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 Taraborelli <dtaraborelli@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.

=========

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).

=========

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

====

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: 

1. 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.

====