Two things: 1. "different styles": I did realise that this depends a LOT on the country. Of course there's a slight change when you have an article of a newspaper than when you're citing a book. And I do agree that it would be simple just typing "[[Biblio:Wealth of Nations]]". The thing with the different styles is, how to you get them all under one style ? I do study in France actually, and I noticed that some of the german Erasmus-students I met here looked at my bibliography once and where astonished by the way it was written. I told them that that's just the french style of writing it. They do have some minor differences when writing theirs. As for the multiple editions: in France, you tend to state the most recent edition (because revised, mistakes have been corrected etc). Do you want to "impose" one style for all ? :-)
2. "just reuse them instead of typing all in ourselves": I do object to that. I don't know about other Wikipedians but when I write articles, I usually have some of my books on my desk, I don't know all that stuff by heart (would be nice though :-) ) And I NEVER put any books in my own bibliography I haven't used. The reason is simple: by only adding the books I used, because I know what's IN the books. I could easily say "oh the english Wiki has some more books than we do, let's just add them too". Not saying that the books in the english wiki article aren't good, but how can I know ? I haven't read them, maybe never heard of them. You could say that maybe I WILL know them since they're stated there and out of curiosity, if I'm interested in the subject of the article, I will look into them, but I still dislike the fact to simply use what's there :-)
Caroline, the innocent :-)
-----Message d'origine----- De : wikipedia-l-bounces@Wikimedia.org [mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces@Wikimedia.org] De la part de Stan Shebs Envoyé : vendredi 7 janvier 2005 01:19 À : wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org Objet : Re: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Bibliography
Caroline Ewen wrote:
Hi all,
Don't get me wrong but why would there be a need for a tool to create a bibliography ? It's all quite simple: Surname, NAME, Title in italic, Edited by..., City, Year.
Or did I misunderstand the whole "technology for bibliographical records"-thing ?
Ah, an innocent wandering into the brambly briers of bibliography... :-)
Think of different styles (some do first name first), different names for the same person (middle initial vs spelled-out), journal articles, book chapters in a multi-author book, translations, multiple editions with different content, annotated works, uppercase/lowercase, and so on.
Even though only a minority of our articles have references now, there is a remarkable randomness among them. Wouldn't you rather be able to type in "[[Biblio:Wealth of Nations]]" and have it expand into a correctly-formatted reference to Adam Smith's book, mentioning original publication date, ISBN for a good recent reprint, and URL for an online text at the most reliable website?
Even better, some dedicated bibtexers and others have built giant bibliographies online, and we would like to just reuse them instead of typing all in ourselves.
Stan
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