Upgrade Storage[MLZ] Collaborations involving Multilingual Zotero
In a separate thread, adamsmith pointed out that document collaborations in which one contributor is using MLZ are potentially problemmatic.
At present, running the same document against MLZ and then against official Zotero would almost certainly cause difficulties, because there are fields and item types in MLZ that do not exist in official Zotero.
The difficulties can be overcome via the same method used to sync MLZ data to zotero.org, however—by normalizing the item data to conform to the Zotero data structure, and embedding the additional data in the Extra field, in this case inside the word processor document.
When the data is read out of the document, the process can either be reversed by MLZ to generate correct citations, or it can be used by official Zotero to successfully generate (perhaps badly formatted) citations there.
Whether to make use of MLZ in a collaboration will be a judgment call for individual collaborators: the aim will only be to assure that, if that choice is made, documents do not break, and a correctly formatted copy of the document citations can be produced on an MLZ system by at least one member of the group.
Many thanks to adamsmith for raising this potential point of unpleasant surprise; outright breakage is certainly something to be avoided, and I would like MLZ to be a "good neighbour" in this respect.
When the issues have been addressed, and the sharing of documents between MLZ and Zotero systems is ready for testing, I will post again to this thread.
At present, running the same document against MLZ and then against official Zotero would almost certainly cause difficulties, because there are fields and item types in MLZ that do not exist in official Zotero.
The difficulties can be overcome via the same method used to sync MLZ data to zotero.org, however—by normalizing the item data to conform to the Zotero data structure, and embedding the additional data in the Extra field, in this case inside the word processor document.
When the data is read out of the document, the process can either be reversed by MLZ to generate correct citations, or it can be used by official Zotero to successfully generate (perhaps badly formatted) citations there.
Whether to make use of MLZ in a collaboration will be a judgment call for individual collaborators: the aim will only be to assure that, if that choice is made, documents do not break, and a correctly formatted copy of the document citations can be produced on an MLZ system by at least one member of the group.
Many thanks to adamsmith for raising this potential point of unpleasant surprise; outright breakage is certainly something to be avoided, and I would like MLZ to be a "good neighbour" in this respect.
When the issues have been addressed, and the sharing of documents between MLZ and Zotero systems is ready for testing, I will post again to this thread.
Just to be clear, I'm a big fan of MLZ and try to nudge people who may benefit from its two major additional features towards using it at every occasion.
Given the collaborative situation described in the other thread, though, trying out something that, as far as I know, no one has done so far seemed like a bad idea, though I agree it'd be good to be able to say that we've tested this.
Tread carefully with this: the code is very new, and there may be glitches, but my initial tests haven't turned up any serious problems.
Let's see how it goes. :)