[Foundation-l] Project Proposal: Wikicat

[Jonathan Leybovich]

Ray Saintonge wrote:
> Citations and verifiability are absolutely essential
to the credibility 
> of Wikipedia and its sister projects.  Nevertheless,
a person 
> undertaking to substantiate his contributions should
not need a 
> professional librarianship background to do so.  Any
manner of clearly 
> identifying the source should be acceptable.

Absolutely.  The catalog that is the subject of this
project proposal is distinct, though obviously
quite-interrelated with, the issue of citation. 
Whatever will be of most convenience to actual editors
should be supported, though I suspect that ambiguous
citation styles where the user must take an extra step
to disambiguate the work/edition he actually meant
will not be all that popular in practice, in addition
to being more involved to implement within the
software.  But again, we should support whatever is
most useful to users.

> There is also a need to begin referencing the
material that is 
> relatively easy to access on line or in other
relatively inexpensive 
> sources of public domain material, like CDs sold for
$5.00 each that can 
> each easily contain 100 books or more.  In the last
few years this 
> material has been produced at a phenomenal rate. 
These are available in 
> image, ASCII plain Jane or more scholarly
annotatable formats.  We could 
> begin by including our own Wikisource material in
the catalogue.

Yes, all these types of items will eventually be
supported by the catalog.  But this will not be
possible during  the bootstrap/read-only phase of the
catalog, where the only data within it will be
imported from other catalogs like the Library of
Congress.  Not only do certain technical pre-reqs need
to be met before Wikicat is made world editable (i.e.
the compeletion of Wikidata), but, as Lars pointed
out, soft pre-reqs need to be met as well,
particularly the creation of cataloging standards and
some sort of training/orientation regime for new editors.

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