In the m:WikiBibliography draft proposal I have briefly tried to explain the difference you allude to. Wikipedia is a project dedicated to synthesizing every notable topic into an encyclopedia. Since Wikipedia doesn't contain original research, eventually every statement there should be able to be traced to its source. The opposite also holds true - eventually every notable topic will be able to be traced back to Wikipedia. We don't necessarily have to cite all sources that a topic is mentioned in within a given article, but it is desirable to document the relationships between these sources so that we understand the true context. These really are two sides of the same problem, and the project proposal aims to cover both sides.

On Sat, Jul 24, 2010 at 12:30 PM, David Goodman <dgoodmanny@gmail.com> wrote:

There's a difference between a project to centralize the various
references in Wikipedia, and an attempt to build a universal
bibliographic database. The first is a reasonable project, though I
think everyone involved has underestimated the extent to which
normalization and manual aggregation will be needed.

On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 7:25 PM, Samuel Klein <meta.sj@gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks for those links, John.
>
> I agree that a separate project is needed to have a central source
> that all language versions of all projects can reference. The
> citations version of Commons.
>
> I like the French model of using "Article name (Authors)" as a key.
> Perhaps with "Article name (Authors, Year)" if needed to disambiguate.
> This shares a design principle with the move away from CamelCase to
> freeform article titles: one should be able to insert an article name
> into a natural sentence, and link the appropriate section of the
> sentence, and have it take you to the appropriate article.
>
> To DGG's question: in the long run, the scope of "all cited works" can
> be captured in such a project, at least for the works cited on a wiki
> Project -- anyone making a new citation would either find it already
> in the project or would add it. Whether this covers all works cited
> by active academics of scholars depends on how effectively we draw
> them into our community and help them see where an extra minute of
> work on their part will help thousands of their readers, reviewers,
> and reusers.
>
> SJ.
>
>
> On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 12:13 AM, John Vandenberg <jayvdb@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, Jul 21, 2010 at 9:49 PM, Finn Aarup Nielsen <fn@imm.dtu.dk> wrote:
>>>..
>>> Do anyone knows anything about the French discussions on the introduction of
>>> the 'Reference' namespace? Should we just implement the French system on the
>>> English Wikipedia and we are there?
>>
>> This was discussed on en.wp in late 2007...
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28technical%29/Archive_14#Is_there_a_centralized_bibliographic_database_for_wikipedia.3F_Is_there_a_way_to_make_citations_just_by_giving_an_universal_ID_instead_of_copying_a_full_citation_template.3F
>>
>> The proposal on fr.wp in early 2006:
>>
>> http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Prise_de_d%C3%A9cision/Espace_r%C3%A9f%C3%A9rence
>>
>> --
>> John Vandenberg
>>
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>
>
>
> --
> Samuel Klein identi.ca:sj w:user:sj
>
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--
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG

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