[Wikipedia-l] Re: bibliography

Fri Jan 7 09:37:52 UTC 2005

For a babe in the woods, Caroline makes a lot of sense.   A huge percentage of articles currently lack references, and we're worried about whether someone leaves out the middle name on an otherwise reasonable reference?   The chances of ambiguities arising are one in a million.  Referencing is the preferred practice, and whether it is done has less to do with the availability of a bells-and-whistles add-on, and more to do with the character of the scribe.
This mother-of-all-bibliographies might have Adam Smith, but will it have Giuseppe Pitre or Santi Correnti or the Funk and Wagnalls Encyclopedia or the New Junior Encyclopedia (which is now extremely old) or the Hansard?  
Salutamu
pippu d'angelo, canberra

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Today's Topics:

1. RE: Re: Bibliography (Caroline Ewen)
2. Re: Choosing interface? (Mark Williamson)
3. Re: A Solution to Larry Sanger's Criticisms - Project Has
Been Around For A While (Stirling Newberry)
4. Re: A Solution to Larry Sanger's Criticisms - Project Has
Been Around For A While (Sean Barrett)
5. Re: Re: Bibliography (Stan Shebs)
6. RE: Re: Bibliography (Caroline Ewen)
7. Re: A Solution to Larry Sanger's Criticisms - Project Has
Been Around For A While (Stirling Newberry)
8. Re: A Solution to Larry Sanger's Criticisms - Project Has
Been Around For A While (Bryan Derksen)
9. A portal page for www.wikipedia.org (was Re: Why
www.wikipedia.org => en.wikipedia.org ?) (Anthere)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2005 00:54:38 +0100
From: "Caroline Ewen" 
Subject: RE: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Bibliography
To: 
Message-ID: <200501062354.AAA23339 at germaine.webtechnologies.lu>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

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 ?

Cheers from LB

Caroline aka Briséis.

-----Message d'origine-----
De : wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org] De la part de Joseph Reagle
Envoyé : jeudi 6 janvier 2005 23:34
À : Karl Eichwalder
Cc : wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
Objet : Re: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Bibliography

On Thursday 06 January 2005 14:46, Karl Eichwalder wrote:
> Make sure to use proper technology for bibliographical records; 
> http://www.indexdata.dk offers good tools under GPL or other free 
> licenses. For storage id-zebra (zebra) and for retrival over Z39.50 
> the YAZ toolkit is available.

A bibtex format would be nice too...

-- 
Regards, http://www.mit.edu/~reagle/
Joseph Reagle E0 D5 B2 05 B6 12 DA 65 BE 4D E3 C1 6A 66 25 4E
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------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2005 16:56:55 -0700
From: Mark Williamson 
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Choosing interface?
To: wikipedia-l at wikimedia.org
Message-ID: <849f98ed050106155666fb1597 at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII

Of its own interface, yes, that would be a nightmare.

The issue with LanguageXX.php is this: two ways to translate the
interface exist (in practice). With one, translations are activated on
that Wikipedia as soon as they are submitted (Mediawiki namespace).
With the other, a developer has to be asked to activate it,
adjustments are more difficult to make, and activation is entirely at
the developer's leisure.

Many more recent translations have been exclusively namespace because
people didn't forsee the problems that might be caused by not using
LanguageXX.php.

It's fairly simple to export the MediaWiki namespace translations into
a LanguageXX.php file, and a bot could probably be made for it, but
even then it would probably be a while before anybody activated them.
(I can't do that because my programming skills are limited to qbasic,
html, and unl)

Mark

On Thu, 6 Jan 2005 17:55:08 +0000, Rowan Collins
wrote:
> On Wed, 5 Jan 2005 18:43:29 -0700, Mark Williamson wrote:
> > Nope, you can choose an interface language now.
> >
> > Unfortunately for many Wikipedias, this uses the LanguageXX.php file
> > and NOT whatever might be in the mediawiki namespace on that Wikipedia
> > - thus you can't view the interface in Kannada, or Navajo, or etc...
> 
> For obvious reasons, it would be a bit of a nightmare if every wiki
> could include a seperate customised version of its interface in every
> language; and the different wikipedias will customise things in ways
> dependent on their *community*, not just the language.
> 
> Presumably (I hope I'm not reopening a can of worms here) the
> languages you mention can become available to whoever wants them as
> soon as somebody creates an appropriate LanguageXX.php, so it's not so
> much a problem of how the interface selection works, as the status of
> those translations.
> 
> --
> Rowan Collins BSc
> [IMSoP]
>

------------------------------

Message: 3
Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2005 19:03:23 -0500
From: Stirling Newberry 
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] A Solution to Larry Sanger's Criticisms -
Project Has Been Around For A While
To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
Message-ID: <8C213924-603F-11D9-93D0-000A95A26E0A at xigenics.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed

On Jan 6, 2005, at 5:16 PM, NSK wrote:

> On Thursday 06 January 2005 21:03, Stirling Newberry wrote:
>> Most academics are poves, that is why they became academics in the
>> first place.
>
> Anti-Intellectualism at its best.
>

Nonsense, anti-academicism yes, but to say that academia is 
intellectual is to defy its own admission that the set of professors 
and the set of dullards have a far from null intersection.

You are engaging in appeal to authority, which has been a logical 
fallacy for quite a little while.

------------------------------

Message: 4
Date: Thu, 06 Jan 2005 16:15:59 -0800
From: Sean Barrett 
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] A Solution to Larry Sanger's Criticisms -
Project Has Been Around For A While
To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
Message-ID: <41DDD4BF.5080309 at epoptic.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed

NSK stated for the record:

> I once saw a professor visiting a Wikipedia article on maths found from a 
> Google search, but he abandoned it just after a few seconds. Another 
> professor has advised us never to cite material not hosted on .edu or .ac.uk 
> or other educational domains.
> 
> If Wikipedia does not change its attitudes, it will eventually die from brain 
> drain: New, more expertise-friendly and intellectual wikis will emerge and 
> WP's knowledgeable users will just immigrate there.

For someone so contemptuous of Wikipedia, you sure do like our mailing 
list a lot.

-- 
Sean Barrett | What was the best thing before sliced bread?
sean at epoptic.com |

------------------------------

Message: 5
Date: Thu, 06 Jan 2005 16:19:12 -0800
From: Stan Shebs 
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Bibliography
To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
Message-ID: <41DDD580.3070302 at apple.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

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

------------------------------

Message: 6
Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2005 01:35:43 +0100
From: "Caroline Ewen" 
Subject: RE: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Bibliography
To: 
Message-ID: <200501070035.BAA00638 at germaine.webtechnologies.lu>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

Two things: 
1. "different styles": I did realise that this depends a LOT on the country.
Of course there's a slight change when you have an article of a newspaper
than when you're citing a book. And I do agree that it would be simple just
typing "[[Biblio:Wealth of Nations]]". The thing with the different styles
is, how to you get them all under one style ? I do study in France actually,
and I noticed that some of the german Erasmus-students I met here looked at
my bibliography once and where astonished by the way it was written. I told
them that that's just the french style of writing it. They do have some
minor differences when writing theirs. As for the multiple editions: in
France, you tend to state the most recent edition (because revised, mistakes
have been corrected etc). Do you want to "impose" one style for all ? :-)

2. "just reuse them instead of typing all in ourselves": I do object to
that. I don't know about other Wikipedians but when I write articles, I
usually have some of my books on my desk, I don't know all that stuff by
heart (would be nice though :-) ) And I NEVER put any books in my own
bibliography I haven't used. The reason is simple: by only adding the books
I used, because I know what's IN the books. I could easily say "oh the
english Wiki has some more books than we do, let's just add them too". Not
saying that the books in the english wiki article aren't good, but how can I
know ? I haven't read them, maybe never heard of them. You could say that
maybe I WILL know them since they're stated there and out of curiosity, if
I'm interested in the subject of the article, I will look into them, but I
still dislike the fact to simply use what's there :-)

Caroline, the innocent :-)

-----Message d'origine-----
De : wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org] De la part de Stan Shebs
Envoyé : vendredi 7 janvier 2005 01:19
À : wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
Objet : Re: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Bibliography

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

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Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

------------------------------

Message: 7
Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2005 19:40:55 -0500
From: Stirling Newberry 
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] A Solution to Larry Sanger's Criticisms -
Project Has Been Around For A While
To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
Message-ID: 
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed

On Jan 6, 2005, at 7:15 PM, Sean Barrett wrote:

> NSK stated for the record:
>
>> I once saw a professor visiting a Wikipedia article on maths found 
>> from a Google search, but he abandoned it just after a few seconds.

Some sections of wikipedia are a horror, and the only way to fix that 
is to contribute. It was the state of the economics section which 
finally got me to contribute. Particularly the lack of a good 
explanation of the IS-LM model.

>> Another professor has advised us never to cite material not hosted on 
>> .edu or .ac.uk or other educational domains.

I think the New York Times has engaged in some poor reporting, but to 
catagorically deny citing them seems, extreme.

>> If Wikipedia does not change its attitudes, it will eventually die 
>> from brain drain: New, more expertise-friendly and intellectual wikis 
>> will emerge and WP's knowledgeable users will just immigrate there.
>>

First you accuse me of anti-intellectualism for saying that academics 
are poves, and then you prove my point.

Thank you I could not have done a better job.

But to get back to seriousness: Wikipedia does need to get more 
friendly to a higher level of information integrity, and it does need 
to get to a higher level of citation, and it does need to recruit many 
more people from academia to contribute articles - more specifically, 
it needs more people who write in their area of profession to 
contribute. One need not be a professor to write a good explanation of 
a star scheme, but actually having implemented one a few times will 
generally be a huge help in writing about them.

------------------------------

Message: 8
Date: Thu, 06 Jan 2005 19:28:22 -0800
From: Bryan Derksen 

Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] A Solution to Larry Sanger's Criticisms -
Project Has Been Around For A While
To: wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.2.20050106192616.00ac5888 at shawmail>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

At 12:16 AM 1/7/2005 +0200, NSK wrote:
>I once saw a professor visiting a Wikipedia article on maths found from a
>Google search, but he abandoned it just after a few seconds. Another
>professor has advised us never to cite material not hosted on .edu or .ac.uk
>or other educational domains.
>
>If Wikipedia does not change its attitudes, it will eventually die from brain
>drain: New, more expertise-friendly and intellectual wikis will emerge and
>WP's knowledgeable users will just immigrate there.

Alternately, you seem to be suggesting that Wikipedia needs to do is get an 
.edu or .ac.uk domain name.

------------------------------

Message: 9
Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2005 22:10:19 -0800 (PST)
From: Anthere 
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] A portal page for www.wikipedia.org (was Re:
Why www.wikipedia.org => en.wikipedia.org ?)
To: wikitech-l at wikimedia.org
Cc: wikipedia-l at wikimedia.org
Message-ID: <20050107061019.56004.qmail at web41802.mail.yahoo.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

Walter Vermeir a Ã©crit:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I want to know why the address
http://www.wikipedia.org redirects 
>> automatically to http://en.wikipedia.org... Is
Wikipedia an english 
>> project with translations, or is it a real
international project?
> 
> 
> I asked myself that same question many years ago. I
think I posted the 
> first question about this on some wikipedia list at
the end of 2001. 
> Always a lot of objections. It would break links,
English is the lingo 
> franca of the internet. At the time of the change
from wikipedia.com to 
> wikipedia.org used to a opportunity to do it but it
has not be done.
> 
> Wikipedia is a international project. But only the
English may use the 
> front entrance.

I was among those who objected more than 2 years ago.
I believe most of the objections raised at that time
do not make any more sense. A lot was written on the
mailing list, and some discussion may be found here :
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/What_to_do_with_www.wikipedia.org.

I do not think there were be links broken now. We
switch the adress more than 2 years ago, the
encyclopedia is so much bigger now, and we had truely
become international (which was not true 3 years ago
at all).

It is high time we finally get a portal page. 

There were other solutions mentionned 2 years and a
half ago, but I think portal is the solution chosen
for all our projects, so best to stick with it
probably.

However, it might be nice to try to do something good
looking and not necessarily wiki (we do not need the
left menu for example).

I suggest that some people try to come up with some
good designs and that we get done with this. For
example, this might be a conceptual proposition
(http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/What_to_do_with_www.wikipedia.org-mav%27s_Prop)
but it could need a graphist to polish it.

I hope someone come up with a good idea :-)

Could someone set up a contest page, where we could
add considerations to respect and where wikipedians
could link their proposal ?

Anthere

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