[Foundation-l] Project Proposal: Wikicat

Fri Jul 28 15:23:07 UTC 2006

> 
> I'm normally against the creation of new projects,
> but this sounds
> like a pretty good idea. Presumably, it'll be a
> little like Commons
> but instead of images, would handle citations. I
> suppose other
> Wikimedia projects will make use of this, do you
> hope to allow
> non-WikiMedia projects to use it?

Strictly speaking, citation is its own project (coming
very shortly, I hope):

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikicite

Wikicat will simply act as the data back-end to
support citation, though both projects are very
interrelated.  For example, citing a work for the
first time will import it into Wikicat, while editing
a work within Wikicat will affect the data displayed
by all Wikipedia articles citing it.

The software for this is being written as an extension
so it should be useable by any Mediawiki installation.

> 
> The project will aim to catalogue books, news,
> journals, what else? Film?

Yes, everything that is currently catalogable will be
supported: books, journals, film, artwork and
artifacts, maps, electronic resources, recorded sound,
natural specimens and realia, etc.  It will be like an
IMDB for everything.  What will separate it from
existing catalogs, hopefully, is its detail- entries
for a particular journal will describe every article
contained within its issues, an entry for a movie will
show every song or piece of music used on its
soundtrack, etc.  Wikicat will also use the model
proposed in Functional Requirements for Bibliographic
Records (FRBR) so that the same or related content can
be easily found, no matter what form its published in:

http://www.frbr.org/eg/hp-goblet-1.html

> 
> How will different referencing styles be handled?

This is still an open issue, but the idea is to use a
single, very compact style so that every citation can
be captured as structured data and used to populate a
"text relationship" database (the focus of a 3rd
project: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiTextrose).
 This will contain a database of all citations, from
Wikipedia articles to published works, and from those
published works to other published works, including
perhaps someday back to Wikpedia articles :)  This
will allow lots of useful functionality, one example
of which is that users will be able to follow a
citation from a Wikipedia article to a work, see all
the works which it cites, and then perhaps improve the
article by using more specialized material than the
work which the article originally cited.

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