I've been designing something similar off-and-on, but waffled on
whether it should be a separate project. I was thinking of making
special pages in their own namespace, a la image files, which
would allow for better integration with articles, categorization,
backrefs ("who references this work?"), plus links to authors,
publishers, and an article on the work itself, since a number of
significant sources have articles in their own right.
As well as authors. My concern is that as wikipedia articles the level
of source protection is no higher than in a regular wikipedia article,
where as for citations, much of the information comes from an outside
source, and like the digits of pi, isn't really improved upon by
editting unsecurely.
In theory bibliography could go into commons, since
most biblio
info is language-independent, and quite a few articles already list
foreign-language works in their references.
Good idea, I like it.
If WP is supposed to be a compendium of the
world's knowledge, then
it seems reasonable to expect that every published book and article
will be cited somewhere eventually, which is a lot to manage. To
look at it another way, if a half-million WP articles do nothing
more than make two citations apiece, that's a million-entry
bibliography to manage; we need support infrastructure equal to
the task.
Stan
Agreed, this is not a small project, but it is smaller than taking a
half million articles, each with a bibliography of 2 to 20 sources, and
unifying it later by hand. The sooner people have the tools, the faster
the project of upgrading the scholarly apparatus will be.