On Feb 10, 2005, at 6:17 AM, Ray Saintonge wrote:
Call numbers serve a different purpose at LOC than LCCNs. Saying that "anything which has had an edition since then has one" is not accurate. It's that later edition that has one; the earlier edition still does not. Thus in the Wikipedia [[BibTeX]] article, the example given for the Abramovitz and Stegun volume as published by Dover. That is not a 1964 publication as the article would suggest. My personal copy of the work is the March 1965 third printing, with corrections produced by the US Dept. of Commerce, and has no ISBN. It would be inappropriate to stick Dover's ISBN on that.
First off: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikicite_feature_requests
But I will reply to the categorical assertion of coverage, which is overly broad. It is only inappropriate to cite a later version of the work in the references when there is a difference between the editions, and that difference is important to the article. This isn't to minimize the point, because while it is a small number of cases, those cases are important: namely cases where a point is specifically quoted or paraphrased.
As for the difference purpose at the Library of Congress, what is important is that any particular identifier locate one particular edition, which is is assured of doing, having many numerical identifiers for the same work isn't a problem.
No-one is suggesting that ISBN is a copyright system. The extent to which ISBNs are commonly used will very much depend on the subject matter. The use is bound to be strong in most of the sciences, but in literature and history much of the references can be very old.
But other call number systems are under copyright, for example the primary legal citation system in the US is copyright.
While I'm certainly not opposing the Wikicite project, my concern remains with Wikisource, and how the system as ultimately adopted will fit in with that project. I have raised the issue of citing sources on both Wikisource and Wiktionary. Still, my experience suggests to me that a significant fraction of our contributors have a great deal of difficulty in grasping the concept or its importance.
Ec
Wikicite is a middle layer between sources and articles. The reasons for having this middle layer are many fold. First, it reduces the work of generating references. Second, it opens those references to the wiki process of credibility. Third is that it will connect citations to the source. If that source exists in wikisource, then the card should have a pointer to that wikisource object, so that the reader can easily call up that object, as you will note http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia: Wikicite_project_purpose#Expansion the expansion macro should expressly create a link to the wikisource object if one has been recorded on the Wikicite card.
In fact, one of the seeds for wikicite should be the wikisource database.