Two things:
1. "different styles": I did realise that this depends a LOT on the country.
Of course there's a slight change when you have an article of a newspaper
than when you're citing a book. And I do agree that it would be simple just
typing "[[Biblio:Wealth of Nations]]". The thing with the different styles
is, how to you get them all under one style ? I do study in France actually,
and I noticed that some of the german Erasmus-students I met here looked at
my bibliography once and where astonished by the way it was written. I told
them that that's just the french style of writing it. They do have some
minor differences when writing theirs. As for the multiple editions: in
France, you tend to state the most recent edition (because revised, mistakes
have been corrected etc). Do you want to "impose" one style for all ? :-)
2. "just reuse them instead of typing all in ourselves": I do object to
that. I don't know about other Wikipedians but when I write articles, I
usually have some of my books on my desk, I don't know all that stuff by
heart (would be nice though :-) ) And I NEVER put any books in my own
bibliography I haven't used. The reason is simple: by only adding the books
I used, because I know what's IN the books. I could easily say "oh the
english Wiki has some more books than we do, let's just add them too". Not
saying that the books in the english wiki article aren't good, but how can I
know ? I haven't read them, maybe never heard of them. You could say that
maybe I WILL know them since they're stated there and out of curiosity, if
I'm interested in the subject of the article, I will look into them, but I
still dislike the fact to simply use what's there :-)
Caroline, the innocent :-)
-----Message d'origine-----
De : wikipedia-l-bounces(a)Wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces@Wikimedia.org] De la part de Stan Shebs
Envoyé : vendredi 7 janvier 2005 01:19
À : wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org
Objet : Re: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Bibliography
Caroline Ewen wrote:
Hi all,
Don't get me wrong but why would there be a need for a tool to create a
bibliography ? It's all quite simple: Surname, NAME, Title in italic,
Edited by..., City, Year.
Or did I misunderstand the whole "technology for bibliographical
records"-thing ?
Ah, an innocent wandering into the brambly briers of bibliography... :-)
Think of different styles (some do first name first), different names for
the same person (middle initial vs spelled-out), journal articles, book
chapters in a multi-author book, translations, multiple editions with
different content, annotated works, uppercase/lowercase, and so on.
Even though only a minority of our articles have references now, there is a
remarkable randomness among them. Wouldn't you rather be able to type in
"[[Biblio:Wealth of Nations]]" and have it expand into a correctly-formatted
reference to Adam Smith's book, mentioning original publication date, ISBN
for a good recent reprint, and URL for an online text at the most reliable
website?
Even better, some dedicated bibtexers and others have built giant
bibliographies online, and we would like to just reuse them instead of
typing all in ourselves.
Stan
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