[Wikipedia-l] A Solution to Larry Sanger's Criticisms - Project Has Been Around For A While

Wed Jan 5 18:08:44 UTC 2005

Shaun MacPherson wrote:

> --- Stirling Newberry
>  
>
>>References and a reference engine would be a
>>tremendous help, both for 
>>readability, and for writing. I would like to
>>suggest a project: 
>>wikicite which would list all available books and
>>create a simple tag 
>>mechanism for citing them.
>>
>>Thus something like {{wikicite:Wealth of Nations}}
>>would expand out to 
>>a canonical Smith, Adam etc.
>>    
>>
>Wikicite is a very good idea.  Especially so since I
>believe the time will come when people will disagree
>what constitutes a good reference, people disagreeing
>on the reference formatting, trouuble in keeping track
>of the different editions and page numbers for a
>quotation, or different printing runs for books.
>
The fundamental idea is solid, but there should be no need for a 
separate project.  It is really just a matter of good research 
practice.  Defining a "good" reference is not always a productive 
exercise.  We can end up with NPOV disputes and edit wars just as much 
over the validity of references as over content.

>As well, if we are citing a public domain work there
>is no reason why the cite cannot bring us to the
>actual document and quotation on wikisource or
>wikicommons.
>
Ideally yes, but we have a long way to go before we get there.  
Importing material from Project Gutenberg may be easy enough, but what 
needs to be done is a mass digitization and OCR proofreading of a huge 
body of works.  That's a _lot_ of tedious work.  After a little more the 
year Wikisource is still working out a lot of its fundamental 
procedures, but what you propose is certainly consistent with the 
long-term vision that I have had of Wikisource since the day it started.

>>Getting journal articles would be next, and harder,
>>but could be worked 
>>out over time. This would make entering sources and
>>bibliography easy, 
>>standardised, and current. It would also keep the
>>burden of generating 
>>citation lists down, and would be a generally useful
>>resource everywhere.
>>
At the risk of stating the obvious, journal articles are shorter than 
books.  One Wikisource contributor has recently begun work on a 1917 
National Geographic issue.  That should be an opportunity for getting 
some of the bugs out of that approach, and developping standards for the 
way we enter journal articles.  Some journal articles may be more 
important than others to include. but the simple fact that they are each 
individually shorter may be an encouragement.

>Wikicite might be able to keep track of all things
>published.  It would also be useful to keep track of
>books and their printing date to know when things
>enter the public domain to know when to put them on
>Wikisource/Wikicommons.
>
There is already a considerable overlap between Wikisource and Wikipedia 
over the matter of bibliography.  For now I see it as fair game for 
both.  I believe that Wikisource should be carrying the fundamental 
information that helps in determining the copyright status, but that's 
only going to be there if people put it there.  Whatever one might think 
of long copyright terms it is still much easier to calculate expiry 
based on the year of death than on the year of publication.  It's going 
to be another 40 years before that becomes the norm for US 
publications..  For them we still need to consider such issues as 
copyright renewals.  A 1923 US publication whose copyright was not 
properly renewed in 1951 is now in the public domain.  There is no need 
for a new wedge project somewhere between Wikisource and Wikipedia.

Ec