On 3/22/11 4:28 PM, Chitu Okoli wrote: > > Reid wrote: >> >> There also appear to be various options for Semantic MediaWiki hosting: >> Wikia, Referata, etc. It would be nice to not have to deal with the >> sysadmin aspects of the project. > > I agree that going with a reliable host would be the way to go. I think > that for the nature of our project, choosing a paid Referata plan would > probably be better than going for Wikia. I for one could probably easily > find grant funding to keep it going.
Sure. If nothing else I'd be happy to chip in personally. I could also ask around for funding here at IBM, but I'm quite pessimistic on that. Paid plans run from $240 to $960/year, and we could certainly get started for free (http://www.referata.com/wiki/Referata:Features). I'm not ready to write off AcaWiki, but I have a number of significant concerns. Some of these I've mentioned before. I'd really like someone from that project to comment on these. * Is the project dead? The mailing list is pretty much empty and the amount of real editing activity in the past 30 days is pretty low. * It appears that the project self-hosts - this means that the project has to do its own sysadmin work, which appears to have been a problem (e.g., the domain expired earlier this month and no one noticed until the site went down!). * Is the target audience correct? I think we want to specifically target our annotated bibliography to researchers, but AcaWiki appears to be targeting laypeople as well as researchers (and IMO it would be very tricky to do both well). * I don't think the focus on "summaries" is right. I think we need a structured infobox plus semi-structured text (e.g. sections for contributions, evidence, weaknesses, questions). * It doesn't look like a MediaWiki. Since the MW software is so dominant, that means pretty much everyone who knows about editing wikis knows how to use MW - and not looking like MW means there's no immediate "aha! I can edit this". There's a lot of value in familiarity. I will post an invitation on the AcaWiki mailing to come here and participate. >> One final note on bibliographic software: many of these claim to do >> automatic import of a reference simply by pointing the software at the >> publisher's web page for the references. But I have never seen this work >> correctly; always, the imported data needs significant cleanup, enough >> that personally I'd rather type it in manually anyway. For example, >> titles of ACM papers aren't even correctly cased on the official ACM >> pages (e.g.,http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1753326.1753615)! > > My only experience with "scraping" pages is with Zotero, and it does it > beautifully. I assume (but don't know) that the current generation of > other bibliography software would also do a good job. Anyway, Zotero has > a huge support community, and scrapers for major sources (including > Google Scholar for articles and Amazon for books) are kept very well up > to date for the most part. Perhaps I'm just unlucky, then - I've only ever tried it on ACM papers (which it failed to do well, so I stopped). >> Bi-directional synchronization is hard to get right, particularly when >> the two sides have different data models. I think we are much >> better off declaring one or the other to be the master and the rest >> should remain read-only (i.e. export rather than synchronization). > > I like this idea; with SMW as the primary, editable source, a read-only > Zotero library imported from the SMW would work well. The problem, > though, is that duplicate detection would need to prevent imports from > adding existing articles. A complete overwrite would not work, since > this would break article IDs for word processor integration. Zotero has > been slow on implementing duplicate detection, but they finally have a > very impressive solution in alpha > (http://www.zotero.org/blog/new-release-multilingual-zotero-with-duplicates-detection/). I don't know anything about how article IDs works in Zotero, but how to build a unique ID for each is an interesting, subtle, and important problem. Others have suggested using opaque IDs such as DOI. I think this is a mistake, because it means that they are utterly meaningless to people when creating citations. For example, consider the following two citations that I might put in my LaTeX code. \cite{10.1145/1753326.1753615} \cite{Panciera2010Lurking} The first means nothing to me, but the second is a useful reminder as to the paper I'm citing. That's what CiteULike does, and it's built from first author, year, first meaningful word of title. In the tiny percentage of cases where this is not unique, a disambiguation digit could be added. I don't know how citation works in Word et al., but I would hope you're not stuck with opaque numeric IDs and/or that Zotero doesn't force you to use integers or something like that. Reid _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
