OK, so... is the following correct?
On Sep 17, 2007, at 1:38 PM, Maury Markowitz wrote:
On 9/17/07, Jim Hu <jimhu(a)tamu.edu> wrote:
I'm a bit confused. Are cite and ref tags
two different things? I
recognize ref tags from the Cite.php extension.
This is part of the confusion. There are three different things being
discussed, but editors have used the terminology interchangeably,
greatly confusing matters.
"FOOTNOTE": a stylistic solution to inserting small amounts of text
that would otherwise break up the flow of a statement. Other solutions
include the sidebar, callouts, and pop-up text. In the case of the
wiki, we don't really have anything that represents these directly.
In the case of a non-paginated wiki page (or most other web pages),
it seems to me that it makes more sense to discuss these as ENDNOTES
instead of footnotes. Operationally, Cite.php is the main mechanism
for putting in endnotes, some of which are references, while others
may be free text. The other mechanism being manual editing of the
text inline and at the end of a wiki page.
Using Cite, endnotes/footnotes are what gets built around the
<references/> tag.
"REFERENCE": any link to another work. in the case of the wiki, we
expect these to be the set of resources that are used to build the
article.
If I understand this correctly, the reference per se doesn't exist in
the display. Reference is a combination of work, expression, and
manifestation in WikiCat? I fear that WikiCat and WikiTextrose are
much too grandiose for my brain to wrap around.
Handling the reference is a combination of how the endnote and the
citation are handled. In some systems (not Cite.php), the reference
information is stored in a database or in a non-displaying block on
the page (I think that's how Biblio handles it).
When I use EndNote to do references in a word document, the
references are in my EndNote database, and only a subset that are
cited get applied to a particular document.
With a wiki, one has to figure out whether to store reference
information internally or externally. With the current
implementation of Cite, it's all internal and it's potentially
redundant in ways that make relational db people shrink in horror.
For EcoliWiki, I've added my ProcessCite.php extenstion on top of
Cite.php and delegated some of the storage to PubMed for that class
of references. This is not very useful for fields outside of
biology, and doesn't provide good coverage in all areas of biology.
But at least every time a user adds <ref name="PMID:number"/>, the
endnote looks the same. I also have the ability to store a page of
references as a reference library for things not in PubMed, but I
don't think this is a good solution as the library gets large.
Is that approach extensible? Maybe this is related to what WikiCat
was about, but could Cite/ProcessCite be modified to pull reference
info as if it was a interwiki link? i.e. <ref name='WikiCat:PageName/>
"CITATION": a somewhat formal system for including a reference to
another work, typically a journal or similar. In the case of the wiki,
these
Citation is operationally the inline marker for the reference.
Cite.php handles these as superscripted letters or numbers, but
alternatives are things like (Doe et al., 2007) or [1]. Using
Cite.php, the ref tag is used for citations.
What if Cite.php was modified to append text between ref tags to
anything that is provided by the name=x information? This would
allow different page ranges for the same source. This would only
work if the name=x refers to an external source, not a different
instance of the same ref name elsewhere on the page.
But, for example, if we modified Cite to recognize ISBN numbers, one
could do <ref name='ISBN:number'>pp 200-210</ref> or something like
that.
Or perhaps the ref tag needs more kinds of attributes besides name.
What I just wrote above probably breaks backward compatibility
horribly. So it would be better to build something like: <ref
isbn='number'>pp 200-210</ref>
With more attributes, you could build lists of frequently cited works
that are field specific as wiki pages in a reference list namespace,
e.g. <ref list='biology' name='Selfish Gene'/>, which would be much
more readable than ISBN numbers.
Jim
Now why do I complain they are confused? Well for one, go visit the
wiki page on footnotes. Note that the entire article is about
references! And where is the REF tag defined? In CITE.PHP!
Maury
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=====================================
Jim Hu
Associate Professor
Dept. of Biochemistry and Biophysics
2128 TAMU
Texas A&M Univ.
College Station, TX 77843-2128
979-862-4054