Submissions/Reform of citation structure for all Wikimedia projects

This is an accepted submission for Wikimania 2014.

This session will take place at 12:30pm on Friday, August 8, in Auditorium 1.

Submission no. 1114
Title of the submission
Reform of citation structure for all Wikimedia projects
Type of submission (discussion, hot seat, panel, presentation, tutorial, workshop)
panel
Author of the submission

various presenters - Lane Rasberry is contact for this

E-mail address

lane@bluerasberry.com

Username
en:user:bluerasberry
Country of origin
United States
Affiliation, if any (organisation, company etc.)
Personal homepage or blog
Abstract (at least 300 words to describe your proposal)

Wikipedia's legitimacy is underpinned by its citations, and yet long-standing problems with citations are yet to be fixed. Among some of the biggest issues are: the ease of inserting or modifying a citation, sharing citations between articles and between Wikipedias, and finding open access content to cite where possible.

Several Wikipedia citation reforms have been proposed in the past with mixed success. Starting in 2006 WikiScholar and Wikicite had the idea to create a sister project to hold citations for all Wikipedia language versions. While those have stalled for technical reasons, French Wikipedia long ago solved articles sharing citations.

New developments give us reason to believe that citation reform is more likely to succeed today. The introduction of Visual Editor could eliminate templating headaches. The maturing of Wikidata means Wikipedias can really share data. And the mainstream success of the Open Access Movement means more sources are free to read, and signal themselves as such. It is time to reassess how we handle citations at the Wikimedia level.

Our panel consists of domain experts from: the Publishing industry, Wikidata community, Library Science field, Open Access movement. Along with questions from the audience the panel covers the following topics:

  • When translating text from one language Wikipedia to another, why is it so difficult to translate the citations? Are cross-language citations desirable?
  • What is the role for Wikidata in managing references? Is Wikidata the right tool to hold citations.
  • In Wikicode, where is the balance between presenting citation templates readable by Wikipedia editors versus making a reusable citation for the readers?
  • What is the state of the Visual Editor's system for managing citations?
  • What do we want to know about our citation usage? What difficulties arise when publishers such as academic journals seek to track citations on Wikimedia projects?


Track
Length of session (if other than 30 minutes, specify how long)
60 minutes
Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?
yes
Slides or further information (optional)
Special requests


Interested attendees

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  1. Anthonyhcole (talk) 07:53, 24 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  2. James Heilman, MD (talk · contribs · email)(please leave replies on my talk page) 08:20, 24 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]
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  24. --Gereon K. (talk) 13:56, 3 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]
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  26. OR drohowa (talk) 21:09, 13 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]
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  28. Johnbod/Wiki CRUK John (talk) 10:27, 11 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  29. Ssastry (talk) 09:59, 31 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  30. Marcoil (WMF) (talk) 10:09, 31 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  31. Fixertool (talk) 09:44, 3 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  32. JSahleen (WMF) (talk) 13:21, 5 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  33. Jasper Deng (talk) 22:59, 7 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]