On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 6:11 PM, Samuel Klein <meta...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 7:51 PM, Pavlo Shevelo <pavlo.shev...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>> Hi Samuel,
>>
>> That's really GREAT - we need that a lot for many "sensitive" topics.
>
> Yes. Also for reconciling differences between sources in different
> languages - which often carry their own quiet biases.
>
> The Foundation is now in a position to help support this sort of work
> with better contacts and brainstorming (than it was 5 years ago when
> these ideas were first developed), but someone still needs to design
> and run these projects... I don't think anyone is working on these
> ideas at the moment.
>
> (Erik, David Strauss, Stirling -- any recent thoughts on the matter?
> WikiData as a concept has been worked on in various ways, but I
> haven't seen any discussion of this particular implementation.)
>
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. In
the implementation we use in our lab all wiki articles that reference
an article are referring to the same citation on the same wiki page
(WatsonCrick53, etc.). The article that contains the citation
information is comprised of an infobox with metadata about the
citation garnered from various web apis and further arbitrary
documentation (we also show a list of other sources that this source
cites, and vice versa, etc..). 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).
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.
We continue to wait for Foundation feedback, but it has been
challenging to get more than sparse conversations. It doesn't seem as
though they have met to discuss the topic, which is unfortunate.
Brian Mingus
Graduate student
Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab
University of Colorado at Boulder
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