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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