On 9/3/06, Bogdan Giusca liste@dapyx.com 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.
There's a well thought-out proposal for this already: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikicat
There's also a related discussion: http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-July/008724.html (and responses)
The most realistic way this project may happen in the near future is through the related WikiAuthors project that has been promoted by Miguel Andrade and others: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiAuthors
I discussed WikiAuthors with a group of scientists at a workshop in Bloomington a few days ago: http://vw.indiana.edu/places&spaces/meeting_060830.php
There was very broad support for the idea of a central wiki for the purpose of author disambiguation, as many existing databases do not assign unique IDs per author. It is likely that funding for this will come through in the coming months, which may also facilitate some of the broader ideas described in the Wikicat proposal linked to above.
The general technology for building wiki-based ontology repositories is part of the WiktionaryZ project and under heavy development: http://wiktionaryz.org/
Let me know if you have further questions, or want to be actively involved in this project.