On 7/29/06, Jonathan Leybovich jleybov@yahoo.com wrote:
A catalog has language-specific data, for sure, but this is not multi-lingual data- the language(s) in which a book's title is historically expressed by the author or publisher is important, and you cannot just do your own translation into an arbitrary language and say that is also the book's title.
A translated version of the book should probably have its own DefinedMeaning, since you will want to relate all kinds of information specifically on that level. It could be linked to the original edition not so much through the synonyms/translations, but through a special relation type, e.g. "is translated edition of." Even with that information, you may _still_ want to translate the title to languages where no actual edition is available, so you can cite a book e.g. with both its official title, and an unofficial translated title in the language of the Wikipedia edition you're using.
This also does not touch the performance/scalability issues of storing all text data, all numerica data, etc. in one table.
It won't be quite as simple as that, but let's discuss that.
Regarding different referencing styles, I'm open to anything though I think you'll find that in practice standard numbers like ISBN are less cumbersome to use than titles. For example, <<ref:The Davinci Code>>- does this mean the book, the movie, the audio book, or "The Davinci Code: Fact or Fiction?" ?
Referencing books that also have movie adaptations doesn't seem quite as common. If I look at a real-world example, e.g. [[Emu]], I'll find references like
* The heat load from solar radiation on a large, diurnally active bird, the emu (Dromaius novaehollandiae) * Ventilatory accommodation of oxygen demand and respiratory water loss in a large bird, the emu (Dromaius novaehollandiae), and a re-examination of ventilatory allometry for birds * Endocrine and testicular changes in a short-day seasonally breeding bird, the emu (Dromaius novaehollandiae), in southwestern Australia.
I don't think any of these will be turned into movies soon. ;-) In addition, you could even capture the type of reference with the template name, e.g. <<book:The Da Vinci Code>> would only refer to an entity which has the class membership "book". You could also do pre-save transformations, that is, the user types <<book:Some title>>, and if the expression unambiguously refers to one publication, a unique identifier is automatically inserted into the reference in addition to the title.
Of course, the ideal user interface would probably give you a little pop-up when you click on a toolbar icon, let you search (or add!) the reference information, and insert the right tags into the wiki source text.
Also, citation is not just fetching bibliographic data for the purposes of displaying it in an info box like other information. It is fundamentally about associating an assertion with evidence or support, and so must capture the cited "text" as well as the paraphrase text. Here is a mock-up of these idea in the context of an enhanced article validation feature:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Wikicite_spider_review_mockup.jpg
:-) I see we have indeed been thinking about very similar problem areas. You'll find a mock-up of a simple scoped citation syntax in p.190 of the first edition of my book: http://medienrevolution.dpunkt.de/files/Medienrevolution-1.pdf
I like your systematic source review, though I'm not sure adding this additional UI layer is necessary. One thing to keep in mind: In a wiki review process, you'll probably almost never flag things as "misleading" or "made-up" -- instead, you should encourage direct editing of the content.
I think we'll have lots to talk about.
Erik