Jonathan Leybovich wrote:
All-
I hereby propose for your consideration Wikicat, a project to create an open, bibliographic catalog. The purpose of Wikicat is to both lay the groundwork for a scholarly apparatus to be used within Wikipedia as well as create a unique and valuable information resource in its own right. In particular, Wikicat will:
- facilitate the process of citation by automatically
fetching bibliographic data based upon unique keys such as ISBN, ISSN, and LCCN
- allow users to more easily navigate between
information resources by grouping them in a functionally significant manner (in particular, according to the principles of [[w:FRBR]]) so that, for example, different editions, translations, etc. are all joined together
- apply Wikipedia's collaborative content creation
model to bibliographic data, resulting in a catalog of unprecedented detail
In terms of implementation, Wikicat will be defined like any other [[m:Wikidata]] dataset and will integrate with other datasets such as WiktionaryZ to share common entities and perhaps someday support something along the lines of a Semantic Mediawiki. As Wikidata is currently not code complete, though, Wikicat will be deployed in stages, during the first of which it will exist as a read-only database that populates itself on an as-needed/"as-cited" basis by importing data from the open catalog servers of such institutions as the Library of Congress, the University of California library system, the U.S. National Library of Medicine, etc.
Details about the project, in increasing technical detail, are available on the following pages:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_new_projects#Wikicat http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikicat http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikicat_Technical_Design
Coding of the first stage of the project is nearly complete and a list of its operational requirements will soon be forthcoming. Here is a demo of Wikicat integration with the Cite/<ref> extension:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Wikicat_Cite_screenshoot.png
Thank you for your time and I look forward to your comments.
While I have deep sympathy for the intentions of this proposals, I also find that the kind of theoretical discussions that are linked to the proposal offer very little encouragement to the average contributor.
Citations and verifiability are absolutely essential to the credibility of Wikipedia and its sister projects. Nevertheless, a person undertaking to substantiate his contributions should not need a professional librarianship background to do so. Any manner of clearly identifying the source should be acceptable. If someone else considers it important to bring the format of citations up to modern library standards he should feel to do that without blame being attributable to the original contributor.
There is also a need to begin referencing the material that is relatively easy to access on line or in other relatively inexpensive sources of public domain material, like CDs sold for $5.00 each that can each easily contain 100 books or more. In the last few years this material has been produced at a phenomenal rate. These are available in image, ASCII plain Jane or more scholarly annotatable formats. We could begin by including our own Wikisource material in the catalogue.
Ec