Bibliography (was Re: [Wikipedia-l] A Solution to Larry Sanger's Criticisms - Project Has Been Around For A While

Wed Jan 5 19:41:05 UTC 2005

>
> I've been designing something similar off-and-on, but waffled on
> whether it should be a separate project. I was thinking of making
> special pages in their own namespace, a la image files, which
> would allow for better integration with articles, categorization,
> backrefs ("who references this work?"), plus links to authors,
> publishers, and an article on the work itself, since a number of
> significant sources have articles in their own right.
>

As well as authors. My concern is that as wikipedia articles the level 
of source protection is no higher than in a regular wikipedia article, 
where as for citations, much of the information comes from an outside 
source, and like the digits of pi, isn't really improved upon by 
editting unsecurely.

> In theory bibliography could go into commons, since most biblio
> info is language-independent, and quite a few articles already list
> foreign-language works in their references.
>

Good idea, I like it.

> If WP is supposed to be a compendium of the world's knowledge, then
> it seems reasonable to expect that every published book and article
> will be cited somewhere eventually, which is a lot to manage. To
> look at it another way, if a half-million WP articles do nothing
> more than make two citations apiece, that's a million-entry
> bibliography to manage; we need support infrastructure equal to
> the task.
>
> Stan
>
>

Agreed, this is not a small project, but it is smaller than taking a 
half million articles, each with a bibliography of 2 to 20 sources, and 
unifying it later by hand. The sooner people have the tools, the faster 
the project of upgrading the scholarly apparatus will be.