Hi Chitu,
Some reactions inline.
One of my most important functionalities would be automatic citations into papers that I'm working with. I haven't used a wide variety of citation managers, but the functionality in EndNote and Zotero is what I'm talking about; I just don't see how a MediaWiki instance could do that, unless some standardized bibliographic information be embedded into each article page to begin with.
Agreed. What I envision is that we write a script which would export the bibliographic data into whatever formats people prefer: BibTeX (my own preferred format), Zotero, EndNote, whatever. I'm happy to write this script for relatively sane formats. This would then let people create citations in the way they usually do.
Moreover, as Dario and Felipe explained, while far from perfect, the search capabilities of dedicated bibliography managers is far superior to what I presently see in MediaWiki.
(I don't know the details of MediaWiki search well, so some of the following may not be quite right.) What MediaWiki would give us is fulltext search. So while it would be easy to search for "John Smith", and that query would find papers authored by John Smith plus perhaps other stuff; however, one cannot search for "author = John Smith" and get only results where the author field matches John Smith and no others.
However, it does seem like Semantic MediaWiki has this type of search and otherwise behaves much like plain MediaWiki.
Maybe you or others could say more about what types of search are important to you?
AcaWiki uses Semantic MediaWiki, I believe. However, I have some reservations about it: * Is it sufficiently stable? (e.g., the FAQ says they "just launched" but the page has not been edited in two years. * The focus on "summaries" worries me, and the target audience is laypeople? We're talking about an annotated bibliography targeted at researchers, which is a different audience. * I don't care for the user interface (this is a mix of personal opinion and professional opinion as an HCI researcher).
As-is, I'm not very interested in AcaWiki. But, if there is an opportunity to make significant changes, then it seem plausible. I would want to know about hosting, backups, etc. make sure that it is a reliable platform.
There also appear to be various options for Semantic MediaWiki hosting: Wikia, Referata, etc. It would be nice to not have to deal with the sysadmin aspects of the project.
One final note on bibliographic software: many of these claim to do automatic import of a reference simply by pointing the software at the publisher's web page for the references. But I have never seen this work correctly; always, the imported data needs significant cleanup, enough that personally I'd rather type it in manually anyway. For example, titles of ACM papers aren't even correctly cased on the official ACM pages (e.g., http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1753326.1753615)!
Bibliographic software then also typically does not include the proper metadata for automatically lower-casing titles in citations. For example, the title "Path Selection: Novel Interaction Technique for Wikipedia" should be lower-cased as "Path selection: Novel interaction technique for Wikipedia". But so often I see papers with "Path selection: novel interaction technique for wikipedia". It's embarrassing.
But, if we were writing our own (e.g.) MediaWiki -> BibTeX export script, we could automatically note that "Novel" should be capitalized (because it begins the subtitle) as well as provide for people to indicate explicitly title words that should remain capitalized. (In this instance, the proper BibTeX export syntax would be "Path Selection: {Novel} Interaction Technique for {Wikipedia}".)
Would it be feasible to have both, and use them concurrently so that researchers could use one or the other, or both, as they prefer? I'm thinking of something like this (for purpose of illustration, let's call the chosen MediaWiki instance MW and the chosen dedicated online shared bibliographic tool BT):
Bi-directional synchronization is hard to get right, particularly when the two sides have different data models. I think we are much better off declaring one or the other to be the master and the rest should remain read-only (i.e. export rather than synchronization).
To be clear, I'm offering to do the following things:
1. Help define a reasonable starting summary template for papers. 2. Build the proper MediaWiki infoboxes and whatnot to realize what we decide from #1 (perhaps concurrently to that discussion, to facilitate it). 3. Write a script to import some sane text-based format to this MediaWiki instance. (I assume Zotero can export such a format.) This would be run once or a few times for initial import, not regularly for synchronization. 4. Write a script to export the MediaWiki data to BibTeX and one or two other sane text-based formats, and arrange for it to be run frequently so people's paper citations stay up to date. 5. Read and annotate papers. 6. Help with follow-up work (synthesizing, writing survey, etc. etc.)
Reid