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

[Neil Harris]

On 21/07/10 22:38, Nikola Smolenski wrote:
> Дана Monday 19 July 2010 22:20:15 Brian J Mingus написа:
>    
>> Feel free to provide your feedback on this idea, in addition to your own
>> ideas, in this thread, or to me personally. I am especially interested in
>> the potential benefits to the WMF projects that you see, and to hear your
>> thoughts on the potential of this project on its own, as that will feature
>> prominently in the proposal. Additionally, what do you think WikiCite would
>> eventually be like, once it is fully matured?
>>      
> I was thinking about this too. Main advantages that I see are that citations
> will become easier to use for editors while more informative for readers. Too
> often I just link to something instead of properly filling a cite template
> because it's just too bothersome. For example, instead of this crud:
>
> {{cite book|author=Š. Kulišić |coauthors=P. Ž. Petrović, N. Pantelić |
> title=Српски митолошки речник |origyear=1970 |publisher=[[Nolit]] |
> location=Belgrade |language=Serbian |pages=161 |chapter=Јерисавља}}
>
> we would have just:
>
> {{cite|work=Српски митолошки речник |pages=161 |chapter=Јерисавља}}
>    

Since there might be more than one edition of the same book, you'd still 
have to do a unique identifier, and expanding the cite into the text of 
the article is still a good idea. I would suggest making the system work 
like the current {{cite pmid}}, {{cite isbn}} and {{cite medline}} 
templates, where you'd add (say)

{{cite citeid|345343095}}

to the article, and a bot would come round to the article and replace 
this with:

{{cite book|author=Š. Kulišić |coauthors=P. Ž. Petrović, N. Pantelić |
title=Српски митолошки речник |origyear=1970 |publisher=[[Nolit]] |
location=Belgrade |language=Serbian |pages=161 |chapter=Јерисавља|citeid=345343095}}

Doing this would combine the advantages of a central database, which has great advantages for providing authoritative centralized data, with the redundant copying of the same information into the article, which has great advantages for archival purposes, so that, were the central database ever to be lost, or access to be unavailable, the information would remain accessible in the article text itself.

By retaining the link in the expanded template, corrections and improvements to data in the authoritative database could then, as necessary, be propagated into articles using a bot. However, if bad data is ever uploaded into the database, the full expansion of the cite would still be available in the article history, again aiding archival access, and protecting against data corruption.

-- Neil