Stirling Newberry wrote:
ISBNs are of limited value since they were only adopted in 1970. Most of that material is still copyright protected. The public domain material on Wikisource is much older than that, and has no ISBNs.
Ec
Once ISBN is implemented we can expand to LCCN, which is everything copyright in the US library of Congress, and is not a copyright system. From this other call numbers, provided they can be referenced in the public domain, will be possible. ISBN's are not of "limited" value, since anything which has had an edition since then has one. This includes many texts which were produced prior to 1970, and virtually all of the commonly cited material on wikipedia. Since the proposed format allows for different types of identifiers, it will be a simple matter to add additional identifiers by which material may be cited.
Call numbers serve a different purpose at LOC than LCCNs. Saying that "anything which has had an edition since then has one" is not accurate. It's that later edition that has one; the earlier edition still does not. Thus in the Wikipedia [[BibTeX]] article, the example given for the Abramovitz and Stegun volume as published by Dover. That is not a 1964 publication as the article would suggest. My personal copy of the work is the March 1965 third printing, with corrections produced by the US Dept. of Commerce, and has no ISBN. It would be inappropriate to stick Dover's ISBN on that.
No-one is suggesting that ISBN is a copyright system. The extent to which ISBNs are commonly used will very much depend on the subject matter. The use is bound to be strong in most of the sciences, but in literature and history much of the references can be very old.
While I'm certainly not opposing the Wikicite project, my concern remains with Wikisource, and how the system as ultimately adopted will fit in with that project. I have raised the issue of citing sources on both Wikisource and Wiktionary. Still, my experience suggests to me that a significant fraction of our contributors have a great deal of difficulty in grasping the concept or its importance.
Ec