On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 2:00 PM, Jakob <jakob.v...@s1999.tu-chemnitz.de>wrote:
> Jodi Schneider wrote: > > > Interesting. I'd really like ID's to be not only comprehensible but > > also to have a fair chance of being directly inputtable by humans. > > Usual bibliographic catalogs do not provide a mnemonic key as soon as > their size is more then a few hundred entries. There are various IDs > like ISBN and OCLC number but there is no large-scale system that has > simple identifiers. Why do you want to type in the ID by hand anyway? > What is the use-case? > > > For instance, on Wikipedia, if I know that I am looking for the > > article on "citation signals" I can type the URL directly, without > > searching. > > > > In my ideal citation-wiki-in-the-sky, you could get to the citation > > directly in this way -- and sensible disambiguation pages would be > > automatically generated. > > Why do you want to directly work with fragile identifiers? Every > modern web application provides auto-suggest: you type in a keyword, > title, author, anything and get a list of publications and a link to > create a new one. Then you select a publication from the list and its > ID gets copied into your editor (an ideal editor would also send a > pingback to the citation database to know where a publication > identifier is used). Done. > > I also like mnemonic identifiers, they are useful if you have to read, > memorize and type in them. But if your workflow is truly digital then > their limitation is just a burden. I would value uniqueness and > stability much more then readability - and you cannot get both! > > Cheers > Jakob > > > You continue to rest the basis of your argument on a small number of outlier cases, vis-a-vis stability. Brian
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