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.
Jonathan Leybovich
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