Wikipedia:WikiProject Wikicite/purpose


 * 1) Temporary Main Page: WikiProject Wikicite
 * 2) Project purpose and original proposal: Wikicite project purpose
 * 3) Feature Requests: Wikicite feature requests
 * 4) Technical Background: Wikicite technical background
 * 5) Wikicite Syntax: Wikicite syntax
 * 6) Wikicite Outreach Wikicite outreach

Introduction
A fact is only as reliable as the ability to source that fact, and the ability to weigh carefully that source. Wikipedia's community, in an effort to expand its useful sphere of users, increase its reliability, usability and credibility has held several related discussions on improving the scholarly apparatus of wikipedia. The need to cite sources is now in the community standard's list, the desire to upgrade the citation of articles is the subject of the Fact and Reference Project, and the Encyclopedic Standards project has discussed automatic, or at least software assisted citations. There has also been a coding effort to support footnoting.

Need for Live Data
These projects, need, not only to be joined together, but to be joined together in a live manner, which allows for the creation of bibliographic apparatus. The Library of Congress is working on such a project for its purposes, it is the purpose of this project to create an open wiki system which will allow:


 * 1) Software assisted citation. To make it easier for editors to cite, and to make citations comprehensive to include a link to an author article, the book's card and the date as a wikilink.
 * 2) Card catalogs which will allow users to annotate the work, and to link to other works, which could include later editions, bibliography and textual apparatus. To make the card catalog live data, rather than dead data.
 * 3) Support a footnote system in wikimedia. To improve the ability to assess credibility and standards compliance of articles and their information.i like ponys!

Reasons
The reason for having such a system goes beyond the need to cite: there must also be the ability to annotate, and provide, at least, some summary for the user that does not have access to the book. This is particularly important if a work is obscure, hard to obtain, or in a different language from the reader's base language. This means that having the card "body" being a wiki space for editing is essential to tying together the functions of citation.

Moreover, this tool would have use in itself beyond wikipedia, or even wikipedia and wiktionary. It would allow, for example, the ability to search through the webs of paper citation, it would allow scholars to cite works against a public database. It would allow googling to find credible links within the citation web of the paper universe.

By this means wikipedia could not only match the ability of external sources to have bibliographic tools, such as are commercially available, but leapfrog them by making the information live, and linked. Books annotation could have information which is critical of them, or extends or expands them.

Just as Amazon has user reviews and credibility rankings, so too should wikipedia have ratings on the utility of a particular work for the purposes of judging the credibility of the citation.

Additional Functionality

 * 1)  Add journal articles, at least for the major journals, this is particularly important in the case of many fields in the sciences where the paper, rather than the book, is the basic means of information distribution.
 * 2) Edition linking, so that editions of the same book could be compared.
 * 3) Bibliography project, to add the bibliographies of books themselves, so that searches can go down, and not just up, the chain.
 * 4) Ability to use BiBTex citation formati, e.g. \cite{ key } in articles.

Database
Wikicite links would link to a wikicite database - like wiktionary and wikipedia and wikisource - one within our name space. The link, if clicked, would bring up a wikicite card, with both the MARC data, and the annotations of the wiki editing community, the "enhanced material", this could also include other identifiers to cite, bibliography of the work, other editions and so on.

Wikicite Card
Specification for wikicite card here.

Reference in Article

 * cite: type:identifier Link to card in database
 * Expands to bibliographic reference, wikified.
 * Expands to BibTex formatted reference, universalized.

type would be defined by look ups to the database, and would include at least ISBN.

Additional fields:


 * 1) edition

Expansion
The macro would expand to the following fields if present:


 * 1) Author Link to wikipedia article in local namespace.
 * 2) Author Card Link to wikicite author card, listing all works by that author
 * 3) Editor Link to wikipedia article in local namespace
 * 4) Editor Card Link to wikicite author card, listing all works by that editor
 * 5) Title Link to wikpedia book article in local namespace. All book entries should have a link at the top to their wikicite added.
 * 6) Publisher Link to wikicite publisher card.
 * 7) Date Link to wikipedia article in local namespace
 * 8) ISBN Link to wikicite book card. Or primary key if no ISBN
 * 9) Source Link to wikisource, if any, for cited material, or external link if no wikisource.

Original Proposal
Original discussion

Proposal Wikicite
Wikicite original