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

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.

Brian J Mingus, 19/07/2010 22:20: I have already mentioned it before, but this description looks quite similar to http://bibdex.org/ . Maybe we should join forces (i.e., send your proposal also to Sunir Shah). Nemo _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

Hi Brian and others, 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.

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.

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.

Wikimedia/MediaWiki wiki? And 'dateadded' would already be recorded in the revision history.

to make sure it is easy translatable to the most common bibliographic formats: bibtex, refman, Z3988 microformat, pubmed, etc.

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.

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

Brian, The meta process for new project proposals is still the cleanest one for suggesting a specific Project and presenting it alongside similar projects. It would be helpful if you could update a related project proposal on meta -- say, [[m:WikiBibliography]], if that seems relevant. (I just cleaned that page up and merged in an older proposal that had been obfuscated.)

Or you can create a new project proposal... WikiCite as a name can be confusing, since it has been used to refer to this bibliographic idea, but also to refer to the idea of citations for every statement or fact - something closer to a blame or trust solution that includes citations in its transactions.

We should figure out how this project would work with acawiki, and possibly bibdex. Bibdex doesn't aim to And it would be helpful to have a publicly-viewable demo to play with -- could you clone your current wiki and populate the result with dummy data?

I love the idea of having a global place to discuss citations -- ALL citations -- something that OpenLibrary, the arXiv, and anyone else hosting cited documents could point to for every one of its works.

Sam. On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 6:03 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki(a)gmail.com> wrote: that like a citation, across this can -- Samuel Klein identi.ca:sj w:user:sj _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 4:06 PM, Finn Aarup Nielsen <fn(a)imm.dtu.dk> wrote: Hi Brian and others, 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. Although the technology required to make a WikiCite happen will be applicable to a more generalized wiki for storing data I think that is too broad for the current proposal. A WMF analogue to Google Base is an entirely new beast that has its own requirements. I certainly think it's an interesting and worthwhile idea, but I don't feel that we are there yet. 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 noticed that AcaWiki is using the title, but I am personally not a fan of it. The motivation for using a key comes from BibTeX. When you cite an entry in a publication in LaTeX, you type \cite{key}. Also, I think most bibliographic formats support such a key. The idea is that there is a universal token that you can type into Google that will lead you to the right item. The predictable disambig is in the format I sent out (which likely needs modification for other kinds of sources). The format is Author1Author2Author3EtAlYYb. Here is a real world example from a pair of very prolific scientists, Deco & Rolls, who published at least three papers together in 2005. In our lab we have really come to love these keys - they are very memorable tokens that you can verbally pass on to other scientists in the midst of a discussion. Eventually, if they enter the key you have given them into Google, they will get the right entry at "WikiCite". DecoRolls05 - Synaptic and spiking dynamics underlying reward reversal in the orbitofrontal cortex. DecoRolls05b - Sequential memory: a putative neural and synaptic dynamical mechanism. DecoRolls05c - Attention, short-term memory, and action selection: a unifying theory.

I have one field to each author so that I can automatically link authors. This is accomplished via Semantic Forms, using the arraymap parser function. You just provide a comma-separated list of authors, and they each get semantic property definitions and deep linking to all papers published by that author.

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. Yes, I have added many nice features to WikiPapers that can unfortunately not make it into the proposed WMF project. Some can, some can't. For example, adding papers to the wiki is via a one click bookmarklet. First, you highlight the title of a paper anywhere on the web, be it a webpage, e-mail, or journal site. Then, you click your "Add to wiki" bookmarklet. On my webserver I am running the citation scraping software from Connotea, CiteULike, and Zotero. I also have a Google Scholar scraper and PubMed importer. You can choose to use one of those sources, or you can choose to merge all of the metadata together. It's automatically added to the wiki for you. Additionally, I have written a bash script that is very adept at getting the pdfs from journals, so it automatically tries to download the pdf and upload it to the wiki for you. I have also implemented the ability to compute the articles that an article cites, and vice versa. With respect to abstracts these scrapers aren't that great. Abstracts usually come from PubMed, whose database you can license, but you cannot change their metadata IIRC. Ultimately, I think the community will have to take a very careful look at what data can be added to the wiki and design policies accordingly. On Wikipedia I believe copyright enforcement has largely been up to the community, and it takes a long time to converge on appropriate policies. Needless to say, much of the technologies I described in the last paragraph would not be found legal on a public wiki. 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. The 'owner' field is a misnomer, but in lieu of mysql support it lets you know which individuals have that entry in their personal bibliographies. dateadded is needed due to what at least used to be a bug in Semantic MediaWiki. 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. I have written extensive amounts of Python interchange code between wiki template syntax and BibTeX. I chose BibTeX because it is rather standard, our lab uses it, and it is very similar to template syntax. Also, I use Bibutils to convert from BibTeX to most popular formats, and vice versa for mass import of bibliographies: http://www.scripps.edu/~cdputnam/software/bibutils/

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. As I was writing a custom Lucene search engine for WikiPapers I realized that it is a perfect replacement for Semantic MediaWiki. Lucene has fields, it supports boolean operators and you can format its output. All that is needed is to write the Lucene backend (perhaps just modifying MWLucene) and write a parser function that supports using templates for formatting of the output of queries. Lucene is extremely fast and can scale to whatever we can imagine doing. That's my proposed plan. 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 believe it is necessary. First, the idea is for any mediawiki anywhere (and any software with appropriate extensions) to be able to cite the same source. Secondly, the project would be multilingual.

Cheers, Brian Mingus Graduate Student Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab University of Colorado at Boulder _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

On Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 11:56 AM, Jodi Schneider <jodi.schneider(a)deri.org> wrote: > > Hi Brian, > On 20 Jul 2010, at 18:02, Brian J Mingus wrote: > > On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 4:06 PM, Finn Aarup Nielsen <fn(a)imm.dtu.dk> wrote: >> >> >> Hi Brian and others, >> >> 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. >

why not separate by pluses? they don't form part of names either, and don't cause problems with wiki page titles.

I don't think it is a good idea to change one key as a function of updates on another, except for a generic disambiguation tag.

Kang+Hsu+Krajbich+2009+the+wick+in or Kang+Hsu+Krajbich+2009+twi

Of course, it does not have to be _exactly_ three authors, nor three words from the title, and it does not solve the John Smith (or Zheng Wang) problem.

On 21 Jul 2010, at 09:42, Daniel Kinzler wrote: This seems best to me of what's proposed so far. While that's a good idea, then we'd have to know all "indistinctive" words in all languages. (Die, Der, La, L', ...)

On 21 Jul 2010, at 09:42, Daniel Kinzler wrote: This seems best to me of what's proposed so far. While that's a good idea, then we'd have to know all "indistinctive" words in all languages. (Die, Der, La, L', ...) There are still going to be duplicates, alas... > >> Of course, it does not have to be _exactly_ three authors, nor three >> words from the title, and it does not solve the John Smith (or Zheng >> Wang) problem. > > It also doesn't solve issues with transliteration: Merik Möller may become > "Moeller" or "Moller", Jakob Voß may become "Voss" or "Vosz" or even "VoB", > etc. In case of chinese names, it's often not easy to decide which part is the > last name.

I like this... however, how would you represent this in a URL? Also note that using plusses in page names don't work with all server configurations, since plus has a special meaning in URLs. another MMDDYYYY I agree. And if you *have* to use the full date, use YYYYMMDD, not the other way around, please. to slash and Both seem good, though i would suggest to form a convention to ignore any leading "the" and "a", to a more distinctive 3 word suffix. It also doesn't solve issues with transliteration: Merik Möller may become "Moeller" or "Moller", Jakob Voß may become "Voss" or "Vosz" or even "VoB", etc. In case of chinese names, it's often not easy to decide which part is the last name. To avoid this kind of ambiguity, i suggest to automatically apply some type of normalization and/or hashing. There is quite a bit of research about this kind of normalisation out there, generally with the aim of detecting duplicates. Perhaps we can learn from bibsonomy.org, have a look how they do it: <http://www.bibsonomy.org/help/doc/inside.html>. Gotta love open source university research projects :) -- daniel

This gives us the following key, guaranteed to be unique: KangHsuKrajbich20091011b

A compromise could be that the ID is the first author's name plus an auto-incrememented ID per author. So for example, the first paper of mine the system learns is priedhorsky1, the second priedhorsky2, etc. So you get a system-generated ID for uniqueness but also something comprehensible for people.

On 21 Jul 2010, at 21:43, Reid Priedhorsky wrote: Interesting. I'd really like ID's to be not only comprehensible but also to have a fair chance of being directly inputtable by humans. For instance, on Wikipedia, if I know that I am looking for the article on "citation signals" I can type the URL directly, without searching. In my ideal citation-wiki-in-the-sky, you could get to the citation directly in this way -- and sensible disambiguation pages would be automatically generated. -Jodi _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

On 21 Jul 2010, at 19:47, Brian J Mingus wrote: Finn, I'm not a fan of including a portion of the the title for a couple of reasons. First, it's not required to make the key unique. Second, it makes the key longer than necessary. Third, the first word or words from a title are not guaranteed to convey any meaning. Regarding a Reference: namespace, I can see how this has some utility and why projects have moved to it. However, I consider it a stopgap solution that projects have implemented when what they really want is a proper wiki for citations. Here are a few quick things that you can't do (or would have to go out of your way to do) with just a Reference namespace that you can do with a wiki dedicated to all the world's citations: - Custom reports that are boolean combinations of citation fields, ala SMW. This requires substantive new technology as SMW doesn't scale. - User bibliographies which are a logical subset of all literature ever published. Not sure why a Reference namespace couldn't do this. - Conduct a search of the literature. Or this (you can search just one namespace) - A new set of policies that are not necessarily NPOV, regarding the creation of articles that discuss collections of literature (lit review-like concept). The content of these policies will emerge over years with the help of a community. These articles could, for instance, help people who are navigating a new area of a literature avoid getting stuck in local minima. It could point out the true global context to them. It could point out experimenter biases in the literature; for example, a recent article was published where it was found that citation networks in academic literature can have a tendency to form based on the assumption of authority, when in fact that authority is false, bringing a whole thread of publications into doubt. I'm not sure that literature reviews belong in the same wiki as citations. That's definitely a different namespace. :) - Create wiki articles about individual sources. This might or might not be the same wiki -- but that could be interesting. I could imagine a page for a journal being pulled in from several sources: the collection of citations in the wiki for that journal, RSS from the current contents (license permitting), a Wikipedia page about the journal (if it exists), a link to author guidelines/submission info, open access info from SHERPA/ROMEO, .... In this vision, very little of the content "lives" in this wiki itself. Rather, it's templated from numerous other places.... Perhaps in the way "buy this book" links are handled in librarything -- there are numerous external links which can be activated with a checkbox, and some external content that is pulled in based on copyright review. While I am not dedicated to any of these things happening, I also do not wish to rule them out. The hope is that a new community will emerge around the project and guide it in the direction that is most useful. My hope in this thread is that we can identify some of the most likely cases and imagine what it will be like, so that we can convey this vision to the Foundation and they can get a sense of the potential importance of the project. Scoping is a big problem, I think -- because it would help to have a vision of which of several related tasks/endpoints is primary. I think an investigation of what fr.wikipedia is doing would be really useful -- does anybody edit there, or have an interest in digging into that? Questions might include: What is the reference namespace doing? What isn't it doing, that they wish it would? Did they consider alternatives to a namespace? How is maintenance going? Do they see the reference namespace as longstanding into the future, or as a stopgap? -Jodi

On 21 Jul 2010, at 21:43, Reid Priedhorsky wrote: Interesting. I'd really like ID's to be not only comprehensible but also to have a fair chance of being directly inputtable by humans. For instance, on Wikipedia, if I know that I am looking for the article on "citation signals" I can type the URL directly, without searching. In my ideal citation-wiki-in-the-sky, you could get to the citation directly in this way -- and sensible disambiguation pages would be automatically generated. -Jodi _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

Sure, but first, is this capable of being done at all? I have never seen a method of bibliographic control that can cope with the complete range of publications, even just print publications. Perhaps we need to proceed within narrow domains.

Second, is this capable of being done by crowd-sourcing, or does it require enforceable standards? The work of Open Library is not a promising model, being a uncontrolled mix, done to many different standards. Actually, within the domain of scientific journal articles from the last 10 years in Western languages, the best current method seems to be a mechanical algorithm, the one used by Google Scholar. True, it does not aggregate perfectly--but it does aggregate better than any other existing database. And it does not get them all--nor could it no matter how much improved, for many of the versions that are actually available are off limits to its crawlers.

"citation signals" will always work until a rock band takes that name and gets a page in Wikipedia. Try "game theory".

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooko's_triangle

Hi, Talking about identifiers for bibliographic records I just want to stress one crucial point: There is absolutely no such thing as a "guaranteed unique identifier" that can be derived from existing metadata. You will *always* have false positives (different publications get the same identifier [1]) and false negatives (same publication has different identifiers [2]). Fuzzy identifiers even occur if they are created by the publisher or author himself (for instance duplicate ISBNs for definitely different editions or even totally different books). If you argue about identifiers please keep in mind that you *always* talk about heuristics but not about something "unique per se". Existing identifiers only differ in the ratio of false positives and false negatives. The only way you may get unique identifiers is to assign your own identifiers that are *not* derived from the content - such as auto-incremented record ids in a database. Even then they are not unique if you change the content because the identity of the object may change. A MD5 or SHA-sum on the full content [3] or the version id in a versioning database (like MediaWiki) is unique but not practical if you want to change content. A solution to this problem is to let people decide in every single case about how an identifier looks like and when it should change (example: Wikipedia article titles). But then the identifiers are not permanent (records may split and join and be renamed). That's the way it is. You have to decide which problem to solve with an identifier and then be aware of its limitations. As Brooks [3] wrote there is no silver bullet - so there is no silver identifier. Cheers Jakob [1] For instance if you have a common name and a general title or if you want to distinguish the printed version and the presentation slides of the same publication etc. [2] For instance different ways to abbreviate and/or write the name of an author and/or title, different years (year of preprint vs year of printed version) etc. [3] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet which cites an article that has been published in 1986 and 1987, and probably reprinted in another year - so what's the identifier? ;-) _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

Interesting. I'd really like ID's to be not only comprehensible but also to have a fair chance of being directly inputtable by humans.

For instance, on Wikipedia, if I know that I am looking for the article on "citation signals" I can type the URL directly, without searching. In my ideal citation-wiki-in-the-sky, you could get to the citation directly in this way -- and sensible disambiguation pages would be automatically generated.

Jodi Schneider wrote: Usual bibliographic catalogs do not provide a mnemonic key as soon as their size is more then a few hundred entries. There are various IDs like ISBN and OCLC number but there is no large-scale system that has simple identifiers. Why do you want to type in the ID by hand anyway? What is the use-case?

Why do you want to directly work with fragile identifiers? Every modern web application provides auto-suggest: you type in a keyword, title, author, anything and get a list of publications and a link to create a new one.

Then you select a publication from the list and its ID gets copied into your editor (an ideal editor would also send a pingback to the citation database to know where a publication identifier is used). Done.

I also like mnemonic identifiers, they are useful if you have to read, memorize and type in them. But if your workflow is truly digital then their limitation is just a burden. I would value uniqueness and stability much more then readability - and you cannot get both!

Cheers Jakob

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 &lt;jayvdb(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: -- Samuel Klein          identi.ca:sj           w:user:sj _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l

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.

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.

there already *are* communities that collect and share bibliographic data

I think focusing on Wikimedia's citation needs is the most promising, especially if this is intended to be a WMF project.

As for mission -- yes -- let's talk about what problem we're trying to solve. Two central ones come to mind: 1. Improve verifiability by making it possible to start with a source and verify all claims made by referencing that source [1] 2. Make it easier for editors to give references, and readers to use them [2]

To figure out what the right problems are, I think it would help to look at the pain points -- and their solutions -- the hacks and proposals related to citations. Hacks include plugins and templates people have made to make MediaWiki more citation-friendly. Proposals include the ones on strategy wiki.

Some of the hacks and proposals are listed here: http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Proposals_related_to_citations Could you add other hacks, proposals, and conversations...?

[1] This can be done using backlinks.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Greenwood%26Ear…  ) [2] I think of this as "actionable references" -- we'd have to explain exactly what the desirable qualities are. Adding to bilbiographic managers in one click is one of mine. :) [3] Other side-effects might be helping to identify what's highly cited in Wikipedia (which would be interesting -- and might help prioritize Wikisource additions), automatically adding quotes to Wikiquote, ...

On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 12:06 AM, Jodi Schneider &lt;jodi.schneider(a)deri.org&gt; wrote: I don't think this has been raised on this list. The academic journals project hosts "Journals cited by Wikipedia" using the {{cite}} data. It is broken down by usage count. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:JCW