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 __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

WiktionaryZ currently supports multilingual free-text attributes and will support other data type attributes in the future. The data you can associate with a WiktionaryZ entitity will likely depend on what class that entity belongs to. For instance, if an entity is of type person, you could associate a birthdate, death date, place of birth, place of death, first name/last name (though that might be handled on another level), etc. If the entity belongs to the class "publication", you could associate references to specific edition; if it belongs to class "author", you could associate publications, and so on. In this generic model, a reference is just one instance of an entity whose associated data you might want to display in a Wikipedia article. So we would probably come up with a special type of template that can fetch data from WiktionaryZ and insert it into a page layout. Then you could, for instance, use <<person:Jimmy Wales>> to display the person data about Jimbo, or <<country:Germany>> to make a nice country infobox. Then again, you could also do <<ref:The Origin of Species|author=Charles Darwin|class=book>> to show _any_ book edition of Darwin's work, or <<ref:The Origin of Species|ISBN=whatever>> to cite a specific edition. If the title is not ambiguous, you might even only have to do something like <<ref:The Cosmic and the Comic: Einstein's Scientific Spirituality>> and all the properties would be derived automatically from that. In fact, the WiktionaryZ model very much matches the work/expression distinction, though we use the terminology the other way around: an expression refers to _any_ possible meaning of a string of characters, whereas each meaning ("work" in this context) has its own defined meaning ID and can also be disambiguated by its relations and other associated data (for publications: author, year, various codes, etc.). One advantage, in my view, is that we do not require people to pass around codes and numbers unless they really need to and want to, and even then, we retain the expression (work title) in the wiki source text, making it easy to see what a particular reference is about. Erik _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

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.