Hi Brian & all,
This is the first I've heard of WikiPapers. If the software isn't released, is
there someplace it's in use? In other words, how can I try it? (The closest I
can find http://www.netblender.com/main/resources/wikipapers/ is clearly not
you!)
This "getting the metadata" functionality sounds very exciting -- especially if
there aren't licensing restrictions on said metadata.
I can definitely see synergies with AcaWiki -- and would love to facilitate
conversations there -- hence cc-ing the AcaWiki listserv.
-Jodi
On 23 Jun 2010, at 17:55, Brian J Mingus wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 8:19 PM, Samuel Klein wrote:
>> Hello Brian,
>>
>> Brian Mingus writes:
>>> I wouldn't go so far as to say nobody is working on these ideas. We
>>> recently submitted a project proposal to the Foundation along the
>>> lines of community documentation of scientific (and other) sources.
>>
>> You are right to call that out -- and your proofs of concept for
>> documenting scientific sources are the best I know of, in the world of
>> open code.
>>
>> And I believe AcaWiki is working with you now, yes? I thought of your
>> project more as summary and literature-review, rather than a global
>> WikiCite... something that might one day delegate its citations,
>> primarily of scientific topics, to a universal WikiCite. (Correct me
>> if I am wrong.)
>
> The already-written software (WikiPapers) is exactly what a WikiCite
> would be. It is able to get metadata for practically any citation and
> add it to the wiki automatically. If there is only one small nugget in
> a proposal that the Foundation needs one would like to think that they
> would have the foresight to notice that and do everything they can to
> get it. It would be _really_ nice if they would at least read your
> proposal and give you some feedback about how you can align your
> vision with the Foundation's needs. Quite the opposite has happened -
> we haven't gotten any real feedback at all. I'm also not sold on
> proposals on the Strategy wiki. How are those different from the
> proposals that have been accumulating on Meta? As far as I know not a
> single one on either wiki has ever turned into a real project.
>
> I am personally not in the loop on the AcaWiki thing - we are working
> with them in some way, kind of. Nobody has installed or asked to
> install WikiPapers on a wiki outside of our lab, despite that everyone
> thinks it's pretty awesome. It's true that it is GPL, but I have not
> released the source code precisely because I want it to be a
> centralized repository of citations. I expect that whenever it finds
> an institutional home lots of modifications will be made, and perhaps
> the Foundation would prefer it to be written in PHP rather than
> Python, etc.
>
> WMF has a clear need for this or a similar technology, but will that
> be enough to mobilize them?
>
> Brian
>
> And I don't think anyone is working on a
>> "wikitextrose" equivalent.
>>
>>
>>> To recap: the fundamental basis of this general idea is a centralized
>>> wiki that contains citation information that other wikis can then
>>> reference using something like a {{cite}} template or a simple link.
>>> The community can document the citation, the author, the book etc..
>>> Users can use this wiki as their personal bibliography as well, as
>>> collections of citations can be exported in arbitrary citation
>>> formats. This general plan would allow community aggregation of
>>> metadata and community documentation of sources along arbitrary
>>> dimensions (quality, trust, reliability, etc.). The hope is that such
>>> a resource would then expand on that wiki and across the projects into
>>> summarizations of collections of sources (lit reviews) that make
>>> navigating entire fields of literature easier and more reliable,
>>> getting you out of the trap of not being aware of the global context
>>> that a particular source sits in.
>>
>> I like that formulation a lot.
>>
>>> We continue to hope that the Foundation
>>> is willing to work with us to draw up a project proposal that works
>>> for them, and we have also offered some programming time (I have
>>> already put in hundreds of hours).
>>
>> Which reminds me: we need to fix our project-proposal process.
>>
>> This sounds like a promising project. Did you ever post a version of
>> the above to strategy.wikimedia.org? I thought that you were going to
>> work with AcaWiki in the short term and see what you had in common.
>>
>> David, the Open Library plugin you mention also sounds excellent for
>> solving the larger "every citable source in the world" challenge.
>>
>> --
>> Samuel Klein identi.ca:sj w:user:sj
>>
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