2009/6/25 Joseph Reagle reagle@mit.edu:
Option 2 is more readable, but requires a redirection by the reader if they want full bibliographic detail, and adds pages (and weight and cost) to a book. Another option is to use an adaptation of Option 1: standard long-then-short Chicago without URLs, which are provided online. This make a practical sort of sense (and this is what Anderson *says* he was planning to do), but is non-standard and I'm not sure how it would be received.
This reminds me of a thought I've been having for a while. *We* can pro-actively take steps to make citation easier for our users, at least in theory; we can provide more elegant URLs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view&am...
can be rendered as
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=6042007
Can we make that even more succinct? Well, we could take a leaf from the DOI playbook, and set up something like:
http://%5Bsite%5D/wp:en/6042007
At first glance, this doesn't seem to actually add very much - it's just a shorter URL. But we could then use it as a platform to help our reusers...
a) if that revision is deleted, we could generate a page saying so and identifying the next live revision *on that page*.
b) if one day we get a marvellous system for identifying authors, this would be an obvious place to display the generated list of them for a given revision.
I'd be curious as to any other applications people can think of.