I've been designing something similar off-and-on, but waffled on whether it should be a separate project. I was thinking of making special pages in their own namespace, a la image files, which would allow for better integration with articles, categorization, backrefs ("who references this work?"), plus links to authors, publishers, and an article on the work itself, since a number of significant sources have articles in their own right.
As well as authors. My concern is that as wikipedia articles the level of source protection is no higher than in a regular wikipedia article, where as for citations, much of the information comes from an outside source, and like the digits of pi, isn't really improved upon by editting unsecurely.
In theory bibliography could go into commons, since most biblio info is language-independent, and quite a few articles already list foreign-language works in their references.
Good idea, I like it.
If WP is supposed to be a compendium of the world's knowledge, then it seems reasonable to expect that every published book and article will be cited somewhere eventually, which is a lot to manage. To look at it another way, if a half-million WP articles do nothing more than make two citations apiece, that's a million-entry bibliography to manage; we need support infrastructure equal to the task.
Stan
Agreed, this is not a small project, but it is smaller than taking a half million articles, each with a bibliography of 2 to 20 sources, and unifying it later by hand. The sooner people have the tools, the faster the project of upgrading the scholarly apparatus will be.