Saturday, July 17, 2021

Making Wikicite a success by putting the Wikipedia editor first

Wikicite as a project has come to an end after a five year run. Much has been achieved (read the article). One great follow up idea is to harvest all the references of all the other Wikipedias and have all this data together so that we can analyse our quality even better.

All the data, all the Wikicite activities have been valued; people have been thanked, accomplishments announced and it is now left open how to move on. The best way to move forward is to bring a public to the data and add value. 

Every Wikipedia article has its references and we put Wikipedia editors and readers first when we show all the known references and its relations with older and newer publications. One button that provides the latest information will create buy in, makes it more interesting. It links to papers, to authors and requested updates are not part of a serial but of a targeted process.

A similar service we can provide for the authors of scholarly works. They will find in Wikidata what we know about them, identifiers of VIAF, ORCiD, Google Scholar, ResearchGate, Twitter even Scopus. They can improve the information on their publications they can add identifiers, references to other publications, co-authors, subjects and see it improve the associated Scholia representations. What we can do for them is regularly harvest information and update Wikidata with the new or altered information.

When we truly build relationships, it is no longer essential that everything should be on Wikimedia servers. Why have a same project at the Internet Archive and at the Wikimedia Foundation? Why not share the work load. When we put our Wikipedia editors first, we provide them with the best information on literature, publications we have on offer. Most references are in the WaybackMachine anyway, we already rely on this so why not collaborate and share both the effort and the cost?

When we truly care about sharing the sum of all knowledge, it is in the eating that we find the proof, not in the dogma.

Thanks, GerardM

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