe seem to be arguing (Dario more than Felipe) that a dedicated bibliographic software tool would be far more useful and easier to maintain long term.
Personally, with the energy I see on the list, I believe that a MediaWiki instance (e.g. AcaWiki or BredeWiki) would be viable, if we tried it again, this time. I for one would be very happy to make such a resource my repository of research summaries--I am currently building a collection on my personal website, but a shared resource would obviously be 1,000 times better. If one MediaWiki instance could be agreed on by this community, I believe we could definitely build a very valuable, ongoing resource. It would be far easier to edit and contribute to such an instance than to any chosen dedicated bibliographic tool.
However, I do strongly share Dario's feelings that a dedicated bibliographic tool would be far more useful for a variety of uses. One of my most important functionalities would be automatic citations into papers that I'm working with. I haven't used a wide variety of citation managers, but the functionality in EndNote and Zotero is what I'm talking about; I just don't see how a MediaWiki instance could do that, unless some standardized bibliographic information be embedded into each article page to begin with. Moreover, as Dario and Felipe explained, while far from perfect, the search capabilities of dedicated bibliography managers is far superior to what I presently see in MediaWiki.
Given that there is the need for both resources (MediaWiki instance and a dedicated bibliographic tool), I think it is much easier to automatically and regularly export from a shared resource like Zotero (for example) to the MediaWiki tool than to go the other way around. For this reason, I tend to favour Dario's proposal.
Would it be feasible to have both, and use them concurrently so that researchers could use one or the other, or both, as they prefer? I'm thinking of something like this (for purpose of illustration, let's call the chosen MediaWiki instance MW and the chosen dedicated online shared bibliographic tool BT):
* All the articles would be represented on both MW and BT. * Automatic exports would be enabled via custom scripts from BT to MW; there would be no automatic script for going the other direction. * Each MW article would have two sections: -- The top section would be automatically generated from BT, and would not be user editable from within MW; it could only be edited by the equally open BT. -- The bottom section would be standard MW editable text. Users would be expected to not duplicate information already in the top BT section. * Users who use both MW and BT could copy contributions from the MW bottom (editable) section into BT. Then after these are automatically exported (perhaps once a week), MW users could remove the duplicate information from MW. * Thus, MW would always have a superset of BT information (at least, after the weekly export).
The benefit is that those who need full BT functionality would have it, along with most of the summary information included; those who don't need the functionality and don't want to deal with the disadvantages of the BT technology would have all the BT information (including metadata) within MW, and would also be able to contribute to MW, which would always have at least as much information as BT.
Does this make sense? Would it be useful? Does it sound feasible?
Regards, Chitu
-------- Message original -------- Sujet: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Fwd: Proposal: build a wiki literature review wiki-style (was: Re: Wikipedia literature review - include or exclude conference articles) De : Felipe Ortega glimmer_phoenix@yahoo.es Pour : Research into Wikimedia content and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date : 18/03/2011 2:29 PM
Hi all,
I've been following this discussion with interest. Please let me add some comments inline, complementing Dario's answer.
----- Mensaje original ----
De: Dario Taraborellidtaraborelli@wikimedia.org Para: aforte@gatech.edu; Research into Wikimedia content and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Enviado: vie,18 marzo, 2011 17:30 Asunto: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Fwd: Proposal: build a wiki literature review wiki-style (was: Re: Wikipedia literature review - include or exclude conference articles)
I was glad to see this thread on wikiresearch-l as I have been recently discussing a similar proposal with other members of the Wikimedia Research Committee.
To make a long story short: I see major problems about *maintaining* a shared reference pool (along with a lit review system) on wiki pages, no matter how standard the format we may come up with to do so. There are excellent free and standards-based services out there designed precisely to allow groups of researchers to collaboratively import, maintain and annotate scholarly references. Zotero is one of them, others are: CiteULike, Bibsonomy, Mendeley, Connotea. My feeling is that the majority of people on this list are already using one of these services to maintain their individual reference library.
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This has been a frequent request, as well as a very old discussion (at least, I can trace it back to WikiSym 2007, and continuing in the Workshop on Interdisciplinary Research on Wikipedia, a.k.a. WIRW, in WikiSym 2008).
In fact, after our discussion in Porto we proposed to create a Wikiresearch Portal (we initially tried to call it a planet, which was a very bad idea....). I think we finally deleted the domain and removed the virtual machine from our servers at Libresoft a few months ago, after years of inactivity.
I think Jakob Voss was the first (or one of the first) providing a comprehensive compilation of research literature related to Wikipedia, including tags to categorize content and keyword search. I remember I got many references from Jakob's repo when I was starting to work in my dissertation, and it was quite useful. It is no longer available, AFAIK, and I'm not sure if all that info was migrated to newer repositories.
After that, I can remember that there was a French? university that also offered a searchable compilation of Wikipedia research papers. Unfortunately, I think I lost the link, and I cannot find it any more.
For the last session of Wikipedia research in Wikimania 2010, I worked with Benjamin Mako and Jodi Schneider to filter out available references. The initial pool exceeded 3,000 references, so you can imagine this is a really daunting task (that's why we stressed the disclaimer that it wasn't a comprehensive or complete review).
Mako and Jodi introduced me to AcaWiki. I think the idea is very good, and it also reminds me of similar initiatives in other areas (like PLoS ONE: http://www.plosone.org/home.action). However, I think the number of references reviewed there is still low.
A very positive point with AcaWiki is that it is free licensed. Zotero would be a good alternative, but I had to uninstall it from my Firefox, since it was taking ages to start the browser. There are plans for a standalone version, and also to improve the UI. The rest of web services are good for maintaining compilations (though each one has its own caveats) but usually bad for direct exchange of metadata (you always need to use intermediate formats like BibTex to migrate your info). Mendeley has thrilling features, but I learned that it is proprietary (from the EULA of the standalone version), and honestly I'm not sure if they will start to charge for the service at some point, or modify their API or service agreement (just see what's happening with Twitter).
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The reason why these services are superior to a wiki page is that they can both produce human-readable reference lists as well as export references in any possible format one may need for writing (JSON, XML, BibTeX, JabRef etc). They all have provisions for posting reviews, tags, notes etc., aggregate these annotations from several users (unless they are private) and export them.
If we were to keep our shared reference pool hosted on any of these services we could still:
- embed or republish a list of references elsewhere (e.g. in a wiki)
- make sure the list of references in the wiki is kept up-to-date via the
external service
- allow people to access bibliographic metadata in a format suitable for writing
and in an environment they are already familiar with
- allow people to write reviews and annotations both on the wiki and via the
external service itself
If we think there is added value in hosting reviews on a wiki, what needs to be implemented is a connector between MediaWiki and any of these services (they all have open APIs).
Such a connector would presumably:
- pull bibliographic metadata from the external service
- define a unique ID for each publication (based on a DOI when available)
- create a wiki page per publication using the unique ID as a title and
populating it with the imported metadata
- retrieve live user annotations and comments from the external service
- allow to host further comments and annotations on the wiki via the article
page
It would be sad to see a lot of effort put into creating yet another static wiki-based bibliography just to see it become obsolete because no one is actively maintaining it or because the output it produces is in a format that does not allow it to be easily queried, reused or republished.
Dario
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I can confirm that the #1 complain I get from colleagues when I point them to the static Wikiresearch bibliography pages in meta is: "it is not easily searchable" (by keywords, content, year, author, etc.). If we plan to have annotations or reviews, in addition to this, I believe a standard wiki (such as MediaWiki) is simply not the way to go (disclaimer: despite I'm a great fan and advocate of wikis, and I like many features in MediaWiki).
So, my suggestions are:
- Use a platform allowing extensive search capabilities (perhaps semantic
wikis, but I haven't tested many of them, yet). In this case, I do think that new NoSQL alternatives might be in place to search through text in reviews. 2. Understand multiple formats to introduce new refereneces (including importing from major existing compilations, and web content like CiteULike). 3. Include feature to rate papers according to different criteria (number of positive reviews, number of citations, or combinations of several search conditions).
Of course, I'd be very glad to help with this initiative if it is finally launched (once again).
Best, Felipe.
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