Ray Saintonge wrote:

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.

Absolutely. The catalog that is the subject of this project proposal is distinct, though obviously quite-interrelated with, the issue of citation. Whatever will be of most convenience to actual editors should be supported, though I suspect that ambiguous citation styles where the user must take an extra step to disambiguate the work/edition he actually meant will not be all that popular in practice, in addition to being more involved to implement within the software. But again, we should support whatever is most useful to users.

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.

Yes, all these types of items will eventually be supported by the catalog. But this will not be possible during the bootstrap/read-only phase of the catalog, where the only data within it will be imported from other catalogs like the Library of Congress. Not only do certain technical pre-reqs need to be met before Wikicat is made world editable (i.e. the compeletion of Wikidata), but, as Lars pointed out, soft pre-reqs need to be met as well, particularly the creation of cataloging standards and some sort of training/orientation regime for new editors.

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