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.
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
On 18 Mar 2011, at 15:09, Andrea Forte wrote:
Somehow I lost this thread - this is great, Finn, I agree that a shared bibliographic resource need not be restricted to conferences, journals, etc, although specific meta-reviews might be.
The main obstacle for this problem of reviewing WP lit seems to be agreeing on a common method for assembling our disparate efforts into something bigger. In another thread I echoed Reid's ideas about using a wiki to accomplish this, a mediawiki instance would be ideal.
Andrea
On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 10:37 AM, Finn Aarup Nielsen fn@imm.dtu.dk wrote:
- Create a public Mediawiki instance.
- Decide on a relatively standardized format of reviewing each paper
(metadata formats, an infobox, how to write reviews of each, etc.) 3. Upload your existing Zotero database into this new wiki (I would be happy to write a script to do this). 4. Proceed with paper readings, with the goal that every single paper is looked at by human eyes. 5. Use this content to produce one or more review articles.
There has been some talk of a wiki for papers - also on this list as far as I remember. There is Bibdex (http://www.bibdex.com/), AcaWiki (http://acawiki.org) and I have the "Brede Wiki" (http://neuro.imm.dtu.dk/wiki/). The AcaWiki use Semantic Mediawiki (AFAIK) and I use MediaWiki templates. You can see an example here:
http://neuro.imm.dtu.dk/wiki/Putting_Wikipedia_to_the_test:_a_case_study
There is an infobox with citation information and sections on "related studies" and "critique".
It is a question though whether such more general targeted wikis are appropriate for composing a collaborative paper.
I have also begun a small Wikipedia review that I upload to our server yesterday:
http://www2.imm.dtu.dk/pubdb/views/edoc_download.php/6012/pdf/imm6012.pdf
I think I will never be able to do an exhaustive review of all papers, but my idea was to give an overview of as many aspect as possible. I think that some research published outside journals and conferences are interesting, e.g., surveys and some of the statistics performed by Erik Zachte. I don't think that Pew's survey has be peer-reviewed, so "just" including journal and conference papers is in my opinion not quite enough to give a complete picture.
/Finn
Finn Aarup Nielsen, DTU Informatics, DenmarkLundbeck Foundation Center for Integrated Molecular Brain Imaging http://www.imm.dtu.dk/~fn/ http://nru.dk/staff/fnielsen/ ___________________________________________________________________
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-- :: Andrea Forte :: Assistant Professor :: College of Information Science and Technology, Drexel University :: http://www.andreaforte.net
-- :: Andrea Forte :: Assistant Professor :: College of Information Science and Technology, Drexel University :: http://www.andreaforte.net
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