On Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 11:56 AM, Jodi Schneider <jodi.schneider(a)deri.org>wrote;wrote: The key seems to be a very important point, so it's important that we get it right. My thinking is guided by several constraints. First, I strongly dislike the numeric keys used at sites such as CiteULike and most database sites (such as 7523225). To the greatest degree possible I believe the key should actually convey what is behind the link. On the other hand, the key should not be too long. Numeric keys maximize the shortness while telling you nothing , whereas titles as keys are very long and don't give you some of the most important information - the authors and the year it was published. The key format I have suggested does seem to have a flaw, being that it easily becomes ambiguous and you must resort to a token that is not easily memorable. Then again, even though many authors and sets of authors will publish multiple items in a year, the vast majority of works have a unique set of authors for a given year. I like your suggestion that the abc disambiguator be chosen based on the first date of publication, and I also like the prospect of using slashes since they can't be contained in names. Using the full year is a good idea too. We can combine these to come up with a key that, in principle, is guaranteed to be unique. This key would contain: 1) The first three author names separated by slashes 2) If there are more than three authors, an EtAl 3) Some or all of the date. For instance, if there is only one source by this set of authors that year, we can just use YYYY. However, once another source by those set of authors is added, the key should change to MMDDYYYY or similar. If there are multiple publications on the same day, we can resort to abc. Redirects and disambiguation pages can be set up when a key changes. Since the slashes are somewhat cumbersome, perhaps we can not make them mandatory, but similarly use them only when they are necessary in order to "escape" a name. In the case that one of the authors does not have a slash in their name - the dominant case - we can stick to the easily legible and niecly compact CamelCase format. Example keys generated by this algorithm: KangHsuKrajbichEtAl2009 Author1Author2/Author-Three/2009 Author1Author2AuthorThree10032009 Author1Author2AuthorThree12312009 LibraryThing is a great example of how to do disambiguation. We can only hope that we can likewise someday have a user community as pedantic and dedicated as theirs ;-) A big part of their success is in providing their users with straightforward tools for doing the disambig work. It was probably a mistake for me to describe WikiPapers as designed around BibTeX. In fact, it's designed around mediawiki templates. From templates as your start, you can support any other format for both import and export.