On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 8:08 PM, Rob Lanphier <robla@robla.net> wrote:
On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 1:20 PM, Brian J Mingus
<Brian.Mingus@colorado.edu> 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.

This sounds great.  Just speaking as a community member, I've been
thinking about this topic a long time myself, and have plenty to add
to the conversation.

> 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.

I'd suggest finding an on-wiki spot to discuss this work.  Here's one
place this has been discussed in the past that may be a good place to
revive the conversation:
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Building_a_database_of_all_books_ever_published

Rather than commenting on list about the subject itself, I've
commented on the discussion page there:
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal_talk:Building_a_database_of_all_books_ever_published#Fact_database_6531

Rob

Rob,

Thanks for bringing my attention to this proposal. It certainly has some of the same ring as this project, with of course some important differences. Commonalities between the projects are that they are multilingual and require a powerful search engine. Differences are that this project is for all literary sources and that I believe it is best suited at the WMF. The widespread use of citations across the Wikipedias will drive user contributions towards adding richer metadata to those citations. And having a source of citations available will increase the quality of the Wikipedias as it becomes easier and easier to cite sources.

Brian