Shaun MacPherson wrote:
--- Stirling Newberry
References and a reference engine would be a tremendous help, both for readability, and for writing. I would like to suggest a project: wikicite which would list all available books and create a simple tag mechanism for citing them.
Thus something like {{wikicite:Wealth of Nations}} would expand out to a canonical Smith, Adam etc.
Wikicite is a very good idea. Especially so since I believe the time will come when people will disagree what constitutes a good reference, people disagreeing on the reference formatting, trouuble in keeping track of the different editions and page numbers for a quotation, or different printing runs for books.
The fundamental idea is solid, but there should be no need for a separate project. It is really just a matter of good research practice. Defining a "good" reference is not always a productive exercise. We can end up with NPOV disputes and edit wars just as much over the validity of references as over content.
As well, if we are citing a public domain work there is no reason why the cite cannot bring us to the actual document and quotation on wikisource or wikicommons.
Ideally yes, but we have a long way to go before we get there. Importing material from Project Gutenberg may be easy enough, but what needs to be done is a mass digitization and OCR proofreading of a huge body of works. That's a _lot_ of tedious work. After a little more the year Wikisource is still working out a lot of its fundamental procedures, but what you propose is certainly consistent with the long-term vision that I have had of Wikisource since the day it started.
Getting journal articles would be next, and harder, but could be worked out over time. This would make entering sources and bibliography easy, standardised, and current. It would also keep the burden of generating citation lists down, and would be a generally useful resource everywhere.
At the risk of stating the obvious, journal articles are shorter than books. One Wikisource contributor has recently begun work on a 1917 National Geographic issue. That should be an opportunity for getting some of the bugs out of that approach, and developping standards for the way we enter journal articles. Some journal articles may be more important than others to include. but the simple fact that they are each individually shorter may be an encouragement.
Wikicite might be able to keep track of all things published. It would also be useful to keep track of books and their printing date to know when things enter the public domain to know when to put them on Wikisource/Wikicommons.
There is already a considerable overlap between Wikisource and Wikipedia over the matter of bibliography. For now I see it as fair game for both. I believe that Wikisource should be carrying the fundamental information that helps in determining the copyright status, but that's only going to be there if people put it there. Whatever one might think of long copyright terms it is still much easier to calculate expiry based on the year of death than on the year of publication. It's going to be another 40 years before that becomes the norm for US publications.. For them we still need to consider such issues as copyright renewals. A 1923 US publication whose copyright was not properly renewed in 1951 is now in the public domain. There is no need for a new wedge project somewhere between Wikisource and Wikipedia.
Ec