On Jan 8, 2005, at 1:22 AM, Karl Eichwalder wrote:
"Caroline Ewen" caroline@web.lu writes:
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 ?
I won't repeat the entirety here, but I will instead summarize merely the obvious reasons.
1. Value of editors time. Just because you aren't paying for it, doesn't mean it is either unlimited in quantity or valueless. 2. Assured canonical format. No mistakes, if the link shows up blue, you got it right. 3. Value of editors time part II: poves have access to precompiled bibliographies, we are asking editors to compete with organizations backed with money. 4. Value gained. It is wikipedians and wikimedia that is leading the drive to compete with other data sources for reputability. It, not the individual editors, gains the advantages, to pass on the costs and take the gains - while moralizing about how lazy and stupid the editors are verges on unethical behavior. 5. Citation resource has a value in and of itself. It allows annotation of sources, trees of editions, cross referencing (what articles link to a particular source) flexible categorization of sources. 6. There are paid versions of such tools, most of which do no more than provide an interface and a database to free information. It is clearly part of wikimedia's mission to provide free and open versions of tools for knowledge work to the public where such exist in proprietary forms.