Hoi, There are several projects that want to achieve similar aims. Wikiauthors, Wikicat are two of them. The initial approach of these two is different; one starts of with scientific publications and wants to start with disambiguation of authors the other wants to start with bibliographic information from the position of librarians. The cool thing is, that the people representing these two approaches are talking and, that it is feasible to merge many if not all of the ideas for both projects. Both projects have people behind them to make this work, combined the result will provide us with a central bibliography that is based on Wikidata functionality.
There are two things to understand; first the database should be usable for all projects and it needs to be usable in many languages and second after having set up such a project it still needs integration in the Wikipedia and other projects.
Thanks, GerardM
Bogdan Giusca wrote:
I think Wikipedia really needs a central bibliography, because there are many books who are used in more than one article, some in dozens or even more.
Currently, a book reference is done this way:
<ref>[[Istvan Vasary]] (2005) ''Cumans and Tatars'', [[Cambridge University Press]]. ISBN 123546958695, page 22</ref>
with a central bibliography, it would be like this;
<book n="Cumans and Tatars" p="22"/>
and the book database would fill in the details in the page displayed to the viewer.
I suggest that we use the name instead of the ISBN, because it can be seen more clearly in the text, when reading the wiki-text. Also, there are many books (especially older books, but not only), which have no ISBN number and some which have many different editions with different ISBNs.
There is still the problem with two books with the same title, in which case we need to add the author, too, for disambiguation, but I think this problem is less on the kind of books we use for reference. Shorter titles are used especially for fiction.
There could be some benefits for having a central bibliography, other than not having to copy-paste the publishing house/ISBN, like knowing which articles refer to a certain book.
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