[Wikipedia-l] Re: Bibliography

[Stan Shebs]

Caroline Ewen wrote:

>Hi all,
>
>Don't get me wrong but why would there be a need for a tool to create a
>bibliography ? It's all quite simple: Surname, NAME, Title in italic, Edited
>by..., City, Year.
>
>Or did I misunderstand the whole "technology for bibliographical
>records"-thing ?
>
Ah, an innocent wandering into the brambly briers of
bibliography... :-)

Think of different styles (some do first name first), different
names for the same person (middle initial vs spelled-out),
journal articles, book chapters in a multi-author book, translations,
multiple editions with different content, annotated works,
uppercase/lowercase, and so on.

Even though only a minority of our articles have references now,
there is a remarkable randomness among them.  Wouldn't you rather
be able to type in "[[Biblio:Wealth of Nations]]" and have it
expand into a correctly-formatted reference to Adam Smith's book,
mentioning original publication date, ISBN for a good recent
reprint, and URL for an online text at the most reliable website?

Even better, some dedicated bibtexers and others have built
giant bibliographies online, and we would like to just reuse
them instead of typing all in ourselves.

Stan