On 21 Jul 2010, at 19:47, Brian J Mingus wrote:

Finn,

I'm not a fan of including a portion of the the title for a couple of reasons. First, it's not required to make the key unique. Second, it makes the key longer than necessary. Third, the first word or words from a title are not guaranteed to convey any meaning.

Regarding a Reference: namespace, I can see how this has some utility and why projects have moved to it. However, I consider it a stopgap solution that projects have implemented when what they really want is a proper wiki for citations. Here are a few quick things that you can't do (or would have to go out of your way to do) with just a Reference namespace that you can do with a wiki dedicated to all the world's citations:

- Custom reports that are boolean combinations of citation fields, ala SMW. This requires substantive new technology as SMW doesn't scale.
- User bibliographies which are a logical subset of all literature ever published.

Not sure why a Reference namespace couldn't do this.

- Conduct a search of the literature.

Or this (you can search just one namespace)

- A new set of policies that are not necessarily NPOV, regarding the creation of articles that discuss collections of literature (lit review-like concept). The content of these policies will emerge over years with the help of a community. These articles could, for instance, help people who are navigating a new area of a literature avoid getting stuck in local minima. It could point out the true global context to them. It could point out experimenter biases in the literature; for example, a recent article was published where it was found that citation networks in academic literature can have a tendency to form based on the assumption of authority, when in fact that authority is false, bringing a whole thread of publications into doubt.

I'm not sure that literature reviews belong in the same wiki as citations. That's definitely a different namespace. :)

I could imagine a page for a journal being pulled in from several sources: the collection of citations in the wiki for that journal, RSS from the current contents (license permitting), a Wikipedia page about the journal (if it exists), a link to author guidelines/submission info, open access info from SHERPA/ROMEO, .... In this vision, very little of the content "lives" in this wiki itself. Rather, it's templated from numerous other places.... Perhaps in the way "buy this book" links are handled in librarything -- there are numerous external links which can be activated with a checkbox, and some external content that is pulled in based on copyright review.

While I am not dedicated to any of these things happening, I also do not wish to rule them out. The hope is that a new community will emerge around the project and guide it in the direction that is most useful. My hope in this thread is that we can identify some of the most likely cases and imagine what it will be like, so that we can convey this vision to the Foundation and they can get a sense of the potential importance of the project.

Scoping is a big problem, I think -- because it would help to have a vision of which of several related tasks/endpoints is primary.

I think an investigation of what fr.wikipedia is doing would be really useful -- does anybody edit there, or have an interest in digging into that? Questions might include: What is the reference namespace doing? What isn't it doing, that they wish it would? Did they consider alternatives to a namespace? How is maintenance going? Do they see the reference namespace as longstanding into the future, or as a stopgap?

-Jodi