[Jurism][mlz] Documentation info about Jurism

duncdrum
edited October 30, 2017
This is mainly a question for the Zotero devs.
I frequently receive requests for advice regarding digital solutions for handling bibliographical data from library and research folks. For 10 (?) years or so, I recommend Zotero or more often Jurism, since in my own research area we need those extra features.

However, since the rebranding to jurism I keep hearing that institutions or individuals couldn't possibly use jurism since its apparently the semi-legal dubious project of a Frank 'blackbeard' Bennett, who hid the true MLZ unicorn on a secret island and threw away the map. Zotero at least is real software.

This has happened often enough that my response has become a fixed routine. The problem is people (think admin folks, or non-techies) coming to Zotero looking for a solution don't know about the History of Zotero / MLZ, nor do they always understand how open source software works. The result is that researchers give up, since Zotero can't always replace jurism, and the library folks get a bad impression of Zotero, because "they tried and it didn't work."

So would it be possible in the brave new world of Zot5 to change the paragraph about Jurism found here https://www.zotero.org/support/supported_languages to be a bit more encouraging, to counter the idea that jurism is some pirated stepchild. key points:

* certain features are only available in jurism.
* switching between the two generally works, since their codebase is largely identical, so users and admins familiar with one can easily support the other.
* like all open source software contributions are welcome.
* legal disclaimer (jurism is independent of Zotero, zotero devs aren't responsible for what happens on treasure island.)
* zotero and jurism hope to merge features at some point in the future. Until then they have been on friendly terms for a number of years, and intend to continue doing so …

P.S.: jurism and zotero are great, I can't imagine doing my research without them anymore.
  • RintzeRintze
    However, since the rebranding to jurism I keep hearing that institutions or individuals couldn't possibly use jurism since its apparently the semi-legal dubious project of a Frank 'blackbeard' Bennett, who hid the true MLZ unicorn on a secret island and threw away the map. Zotero at least is real software.
    Do you know where your patrons get this idea from? It all sounds a bit ... odd. I think Juris-M could do a better job selling itself (I imagine https://juris-m.github.io/ can be a little intimidating for newcomers), but https://juris-m.github.io/about/ is reasonably clear about its history, and I don't think https://www.zotero.org/support/supported_languages#juris-m_formerly_mlz is that discouraging. It just mentions that Juris-M is an unofficial version of Zotero (to make sure that people know it's not a product of the Zotero team itself, and that the Zotero team doesn't offer support for it) and maintained by a single individual, which is both correct.

    But anyway, the documentation is a wiki, so you can register for an account and make any desired changes yourself: https://www.zotero.org/support/dev/documentation#creating_a_wiki_account_logging_in
  • dstillman
    (Though in this case, it'd probably be a good idea to discuss changes here first, since how Juris-M is represented is pretty important, and I would agree that the current description is accurate.)
  • dstillman
    Basically, I don't think the Zotero wiki really needs to get more into any of the points you list. Those just seem more appropriate for the Juris-M documentation.

    As for the last one, I think the "zotero and jurism hope to merge features at some point in the future" idea is pretty well obsolete. Frank has of course extracted patches of general interest that we've accepted, and that will no doubt continue, but given the rather insane scope of the main project at this point and the complexity of Juris-M, it's just not realistic for the core team to take on additional responsibility for things they don't really know anything about.
  • bwiernik
    How about these minor changes to try to emphasize the collaborative relationship between Zotero and Juris-M? @duncdrum, would this address your concerns? (I'll admit that I've not encountered the sort of skepticism you're describing, so I'm not exactly sure what's needed.)
    Juris-M (formerly called MLZ) is an unofficial community-driven version of Zotero that adds additional support for multilingual and legal citations. Juris-M allows you to store transliterations and translations of names, titles and other fields, and create citations and bibliographies that show this information (e.g. “Soseki, Wagahai ha neko de aru [I am a cat] (1905-06)”).

    Juris-M is developed by Frank Bennett, a Zotero user and active Zotero contributor. If you would like to try out Juris-M, see the project webpage.
  • dstillman
    That looks good to me.
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