Hi Brian and others,
Interesting project. At WikiSym and Wikimania there were some discussions
on the issue of bibliographic databases - and more generally about
structured data in wikis and I mentioned your project briefly in my talk.
Daniel Kinzler (which might be on this mailing list) showed some initial
efforts for bibliographic databasing in Wikipedia. He did not reveal much
(I don't know if it is appropriate to tell about Daniel's project - but
now I have done it anyway...). I have started to build a bibliographic
wiki (Brede Wiki) that is entirely separate from Wikimedia. It is
available from here:
http://neuro.imm.dtu.dk/wiki/
My Wikimania talk about that wiki and related issues is available here
(the video may come later):
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Finn_%C3%85rup_Nielsen_-_Wikipedia_i…
I also think that it would be interesting with some bibliographic support,
for two-way citation tracking and commenting on articles (for example),
but I furthermore find that particular in science article we often find
data that is worth structuring and put in a database or a structured wiki,
so that we can extract the data for meta-analysis and specialized
information retrieval. That is what I also do in the Brede Wiki. I use the
templates to store such data. So if such a system as yours is implemented
we should not just think of it as a bibliographic database but in more
broader terms: A data wiki.
Yours and my system shares some similarities. Here are some differences:
As the 'key' (the wiki page title) I use the (lowercase) title of the
article. That might be more reader friendly - but usually longer. I think
that KangHsuKrajbichEtAl09 is too camel-cased. Neither the title nor
author list + year will be unique, so we need some predictable disambig.
I have one field to each author so that I can automatically link authors.
I use author1, author2, etc. fields. Likewise for URLs: url1, url2, etc.
In this way I can also 'database' authors, ie., I have a wiki page for
each author (regardless of notability). Also journals and organizations
and events are available in my wiki.
I do not include abstracts in my CC-by-sa'ed wiki, since I am not sure how
publishers regard the copyright for abstracts. Neither I am sure about the
forward cites. Most commerical publishers hide the cites for unpaid
viewing. Including cites in CC-by-sa material on a large-scale may
infringe publishers' copyright. Perhaps it is possible to negotiate with
some publishers. We need some talk with 'closed access' publishers before
we add a such data.
I am not sure what 'owner' is in your format. Surely you cant have owners
in Wikimedia/MediaWiki wiki? And 'dateadded' would already be recorded in
the revision history.
We probably need to check on the final format of the bibliographic
template to make sure it is easy translatable to the most common
bibliographic formats: bibtex, refman, Z3988 microformat, pubmed, etc.
As I understand there are issue with Semantic MediaWiki with respect to
performance and security that needs to be resolved before a large scale
deployment within Wikimedia Foundation projects. I heard that Markus
Krötzsch is going to Oxford to work on core SMW, so there might come some
changes to SMW in the future. Code audit of SMW lacks.
It not 'necessarily necessary' to make a new Wikimedia project. There
has been a suggestion (in the meta or strategy wiki) just to use a
namespace in Wikipedia. You could then have a page called
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bib:The_wick_in_the_candle_of_learning
I would say that a page called:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_wick_in_the_candle_of_learning
would be the way to do it. But that would never pass the deletionists. :-)
/Finn
On Mon, 19 Jul 2010, Brian J Mingus wrote:
I have been working with Sam and others for some time
now on brainstorming a
proposal for the Foundation to create a centralized wiki of citations, a
WikiCite so to speak, if that is not the eventual name. My plan is to
continue to discuss with folks who are knowledgeable and interested in such
a project and to have the feedback I receive go into the proposal which I
hope to write this summer. The proposal white paper will then be sent around
to interested parties for corrections and feedback, including on-wiki and
mailing lists, before eventually landing at the Foundation officially. As we
know WMF has not started a new project in some years, so there is no
official process. Thus I find it important to get it right.
The basic idea is a centralized wiki that contains citation information that
other MediaWikis and WMF projects can then reference using something like a
{{cite}} template or a simple link. The community can document the citation,
the author, the book etc.. and, in one idealization, all citations across
all wikis would point to the same article on WikiCite. 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.
To give all a more concrete view, here is an example from some software that
I have implemented in our lab called WikiPapers. Please take note that while
this is a scientific literature example, the idea is general to *all
publications ever*. Also, while I have implemented a feature-full version of
a WikiCite, it's important to point out that for the WMF project we will
need a new extension that handles the needs of the project exactly, and in
PHP (I use Python :).
The name of the wiki article is a unique key that is a combination of the
author names and the year, in the following format:
Author1Author2Author3EtAl10b. This works for scientific articles, but we may
find we need to modify the key for other kinds of sources. The content of
the wiki article is composed of an infobox constructed via the Citation
template, and any other text and media the community determines it is useful
and legal to include in the article. Example article:
Screenshot of how this infobox renders on our wiki:
http://grey.colorado.edu/mediawiki/sites/mingus/images/0/0e/KangHsuKrajbich…
Title: KangHsuKrajbichEtAl09
{{Citation
|publisher=SAGE Publications
|dateadded=2010-07-17
|author=Kang M.J. and Hsu M. and Krajbich I.M. and Loewenstein G. and
McClure S.M. and Wang J.T. and Camerer C.F.
|url=http://pss.sagepub.com/content/20/8/963.full
|abstract=Curiosity has been described as a desire for learning and
knowledge, but its underlying mechanisms are not well understood. We scanned
subjects with functional magnetic resonance imaging while they read trivia
questions. The level of curiosity when reading questions was correlated with
activity in caudate regions previously suggested to be involved in
anticipated reward. This finding led to a behavioral study, which showed
that subjects spent more scarce resources (either limited tokens or waiting
time) to find out answers when they were more curious. The functional
imaging also showed that curiosity increased activity in memory areas when
subjects guessed incorrectly, which suggests that curiosity may enhance
memory for surprising new information. This prediction about memory
enhancement was confirmed in a behavioral study: Higher curiosity in an
initial session was correlated with better recall of surprising answers 1 to
2 weeks later.
|title=The Wick in the Candle of Learning
|bibtex type=article
|number=8
|volume=20
|owner=Sethherd
|journal=Psychological Science
|year=2009
|cites=O'ReillyFrank06,Cowan95,Wise04,Fuster80,Panksepp98,KakadeDayan02b,DelgadoLockeStengerEtAl03,BrewerZhaoDesmondEtAl98,DelgadoNystromFiez00,Beatty82,Baddeley92,Waanabe96,Roland93lm,DelgadoNystromFissellEtAl00,WagnerSchacterRotteEtAl98,SeymourDawDayanEtAl07,ODoherty04,BandettiniMoonen99,ODohertyDayanFristonEtAl03,RogersOwenRobbins99,KnutsonWestdorpKaiserEtAl00,CircuitryMemory,OReillyFrank06,Watanabe96a,BrewerZhaoGabrieli98,WagnerSchacterBuckner98,RogersOwenMiddletonEtAl99,Baddeley86,Watanabe96,Rolls96a,PallerWagner02
|cited_by=Author1Author2Author3EtAl10,etc...
|pages=963
}}
Then, any other WMF wiki, or any other MediaWiki, could cite this universal
entry by simply typing {{cite|KangHsuKrajbichEtAl09}}
Additionally, if a technology such as Semantic MediaWiki is used (as it is
in WikiPapers), arbitrary lists of collections of literature can be
generated by constructing simple queries that are boolean combinations of
template properties. Given that SMW does not scale well, I have a plan that
uses Lucene instead for fast, scalable dynamic generation of collections of
citations. Imagine the possibilities..
Feel free to provide your feedback on this idea, in addition to your own
ideas, in this thread, or to me personally. I am especially interested in
the potential benefits to the WMF projects that you see, and to hear your
thoughts on the potential of this project on its own, as that will feature
prominently in the proposal. Additionally, what do you think WikiCite would
eventually be like, once it is fully matured?
Brian Mingus
Graduate Student
Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab
University of Colorado at Boulder
On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 11:22 AM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:
> There have been a number of proposals floated in the Wikimedia
> community over the years to build a wiki-based project for collecting
> journal citation information. For those interested in that topic, you
> might want to check out the University of Prince Edward Island's
> "knowledge for all" project proposal -- it proposes to build an open
> universal citation index (to serve as an alternative to the many
> hundreds of proprietary citation index products that libraries
> currently buy). This of course is not the first attempt at this
> problem, but it's an interesting proposal that's getting a bit of buzz
> in the library community.
>
http://library.upei.ca/k4all
___________________________________________________________________
Finn Aarup Nielsen, DTU Informatics, Denmark
Lundbeck Foundation Center for Integrated Molecular Brain Imaging
http://www.imm.dtu.dk/~fn/ http://nru.dk/staff/fnielsen/
___________________________________________________________________