Re: [Wiki-research-l] Fwd: Proposal: build a wiki literature review wiki-style (was: Re: Wikipedia literature review - include or exclude conference articles)

I was glad to see this thread on wikiresearch-l as I have been recently discussing a similar proposal with other members of the Wikimedia Research Committee. To make a long story short: I see major problems about *maintaining* a shared reference pool (along with a lit review system) on wiki pages, no matter how standard the format we may come up with to do so. There are excellent free and standards-based services out there designed precisely to allow groups of researchers to collaboratively import, maintain and annotate scholarly references. Zotero is one of them, others are: CiteULike, Bibsonomy, Mendeley, Connotea. My feeling is that the majority of people on this list are already using one of these services to maintain their individual reference library. The reason why these services are superior to a wiki page is that they can both produce human-readable reference lists as well as export references in any possible format one may need for writing (JSON, XML, BibTeX, JabRef etc). They all have provisions for posting reviews, tags, notes etc., aggregate these annotations from several users (unless they are private) and export them. If we were to keep our shared reference pool hosted on any of these services we could still: * embed or republish a list of references elsewhere (e.g. in a wiki) * make sure the list of references in the wiki is kept up-to-date via the external service * allow people to access bibliographic metadata in a format suitable for writing and in an environment they are already familiar with * allow people to write reviews and annotations both on the wiki and via the external service itself If we think there is added value in hosting reviews on a wiki, what needs to be implemented is a connector between MediaWiki and any of these services (they all have open APIs). Such a connector would presumably: * pull bibliographic metadata from the external service * define a unique ID for each publication (based on a DOI when available) * create a wiki page per publication using the unique ID as a title and populating it with the imported metadata * retrieve live user annotations and comments from the external service * allow to host further comments and annotations on the wiki via the article page It would be sad to see a lot of effort put into creating yet another static wiki-based bibliography just to see it become obsolete because no one is actively maintaining it or because the output it produces is in a format that does not allow it to be easily queried, reused or republished. Dario On 18 Mar 2011, at 15:09, Andrea Forte wrote: