On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 8:19 PM, Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com wrote:
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.)
The already-written software (WikiPapers) is exactly what a WikiCite would be. It is able to get metadata for practically any citation and add it to the wiki automatically. If there is only one small nugget in a proposal that the Foundation needs one would like to think that they would have the foresight to notice that and do everything they can to get it. It would be _really_ nice if they would at least read your proposal and give you some feedback about how you can align your vision with the Foundation's needs. Quite the opposite has happened - we haven't gotten any real feedback at all. I'm also not sold on proposals on the Strategy wiki. How are those different from the proposals that have been accumulating on Meta? As far as I know not a single one on either wiki has ever turned into a real project.
I am personally not in the loop on the AcaWiki thing - we are working with them in some way, kind of. Nobody has installed or asked to install WikiPapers on a wiki outside of our lab, despite that everyone thinks it's pretty awesome. It's true that it is GPL, but I have not released the source code precisely because I want it to be a centralized repository of citations. I expect that whenever it finds an institutional home lots of modifications will be made, and perhaps the Foundation would prefer it to be written in PHP rather than Python, etc.
WMF has a clear need for this or a similar technology, but will that be enough to mobilize them?
Brian
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.
-- Samuel Klein identi.ca:sj w:user:sj
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