Wikipedia:Wikicite technical background

A Brief Discussion of ISBN
Since the first level of wikicite implementation would be to make available ISBN numbered books, or some subset, a short discussion of ISBN is in order.

Format of an ISBN number
An ISBN is a 10-digit number that identifies a book, it is used for commercial and citation purposes. It has 9 significant digits and a check digit. A digit is base 11, that is 0-10, represented by the digits 0-9 and an "x" for 10.

The ISBN code is broken into 4 parts:


 * Group/Country id
 * Publisher id
 * Title id - by format
 * Check digit

The standard says hypens are to be placed between these four parts, but often they are not.

Obtaining ISBN data
One can purchase commercial data for ISBN databases from the Library of Congress and other sources. However, Wikimedia would probably begin by taking MARC Records downloaded from Z39.40 sources.

A MARC record is a card catalog format, and the Z39.50 protocol is used for records in this format. This means an initial test implementation could be "sparse" by creating records which are linking to the ISBN page as citations.

List of ISBN ranges

Brief Discussion of BibTex


BibTex is a Tex format for bibliographic citing, its format is

@type { name = {value}, ... }