Gerard Meijssen wrote:
There is a difference between stronger citation standards and better citation technology. I am all for better citation technology. I am completely against raising the entry level of people to contribute to the Wikipedia project.
I agree we should avoid alienating new users as much as possible. So what do you think of introducing new citation/evidence mark-up which the renderer will then use to automatically flag "evidence holes" within an article (see mock-up: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:WikiTextrose_article_citations.png )? This would probably be an immediate milestone for the project as it is something we could implement without Wikidata.
I am well aware of what Wikidata is. Wikidata is the implementation of relational technology within the Mediawiki software. Off itself it provides you with no functionality. A database design is necessary to consider if it possible to create the functionality that you describe.
I'll put together a datamodel diagram once the functional requirements of the system are more well-defined. I've deferred doing so because I wanted to get feedback from the rest of the community first, including their reaction to the basic concept. I'll have a high-level entity-relationship diagram up soon, though.
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
Introducing detailed citation features would require
either abanoning
that simplicity or abandoning the concept of writing
the wikitext
directly. Both of these would be significantly
detrimental to the
Wikipedia project in the short term.
The mark-up would look something like:
[[cite:ISBN:123456789:p. 10|"cited text"|"paraphrase/article text"]]
To me that doesn't seem more complicated than most other basic wiki mark-up.
Ray Saintonge wrote:
This is all theoretically very interesting, and I
cannot oppose it.
Nevertheless until someone is ready to code this it
won't happen .
Meanwhile, many of us who concern ourselves with
content still have to
go on with life without waiting for you to do the
coding, which could
take a long time.
What would you suggest that we non-technical people
do in the meantime?
Erik Möller is working on Wikidata right now, which may be functional before the end of the year. Once this is done hopefully I can put together the beginnings of a prototype.
In the meantime people can help by updating the Meta project pages: [[m:Wikicite]] [[m:WikiTextrose]] . Fleshing out the functionality of the system is particularly important at this stage. Think of how you would use citation data. What would be the best way to visualize/present it? What kind of searches would you like to be able to do with it? Once you have some ideas create mock-ups or rough sketches of them and add those to the project page. People with expertise in library science could also help by creating lists for the sorts of data we should be capturing in the "card catalog" portion of the database. I've been using the "Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records" as a starting point: http://www.oclc.org/research/projects/frbr/ (SJ- can you confirm whether this is an appropriate reference?). If someone could use it to begin to put together the list of attributes we need for the "card catalog" that would be very helpful.
Using the text relationship database, editors can
now
see at a glance what is authoritative within a particular literature. The article renderer now
takes
It is less cut-and-dried than this; one useful
comparative view would
be the authority-ranking of major essays/articles in a
field assuming
School-of-thought A is correct in its assumptions,
and the
authority-tree assuming some rival School B is correct in its
assumptions.
Certainly, though this depends on the field. In mathematics I'd bet there is relatively little contention; in the physical sciences probably more so, and much more so in the social sciences. Hopefully we can come up with formulas sophisticated enough to identify such patterns (maybe including schools of thought). I would like to see a visualization of citation data for someone like Edward Said, for example :)
virtuous circle begins- a citation based upon a
work
of popular history is exchanged for one relying
upon a
more specialized work, which is later exchanged
for a
scholarly monograph or journal article, which in
turn
encourages reference to primary sources, etc. By
this
process Wikipedia becomes not just accurate, but scholarly and state-of-the-knowledge.
By this process, the claims of the popular works are
also being
verified or disproven by Wikipedia authors over time;
hopefully that information
can be passed on to the book editors/publishers --
as they too enter
the digital age.
Right, and not necessarily just popular works if the Wikipedian is armed with strong enough data. I think we would all be proud the day such a feedback loop is introduced.
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