David wrote:
There's a difference between a project to centralize the various references in Wikipedia, and an attempt to build a universal bibliographic database. The first is a reasonable project, though I think everyone involved has underestimated the extent to which normalization and manual aggregation will be needed.
Well said. Reminds me on Erik Möllers Wikimania talk about Free Knowledge projects beyond the Encyclopedia: You need a clearly articulated mission. There already are many projects to create a universal bibliographic database (Worldcat, The Open Library, LibraryThing etc.) and all either failed or have a specific scope. A wiki-based bibliographic database for sources in Wikimedia projects ("citations version of Commons") is a reasonable scope, I think. "Lets just collect all bibliographic data we can get onto a gigantic pile of data" is not. Let's better focus on real use cases, such as citations in Wikimedia projects.
SJ wrote:
I like the French model of using "Article name (Authors)" as a key. Perhaps with "Article name (Authors, Year)" if needed to disambiguate. This shares a design principle with the move away from CamelCase to freeform article titles: one should be able to insert an article name into a natural sentence, and link the appropriate section of the sentence, and have it take you to the appropriate article.
With free form titles there will be no general 100% schema (there are always exceptions) but a general rule to start with is needed. There at least 32 ways to combine only title and authors: which to put first, which character to separate author names, order of names and name-parts, ways abbreviate etc. - and this are only the possibilities if its a simple English title with English author names!
If you are looking for a method to define one schema please have a loot at the Citation Style Language and use or define a citation style in CSL so users of Zotero, Mendeley and other bibliographic software can automatically create a key from given bibliographic data.
To DGG's question: in the long run, the scope of "all cited works" can be captured in such a project, at least for the works cited on a wiki Project -- anyone making a new citation would either find it already in the project or would add it. Whether this covers all works cited by active academics of scholars depends on how effectively we draw them into our community and help them see where an extra minute of work on their part will help thousands of their readers, reviewers, and reusers.
Again: there already *are* communities that collect and share bibliographic data - why should they move to a new project with unclear mission and unusable software (we need much more then Liquid Threads) that was never created for this task? Everyone talking about a Wikimedia project with bibliographic data should *at least* have a look at Zotero, CSL, The Open Library, and LibraryThing first and make clear then what a new project should copy from this existing projects and what should be done differently. Please do not reinvent a wheel that nobody beside some Wikimediacs want.
Don't get me wrong: I also want such a free bibliographic wiki database. But to attract more then a little fraction of the declining number of Wikipedia authors we need a clear mission and usable software for this task - I seen neither the one nor the other.
Jakob