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(a)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:
1. 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%26Ear… )
[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, ...
--
Samuel Klein identi.ca:sj w:user:sj