[Wikipedia-l] Re: Bibliography

[Stirling Newberry]

On Jan 8, 2005, at 1:22 AM, Karl Eichwalder wrote:

> "Caroline Ewen" <caroline at web.lu> writes:
>
>> 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 ?

I won't repeat the entirety here, but I will instead summarize merely 
the obvious reasons.

1. Value of editors time. Just because you aren't paying for it, 
doesn't mean it is either unlimited in quantity or valueless.
2. Assured canonical format. No mistakes, if the link shows up blue, 
you got it right.
3. Value of editors time part II: poves have access to precompiled 
bibliographies, we are asking editors to compete with organizations 
backed with money.
4. Value gained. It is wikipedians and wikimedia that is leading the 
drive to compete with other data sources for reputability. It, not the 
individual editors, gains the advantages, to pass on the costs and take 
the gains - while moralizing about how lazy and stupid the editors are 
verges on unethical behavior.
5. Citation resource has a value in and of itself. It allows annotation 
of sources, trees of editions, cross referencing (what articles link to 
a particular source) flexible categorization of sources.
6. There are paid versions of such tools, most of which do no more than 
provide an interface and a database to free information. It is clearly 
part of wikimedia's mission to provide free and open versions of tools 
for knowledge work to the public where such exist in proprietary forms.