Hi Brian and others,
Interesting project. At WikiSym and Wikimania there were some discussions on the issue of bibliographic databases - and more generally about structured data in wikis and I mentioned your project briefly in my talk. Daniel Kinzler (which might be on this mailing list) showed some initial efforts for bibliographic databasing in Wikipedia. He did not reveal much (I don't know if it is appropriate to tell about Daniel's project - but now I have done it anyway...). I have started to build a bibliographic wiki (Brede Wiki) that is entirely separate from Wikimedia. It is available from here:
My Wikimania talk about that wiki and related issues is available here (the video may come later):
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Finn_%C3%85rup_Nielsen_-_Wikipedia_is...
I also think that it would be interesting with some bibliographic support, for two-way citation tracking and commenting on articles (for example), but I furthermore find that particular in science article we often find data that is worth structuring and put in a database or a structured wiki, so that we can extract the data for meta-analysis and specialized information retrieval. That is what I also do in the Brede Wiki. I use the templates to store such data. So if such a system as yours is implemented we should not just think of it as a bibliographic database but in more broader terms: A data wiki.
Yours and my system shares some similarities. Here are some differences:
As the 'key' (the wiki page title) I use the (lowercase) title of the article. That might be more reader friendly - but usually longer. I think that KangHsuKrajbichEtAl09 is too camel-cased. Neither the title nor author list + year will be unique, so we need some predictable disambig.
I have one field to each author so that I can automatically link authors. I use author1, author2, etc. fields. Likewise for URLs: url1, url2, etc. In this way I can also 'database' authors, ie., I have a wiki page for each author (regardless of notability). Also journals and organizations and events are available in my wiki.
I do not include abstracts in my CC-by-sa'ed wiki, since I am not sure how publishers regard the copyright for abstracts. Neither I am sure about the forward cites. Most commerical publishers hide the cites for unpaid viewing. Including cites in CC-by-sa material on a large-scale may infringe publishers' copyright. Perhaps it is possible to negotiate with some publishers. We need some talk with 'closed access' publishers before we add a such data.
I am not sure what 'owner' is in your format. Surely you cant have owners in Wikimedia/MediaWiki wiki? And 'dateadded' would already be recorded in the revision history.
We probably need to check on the final format of the bibliographic template to make sure it is easy translatable to the most common bibliographic formats: bibtex, refman, Z3988 microformat, pubmed, etc.
As I understand there are issue with Semantic MediaWiki with respect to performance and security that needs to be resolved before a large scale deployment within Wikimedia Foundation projects. I heard that Markus Krötzsch is going to Oxford to work on core SMW, so there might come some changes to SMW in the future. Code audit of SMW lacks.
It not 'necessarily necessary' to make a new Wikimedia project. There has been a suggestion (in the meta or strategy wiki) just to use a namespace in Wikipedia. You could then have a page called http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bib:The_wick_in_the_candle_of_learning
I would say that a page called:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_wick_in_the_candle_of_learning
would be the way to do it. But that would never pass the deletionists. :-)
/Finn
On Mon, 19 Jul 2010, Brian J Mingus 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. 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.
The basic idea is a centralized wiki that contains citation information that other MediaWikis and WMF projects can then reference using something like a {{cite}} template or a simple link. The community can document the citation, the author, the book etc.. and, in one idealization, all citations across all wikis would point to the same article on WikiCite. Users can use this wiki as their personal bibliography as well, as collections of citations can be exported in arbitrary citation formats. This general plan would allow community aggregation of metadata and community documentation of sources along arbitrary dimensions (quality, trust, reliability, etc.). The hope is that such a resource would then expand on that wiki and across the projects into summarizations of collections of sources (lit reviews) that make navigating entire fields of literature easier and more reliable, getting you out of the trap of not being aware of the global context that a particular source sits in.
To give all a more concrete view, here is an example from some software that I have implemented in our lab called WikiPapers. Please take note that while this is a scientific literature example, the idea is general to *all publications ever*. Also, while I have implemented a feature-full version of a WikiCite, it's important to point out that for the WMF project we will need a new extension that handles the needs of the project exactly, and in PHP (I use Python :).
The name of the wiki article is a unique key that is a combination of the author names and the year, in the following format: Author1Author2Author3EtAl10b. This works for scientific articles, but we may find we need to modify the key for other kinds of sources. The content of the wiki article is composed of an infobox constructed via the Citation template, and any other text and media the community determines it is useful and legal to include in the article. Example article:
Screenshot of how this infobox renders on our wiki: http://grey.colorado.edu/mediawiki/sites/mingus/images/0/0e/KangHsuKrajbichE...
Title: KangHsuKrajbichEtAl09
{{Citation |publisher=SAGE Publications |dateadded=2010-07-17 |author=Kang M.J. and Hsu M. and Krajbich I.M. and Loewenstein G. and McClure S.M. and Wang J.T. and Camerer C.F. |url=http://pss.sagepub.com/content/20/8/963.full |abstract=Curiosity has been described as a desire for learning and knowledge, but its underlying mechanisms are not well understood. We scanned subjects with functional magnetic resonance imaging while they read trivia questions. The level of curiosity when reading questions was correlated with activity in caudate regions previously suggested to be involved in anticipated reward. This finding led to a behavioral study, which showed that subjects spent more scarce resources (either limited tokens or waiting time) to find out answers when they were more curious. The functional imaging also showed that curiosity increased activity in memory areas when subjects guessed incorrectly, which suggests that curiosity may enhance memory for surprising new information. This prediction about memory enhancement was confirmed in a behavioral study: Higher curiosity in an initial session was correlated with better recall of surprising answers 1 to 2 weeks later. |title=The Wick in the Candle of Learning |bibtex type=article |number=8 |volume=20 |owner=Sethherd |journal=Psychological Science |year=2009 |cites=O'ReillyFrank06,Cowan95,Wise04,Fuster80,Panksepp98,KakadeDayan02b,DelgadoLockeStengerEtAl03,BrewerZhaoDesmondEtAl98,DelgadoNystromFiez00,Beatty82,Baddeley92,Waanabe96,Roland93lm,DelgadoNystromFissellEtAl00,WagnerSchacterRotteEtAl98,SeymourDawDayanEtAl07,ODoherty04,BandettiniMoonen99,ODohertyDayanFristonEtAl03,RogersOwenRobbins99,KnutsonWestdorpKaiserEtAl00,CircuitryMemory,OReillyFrank06,Watanabe96a,BrewerZhaoGabrieli98,WagnerSchacterBuckner98,RogersOwenMiddletonEtAl99,Baddeley86,Watanabe96,Rolls96a,PallerWagner02 |cited_by=Author1Author2Author3EtAl10,etc... |pages=963 }}
Then, any other WMF wiki, or any other MediaWiki, could cite this universal entry by simply typing {{cite|KangHsuKrajbichEtAl09}}
Additionally, if a technology such as Semantic MediaWiki is used (as it is in WikiPapers), arbitrary lists of collections of literature can be generated by constructing simple queries that are boolean combinations of template properties. Given that SMW does not scale well, I have a plan that uses Lucene instead for fast, scalable dynamic generation of collections of citations. Imagine the possibilities..
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?
Brian Mingus Graduate Student Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab University of Colorado at Boulder
On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 11:22 AM, phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.comwrote:
There have been a number of proposals floated in the Wikimedia community over the years to build a wiki-based project for collecting journal citation information. For those interested in that topic, you might want to check out the University of Prince Edward Island's "knowledge for all" project proposal -- it proposes to build an open universal citation index (to serve as an alternative to the many hundreds of proprietary citation index products that libraries currently buy). This of course is not the first attempt at this problem, but it's an interesting proposal that's getting a bit of buzz in the library community. http://library.upei.ca/k4all
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Finn Aarup Nielsen, DTU Informatics, Denmark Lundbeck Foundation Center for Integrated Molecular Brain Imaging http://www.imm.dtu.dk/~fn/ http://nru.dk/staff/fnielsen/ ___________________________________________________________________