On Feb 10, 2005, at 6:17 AM, Ray Saintonge wrote:
Call
numbers serve a different purpose at LOC than LCCNs. Saying that
"anything which has had an edition since then has one" is not
accurate. It's that later edition that has one; the earlier edition
still does not. Thus in the Wikipedia [[BibTeX]] article, the example
given for the Abramovitz and Stegun volume as published by Dover.
That is not a 1964 publication as the article would suggest. My
personal copy of the work is the March 1965 third printing, with
corrections produced by the US Dept. of Commerce, and has no ISBN. It
would be inappropriate to stick Dover's ISBN on that.
First off:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikicite_feature_requests
But I will reply to the categorical assertion of coverage, which is
overly broad. It is only inappropriate to cite a later version of the
work in the references when there is a difference between the editions,
and that difference is important to the article. This isn't to minimize
the point, because while it is a small number of cases, those cases are
important: namely cases where a point is specifically quoted or
paraphrased.
As for the difference purpose at the Library of Congress, what is
important is that any particular identifier locate one particular
edition, which is is assured of doing, having many numerical
identifiers for the same work isn't a problem.
No-one is suggesting that ISBN is a copyright system.
The extent to
which ISBNs are commonly used will very much depend on the subject
matter. The use is bound to be strong in most of the sciences, but in
literature and history much of the references can be very old.
But other call number systems are under copyright, for example the
primary legal citation system in the US is copyright.
While I'm certainly not opposing the Wikicite
project, my concern
remains with Wikisource, and how the system as ultimately adopted will
fit in with that project. I have raised the issue of citing sources
on both Wikisource and Wiktionary. Still, my experience suggests to
me that a significant fraction of our contributors have a great deal
of difficulty in grasping the concept or its importance.
Ec
Wikicite is a middle layer between sources and articles. The reasons
for having this middle layer are many fold. First, it reduces the work
of generating references. Second, it opens those references to the wiki
process of credibility. Third is that it will connect citations to the
source. If that source exists in wikisource, then the card should have
a pointer to that wikisource object, so that the reader can easily call
up that object, as you will note
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:
Wikicite_project_purpose#Expansion the expansion macro should expressly
create a link to the wikisource object if one has been recorded on the
Wikicite card.
In fact, one of the seeds for wikicite should be the wikisource
database.