[Foundation-l] [Wiki-research-l] WikiCite - new WMF project? Was: UPEI's proposal for a "universal citation index"

[Brian J Mingus]

On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 8:08 PM, Rob Lanphier <robla at robla.net> wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 1:20 PM, Brian J Mingus
> <Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu> wrote:
> > I have been working with Sam and others for some time now on
> brainstorming a
> > proposal for the Foundation to create a centralized wiki of citations, a
> > WikiCite so to speak, if that is not the eventual name. My plan is to
> > continue to discuss with folks who are knowledgeable and interested in
> such
> > a project and to have the feedback I receive go into the proposal which I
> > hope to write this summer.
>
> This sounds great.  Just speaking as a community member, I've been
> thinking about this topic a long time myself, and have plenty to add
> to the conversation.
>
> > The proposal white paper will then be sent around
> > to interested parties for corrections and feedback, including on-wiki and
> > mailing lists, before eventually landing at the Foundation officially. As
> we
> > know WMF has not started a new project in some years, so there is no
> > official process. Thus I find it important to get it right.
>
> I'd suggest finding an on-wiki spot to discuss this work.  Here's one
> place this has been discussed in the past that may be a good place to
> revive the conversation:
>
> http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Building_a_database_of_all_books_ever_published
>
> Rather than commenting on list about the subject itself, I've
> commented on the discussion page there:
>
> http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal_talk:Building_a_database_of_all_books_ever_published#Fact_database_6531
>
> Rob
>

Rob,

Thanks for bringing my attention to this proposal. It certainly has some of
the same ring as this project, with of course some important differences.
Commonalities between the projects are that they are multilingual and
require a powerful search engine. Differences are that this project is for
all literary sources and that I believe it is best suited at the WMF. The
widespread use of citations across the Wikipedias will drive user
contributions towards adding richer metadata to those citations. And having
a source of citations available will increase the quality of the Wikipedias
as it becomes easier and easier to cite sources.

Brian