Hey all,
we had a productive “strategy meetup” at Wikimania with a group of about 20 people, to
talk about the future of WikiCite and a roadmap for source metadata in Wikidata more
generally.
The motivation for this meetup was a set of concerns around scalability and “growing
pains” around bibliographic and citation data in Wikidata, as well as the need (that many
in the community have expressed) for a clearer goal, value proposition, and scope for
WikiCite.
The result is a series of notes fleshing out 4 possible scenarios for the future of
bibliographic data as structured data—from a centralized scenario to a fully federated
one—discussing their possible risks and benefits at the technical, social, and governance
level:
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiCite/Roadmap
The question these notes try to address is whether Wikimedia should aim to build a
“bibliographic commons”, and if so, what it would look like, and where it should live.
This document is not a formal proposal or an RfC open for a vote, but a conversation
starter to evaluate what type of future makes most sense for this data and the communities
and stakeholders that will benefit from it. A shared understanding on what we’re building
towards is also going to help us inform the program of the upcoming WikiCite 2018
conference in November (the application process will open in a few days).
If you wish to share your thoughts on these four scenarios, please chime in on wiki,
rather than replying here, to avoid thread splintering (I’m cross-posting this on a few
mailing lists).
Dario
on behalf of the meetup participants