Jakob writes:
there already *are* communities that collect and share bibliographic data
I would be happy if anyone does what I was describing; no point in reinventing what already exists. But I have not found it:
I mean a public collection of citations, with reader-editable commentary and categorization, for published works. Something that Open Library could link to from each of its books, that arXiv.org and PLoS could link to from each of its articles. Something that, for better or worse, Wikipedia articles could link to also, when they are cited as sources.
Jodi Schneider jodi.schneider@deri.org wrote:
I think focusing on Wikimedia's citation needs is the most promising, especially if this is intended to be a WMF project.
Agreed. That is clearly the place to start, as it was with Commons.
And, as with Commons, the project should be free to develop its own scope, and be more than a servant project to the others. That scope may be grand (a collection of all educational freely licensed media; a general collection of citations), but shouldn't keep us from getting started now.
As for mission -- yes -- let's talk about what problem we're trying to solve. Two central ones come to mind:
- Improve verifiability by making it possible to start with a source and
verify all claims made by referencing that source [1] 2. Make it easier for editors to give references, and readers to use them [2]
< others? [3]
3. Enable commenting on sources, to discuss their reliability and notability, in a shared place. (Note the value of having a multilingual discussion here: currently notions of notability and reliability can change a great deal across language barriers)
4. Enable discussing splitting or merging sources, or providing disambiguations when different people are confusingly using a single citation to refer to more than one source.
To figure out what the right problems are, I think it would help to look at the pain points -- and their solutions -- the hacks and proposals related to citations. Hacks include plugins and templates people have made to make MediaWiki more citation-friendly. Proposals include the ones on strategy wiki.
<
Some of the hacks and proposals are listed here: http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Proposals_related_to_citations Could you add other hacks, proposals, and conversations...?
Thanks for that link.
Sam.
[1] This can be done using backlinks. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Greenwood%26Earn...) [2] I think of this as "actionable references" -- we'd have to explain exactly what the desirable qualities are. Adding to bilbiographic managers in one click is one of mine. :) [3] Other side-effects might be helping to identify what's highly cited in Wikipedia (which would be interesting -- and might help prioritize Wikisource additions), automatically adding quotes to Wikiquote, ...