Jodi Schneider wrote:
Interesting. I'd really like ID's to be not only comprehensible but also to have a fair chance of being directly inputtable by humans.
Usual bibliographic catalogs do not provide a mnemonic key as soon as their size is more then a few hundred entries. There are various IDs like ISBN and OCLC number but there is no large-scale system that has simple identifiers. Why do you want to type in the ID by hand anyway? What is the use-case?
For instance, on Wikipedia, if I know that I am looking for the article on "citation signals" I can type the URL directly, without searching.
In my ideal citation-wiki-in-the-sky, you could get to the citation directly in this way -- and sensible disambiguation pages would be automatically generated.
Why do you want to directly work with fragile identifiers? Every modern web application provides auto-suggest: you type in a keyword, title, author, anything and get a list of publications and a link to create a new one. Then you select a publication from the list and its ID gets copied into your editor (an ideal editor would also send a pingback to the citation database to know where a publication identifier is used). Done.
I also like mnemonic identifiers, they are useful if you have to read, memorize and type in them. But if your workflow is truly digital then their limitation is just a burden. I would value uniqueness and stability much more then readability - and you cannot get both!
Cheers Jakob