Shaun McPherson wrote:
--- Stirling Newberry stirling.newberry@xigenics.net wrote:
References and a reference engine would be a tremendous help, both for readability, and for writing. I would like to suggest a project: wikicite which would list all available books and create a simple tag mechanism for citing them.
Thus something like {{wikicite:Wealth of Nations}} would expand out to a canonical Smith, Adam etc.
Wikicite is a very good idea. Especially so since I believe the time will come when people will disagree what constitutes a good reference, people disagreeing on the reference formatting, trouuble in keeping track of the different editions and page numbers for a quotation, or different printing runs for books.
As well, if we are citing a public domain work there is no reason why the cite cannot bring us to the actual document and quotation on wikisource or wikicommons.
Getting journal articles would be next, and harder, but could be worked out over time. This would make entering sources and bibliography easy, standardised, and current. It would also keep the burden of generating citation lists down, and would be a generally useful resource everywhere.
Wikicite might be able to keep track of all things published. It would also be useful to keep track of books and their printing date to know when things enter the public domain to know when to put them on Wikisource/Wikicommons.
I don't mean to steal your idea, I just agree with it a lot and added some suggestions :). If you are around you can mention Wikicite at (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Fact_and_Reference_C...) the talk page here, I think many people would be interested.
Bye,
ShaunMacPherson
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I completely agree. Wikicite is an excellent idea. -- Josh Gerdes (en:User:JoshG)