Hoi,At some time Wikicite was alive and well. Now people at Wikidata state that given that the roadmap of Wikicite has not been updated for a long time, it is presumed dead. [1] As a consequence it is all too easy to ask for the "cleanup" of the existing scholarly data and imho mis-representing what has gone before.
In the years since the last WikiCite roadmap update, a lot has changed.
- Magnus rewrote many of his tools in RUST, including the SourceMD tooks, it made no difference for the community
- Elsevier has opened up its references; they are now available at Crossref.
- Scholia now knows where a paper is used as a reference in particularly the English Wikipedia
- Scholia templates exist on many subjects and scientists in the English Wikipedia
- Wikidata is now used to improve the information of the papers used as references with information from Wikidata
- There was an initial run linking books know by their ISBN from Wikidata to Open Library.
Personally I still add papers, one at a time, and use them as "cites work" references. For books I add the books and often link to Open Library.. I care about ecology, rewilding and when I feel compelled to work on a specific paper, I will. [2] When I come across a scientist who is in the news, I will use the author-disambiguator to link to its papers.
The last I heard about plans for Wikicite was what to do next centred around the notion that we "could" have all the papers in a Wikibase. As far as I am aware, whatever happened is not generally known and it may be a lot but I expect nothing much; I prefer to be surprised.
When these people who have their own pet projects get their way, it will destroy all the work that has been done. It will destroy mine. The notion that it will be for the better can be understood from their perspective. My problem is that it will make Wikidata only more biased. When you compare any subject that has a worldwide validity, its coverage is dominated by what we know and it is North American, European. You are unlikely to find any city of Africa with all its mayors. We do not know all the national ministers for the twenty first century and obviously not for the twentieth century of the African countries.
For Wikicite is to be alive and well it needs to have a goal. For me it is for the all the references to scientific papers to be known in Wikidata, including the papers they cite, including its authors. This will provide a rabbit hole where people can find additional material on a subject. In addition it will show when the science referenced in a Wikipedia article is out of date. It happens and old ideas are jealously protected.
So what will it be.. Is there live in Wikicite?
Thanks,
GerardM