On 3/18/11 12:30 PM, Dario Taraborelli wrote: > > There are excellent free and standards-based services out there > designed precisely to allow groups of researchers to collaboratively > import, maintain and annotate scholarly references. Zotero is one of > them, others are: CiteULike, Bibsonomy, Mendeley, Connotea. My > feeling is that the majority of people on this list are already using > one of these services to maintain their individual reference > library.
My take on these software is different: all of the ones I've tried are really rather bad. * Zotero - software to install, clunky UI. * CiteULike - clunky, sharing is hard, weird duplication of publications. * Bibdex - seems to be run by a private company which is one guy, no blog activity since April 2010, login required. * Mendeley - non-free software to install, clunky? * Bibsonomy - couldn't figure out how to use it, lots of bibliographic database noise in the interface that gets in the way * Connotea - run by a private company, login required (I didn't create a login so I don't know if the UI is any good), API seems limited??? I for one do not use any of these. It's either a cobbled-together BibTeX document or my own Yabman software, which has a lot of flaws but is at least fast for putting together a paper's ref list and getting a decently formatted BibTeX file. The main benefit of doing it with Mediawiki is that has a nice clean interface and it's super easy to get started - just go to the website and edit. No login required, nothing to install, no software to learn (other than a very basic knowledge of wiki markup). We know this is a big reason Wikipedia is successful, and that barriers to entry, even if small, really discourage people from getting started, and if they don't get started they don't develop into core contributors. There is also a rich ecosystem of support software (e.g. It's All Text extension and Emacs wikipedia-mode). Bottom line, we're asking people to commit to spending whole days of work in the system. Would I do that in MediaWiki? Yes, definitely. Any of the other bibliographic software mentioned above? No. I would be more than happy to use something other than Mediawiki, but thus far nothing that seems acceptable to me has been suggested. Others in this thread have mentioned projects similar to what I suggest: * AcaWiki - This is similar to what I suggest, though the template used for papers needs work IMO. Could be a plausible starting point. The fact that it doesn't look like regular Mediawiki is a drawback. * BredeWiki - Very much along the lines of what I suggest. I think a key goal here is to not let the perfect become the enemy of the good. We can start a Mediawiki-based bibliography *now* and easily mold it into something which meets our needs quite well. If we want to add on fancy connector later, that's fine; but IMO simple exporters would be plenty for most uses. Reid _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
