[Foundation-l] Jihad in Defense of Objectivity (Was: Enforcing WP:CITE)

Tue Dec 6 07:10:42 UTC 2005

Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> There is a difference between stronger citation
> standards and better 
> citation technology. I am all for better citation
> technology. I am 
> completely against raising the entry level of people
> to contribute to 
> the Wikipedia project.

I agree we should avoid alienating new users as much
as possible.  So what do you think of introducing new
citation/evidence mark-up which the renderer will then
use to automatically flag "evidence holes" within an
article (see mock-up: 
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:WikiTextrose_article_citations.png
)?  This would probably be an immediate milestone for
the project as it is something we could implement
without Wikidata.

> I am well aware of what Wikidata is. Wikidata is the
> implementation of 
> relational technology within the Mediawiki software.
> Off itself it 
> provides you with no functionality. A database
> design is necessary to 
> consider if it possible to create the functionality
> that you describe. 

I'll put together a datamodel diagram once the
functional requirements of the system are more
well-defined.  I've deferred doing so because I wanted
to get feedback from the rest of the community first,
including their reaction to the basic concept.  I'll
have a high-level entity-relationship diagram up soon,
though.

Anthony DiPierro wrote:
> Introducing detailed citation features would require
either abanoning
> that simplicity or abandoning the concept of writing
the wikitext
> directly.  Both of these would be significantly
detrimental to the
> Wikipedia project in the short term.

The mark-up would look something like:

[[cite:ISBN:123456789:p. 10|"cited
text"|"paraphrase/article text"]]

To me that doesn't seem more complicated than most
other basic wiki mark-up.

Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
> This is all theoretically very interesting, and I
cannot oppose it.  
> Nevertheless until someone is ready to code this it
won't happen .  
> Meanwhile, many of us who concern ourselves with
content still have to 
> go on with life without waiting for you to do the
coding, which could 
> take a long time.
>
> What would you suggest that we non-technical people
do in the meantime?

Erik Möller is working on Wikidata right now, which
may be functional before the end of the year.  Once
this is done hopefully I can put together the
beginnings of a prototype.

In the meantime people can help by updating the Meta
project pages: [[m:Wikicite]] [[m:WikiTextrose]] . 
Fleshing out the functionality of the system is
particularly important at this stage.  Think of how
you would use citation data.  What would be the best
way to visualize/present it?  What kind of searches
would you like to be able to do with it?  Once you
have some ideas create mock-ups or rough sketches of
them and add those to the project page.  People with
expertise in library science could also help by
creating lists for the sorts of data we should be
capturing in the "card catalog" portion of the
database.  I've been using the "Functional
Requirements for Bibliographic Records" as a starting
point: http://www.oclc.org/research/projects/frbr/
(SJ- can you confirm whether this is an appropriate
reference?).  If someone could use it to begin to put
together the list of attributes we need for the "card
catalog" that would be very helpful.

> > Using the text relationship database, editors can
now
> > see at a glance what is authoritative within a
> > particular literature.  The article renderer now
takes
>
> It is less cut-and-dried than this; one useful
comparative view would 
> be 
> the authority-ranking of major essays/articles in a
field assuming 
> School-of-thought A is correct in its assumptions,
and the 
> authority-tree 
> assuming some rival School B is correct in its
assumptions.

Certainly, though this depends on the field.  In
mathematics I'd bet there is relatively little
contention; in the physical sciences probably more so,
and much more so in the social sciences.  Hopefully we
can come up with formulas sophisticated enough to
identify such patterns (maybe including schools of
thought).  I would like to see a visualization of
citation data for someone like Edward Said, for
example :)

> > virtuous circle begins- a citation based upon a
work
> > of popular history is exchanged for one relying
upon a
> > more specialized work, which is later exchanged
for a
> > scholarly monograph or journal article, which in
turn
> > encourages reference to primary sources, etc.  By
this
> > process Wikipedia becomes not just accurate, but
> > scholarly and state-of-the-knowledge.
>
> By this process, the claims of the popular works are
also being 
> verified 
> or disproven by Wikipedia authors over time;
hopefully that information 
> can be passed on to the book editors/publishers --
as they too enter 
> the 
> digital age.

Right, and not necessarily just popular works if the
Wikipedian is armed with strong enough data.  I think
we would all be proud the day such a feedback loop is introduced.

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