[Wikipedia-l] Central bibliography

[Francis Tyers]

In fact, this brings up an interesting point, having <book> 
and <article> for specifics (they tend to be long), and then
having <ref> for miscellaneous stuff.

I completely agree that a centralised repository of references/
citations would be desirable, not only would we be able to see
which books are used where, but possibly (if people think it 
wise) to see who has which books/articles.

For example, I have many journal articles that I have photocopied
from the British Library (my department paid for it) that I would 
be happy to look up information in for people. They can't be 
distributed because of copyright reasons, but if someone comes along,
sees that I've cited it and asks me a question about the paper, I 
would have no problem in looking it up etc.

Fran

On Sun, 2006-09-03 at 18:09 +0300, Bogdan Giusca wrote:
> I think Wikipedia really needs a central bibliography,
> because there are many books who are used in more than
> one article, some in dozens or even more.
> 
> Currently, a book reference is done this way:
> 
> <ref>[[Istvan Vasary]] (2005) ''Cumans and Tatars'',
> [[Cambridge University Press]]. ISBN 123546958695,
> page 22</ref>
> 
> with a central bibliography, it would be like this;
> 
> <book n="Cumans and Tatars" p="22"/>
> 
> and the book database would fill in the details in the
> page displayed to the viewer.
> 
> I suggest that we use the name instead of the ISBN, because
> it can be seen more clearly in the text, when reading the
> wiki-text. Also, there are many books (especially older
> books, but not only), which have no ISBN number and some
> which have many different editions with different ISBNs.
> 
> There is still the problem with two books with the same title,
> in which case we need to add the author, too, for disambiguation,
> but I think this problem is less on the kind of books we use for
> reference. Shorter titles are used especially for fiction.
> 
> There could be some benefits for having a central bibliography,
> other than not having to copy-paste the publishing house/ISBN,
> like knowing which articles refer to a certain book.
> 
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