Saturday, October 31, 2020

Wikicite, but from the bottom up

Wikicite is one of the most active projects in Wikidata. Its purpose is to "develop open citations and linked bibliographic data to serve free knowledge". A lot of work has been done over the years, there is only one issue; what purpose does it serve.

One of the visible parts of Wikicite are the many Scholia presentations for information. Papers, authors, organisations, subjects even combinations. There is a template that enables the inclusion of Scholia information on a Wikipedia article like here.

One objective of Wikicite is to become the repository of all references of Wikipedia articles. This is where progress is possible enabling people like myself to combine the two and make it easier for Wikipedia editors to find even more sources.. I spend a lot of time adding the subject "trophic cascade" to scholarly articles that include the phrase "trophic cascade" in its title. In addition I attributed the papers of many a scholar as well. This is reflected in the Scholia for trophic cascade. Many of the papers in the references part of the English article are these same papers.

Referenced articles may be specific to multiple subjects and, may be part of the references of multiple articles. When we know all the papers used as references in a Wikipedia article in Wikidata, we can make the information in a Scholia even more useful. 

The information of existing papers with authors and citations can be enriched. For references we can add new papers., the subject of the Wikipedia article can be marked as a "main subject" for the paper as well. We weave a mighty web in this way. Our quality will be improved by flagging retracted papers and we can flag articles for an update when new information becomes available as well.

What we do does not have to be complete. That is not the way, that is not the Wiki way. When we start with what we have, we will find that it is already really useful.

Thanks, GerardM