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