Stirling Newberry wrote:
The fundamental idea is solid, but there should be no need for a separate project. It is really just a matter of good research practice. Defining a "good" reference is not always a productive exercise. We can end up with NPOV disputes and edit wars just as much over the validity of references as over content.
It should be a separate project, it has its own technical challenges and it is clearly a separate database, since its content is more restricted, and its format different. More over, there is a need for lineages of sources in a way which there is not among wikipedia articles. It might well be piggybacked on wikisource - but the concerns are different. The major technical challenge for wikicite would be creating cards, creating descent for editions of the same book, and for then annotating those cards. As for administrative divisions, that I am not clear on the relative merits of creating a separate people structure for it, so will defer to others who know more than I, which on this point is almost everyone.
It would be integrated in with wiktionary, wikipedia, wikiquote and wikisource - each one having citation needs - and therefore a community of users who would want to have access to a catalog, and to annotate the reliability of sources in it.
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.
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.
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