[Foundation-l] WikiCite - new WMF project? Was: [Wiki-research-l] UPEI's proposal for a "universal citation index"

[Brian J Mingus]

I have been working with Sam and others for some time now on brainstorming a
proposal for the Foundation to create a centralized wiki of citations, a
WikiCite so to speak, if that is not the eventual name. My plan is to
continue to discuss with folks who are knowledgeable and interested in such
a project and to have the feedback I receive go into the proposal which I
hope to write this summer. The proposal white paper will then be sent around
to interested parties for corrections and feedback, including on-wiki and
mailing lists, before eventually landing at the Foundation officially. As we
know WMF has not started a new project in some years, so there is no
official process. Thus I find it important to get it right.

The basic idea is a centralized wiki that contains citation information that
other MediaWikis and WMF projects can then reference using something like a
{{cite}} template or a simple link. The community can document the citation,
the author, the book etc.. and, in one idealization, all citations across
all wikis would point to the same article on WikiCite. 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.

To give all a more concrete view, here is an example from some software that
I have implemented in our lab called WikiPapers. Please take note that while
this is a scientific literature example, the idea is general to *all
publications ever*. Also, while I have implemented a feature-full version of
a WikiCite, it's important to point out that for the WMF project we will
need a new extension that handles the needs of the project exactly, and in
PHP (I use Python :).

The name of the wiki article is a unique key that is a combination of the
author names and the year, in the following format:
Author1Author2Author3EtAl10b. This works for scientific articles, but we may
find we need to modify the key for other kinds of sources. The content of
the wiki article is composed of an infobox constructed via the Citation
template, and any other text and media the community determines it is useful
and legal to include in the article. Example article:

Screenshot of how this infobox renders on our wiki:
http://grey.colorado.edu/mediawiki/sites/mingus/images/0/0e/KangHsuKrajbichEtAl10_infobox.png

Title: KangHsuKrajbichEtAl09

{{Citation
|publisher=SAGE Publications
|dateadded=2010-07-17
|author=Kang M.J. and Hsu M. and Krajbich I.M. and Loewenstein G. and
McClure S.M. and Wang J.T. and Camerer C.F.
|url=http://pss.sagepub.com/content/20/8/963.full
|abstract=Curiosity has been described as a desire for learning and
knowledge, but its underlying mechanisms are not well understood. We scanned
subjects with functional magnetic resonance imaging while they read trivia
questions. The level of curiosity when reading questions was correlated with
activity in caudate regions previously suggested to be involved in
anticipated reward. This finding led to a behavioral study, which showed
that subjects spent more scarce resources (either limited tokens or waiting
time) to find out answers when they were more curious. The functional
imaging also showed that curiosity increased activity in memory areas when
subjects guessed incorrectly, which suggests that curiosity may enhance
memory for surprising new information. This prediction about memory
enhancement was confirmed in a behavioral study: Higher curiosity in an
initial session was correlated with better recall of surprising answers 1 to
2 weeks later.
|title=The Wick in the Candle of Learning
|bibtex type=article
|number=8
|volume=20
|owner=Sethherd
|journal=Psychological Science
|year=2009
|cites=O'ReillyFrank06,Cowan95,Wise04,Fuster80,Panksepp98,KakadeDayan02b,DelgadoLockeStengerEtAl03,BrewerZhaoDesmondEtAl98,DelgadoNystromFiez00,Beatty82,Baddeley92,Waanabe96,Roland93lm,DelgadoNystromFissellEtAl00,WagnerSchacterRotteEtAl98,SeymourDawDayanEtAl07,ODoherty04,BandettiniMoonen99,ODohertyDayanFristonEtAl03,RogersOwenRobbins99,KnutsonWestdorpKaiserEtAl00,CircuitryMemory,OReillyFrank06,Watanabe96a,BrewerZhaoGabrieli98,WagnerSchacterBuckner98,RogersOwenMiddletonEtAl99,Baddeley86,Watanabe96,Rolls96a,PallerWagner02
|cited_by=Author1Author2Author3EtAl10,etc...
|pages=963
}}

Then, any other WMF wiki, or any other MediaWiki, could cite this universal
entry by simply typing {{cite|KangHsuKrajbichEtAl09}}

Additionally, if a technology such as Semantic MediaWiki is used (as it is
in WikiPapers), arbitrary lists of collections of literature can be
generated by constructing simple queries that are boolean combinations of
template properties. Given that SMW does not scale well, I have a plan that
uses Lucene instead for fast, scalable dynamic generation of collections of
citations. Imagine the possibilities..

Feel free to provide your feedback on this idea, in addition to your own
ideas, in this thread, or to me personally. I am especially interested in
the potential benefits to the WMF projects that you see, and to hear your
thoughts on the potential of this project on its own, as that will feature
prominently in the proposal. Additionally, what do you think WikiCite would
eventually be like, once it is fully matured?

Brian Mingus
Graduate Student
Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab
University of Colorado at Boulder


On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 11:22 AM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com>wrote:

> There have been a number of proposals floated in the Wikimedia
> community over the years to build a wiki-based project for collecting
> journal citation information. For those interested in that topic, you
> might want to check out the University of Prince Edward Island's
> "knowledge for all" project proposal -- it proposes to build an open
> universal citation index (to serve as an alternative to the many
> hundreds of proprietary citation index products that libraries
> currently buy). This of course is not the first attempt at this
> problem, but it's an interesting proposal that's getting a bit of buzz
> in the library community.
> http://library.upei.ca/k4all
>
> -- phoebe
>
> --
> * I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers
> <at> gmail.com *
>
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