Upgrade StorageIntegration with Wikipedia reference system
I'm not completely familiar with how Zotero works, so I apologize if I'm asking stupid questions.
Wikipedia is the free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. One of the consequences of the "anyone can edit" part is that we really like it when people provide citations for the facts they enter into articles.
Unfortunately, the citation system currently in use is pretty clunky, and requires you to enter information in by hand every time you cite something. This leads to a lot of problems. The information people fill in for each reference is arbitrary, they enter things incorrectly, the citation styles are haphazard and completely different from one reference to the next, and so on. A lot of the time, people just don't bother to enter references because it's so technical and difficult. We have a bunch of "citation templates" to help solve some of this; they allow you to enter the information in a x=y format, and the software generates links and formats it in the desired citation style for you:
Entering this in the source code of the page:
In the future, a new citation system should solve all these problems, but that's probably far in the future. It would be great if Zotero could help with the citation process in the meantime.
Ideally, I'd like Zotero to know all of the books I own, and when I want to cite one, I just click on it in Zotero, say "export to Wikipedia" or something like that, and it would generate a citation template for me from the bibliographic information it already knows and copy it to the clipboard for pasting into an article. The citation would have as much information as possible, including meta-data, ISBN numbers, DOIs, and so on, so that the reference in Wikipedia could be robust and a reader could find the actual resource easily through URLs or OpenURL or whatever. Is this possible?
Wikipedia is the free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. One of the consequences of the "anyone can edit" part is that we really like it when people provide citations for the facts they enter into articles.
Unfortunately, the citation system currently in use is pretty clunky, and requires you to enter information in by hand every time you cite something. This leads to a lot of problems. The information people fill in for each reference is arbitrary, they enter things incorrectly, the citation styles are haphazard and completely different from one reference to the next, and so on. A lot of the time, people just don't bother to enter references because it's so technical and difficult. We have a bunch of "citation templates" to help solve some of this; they allow you to enter the information in a x=y format, and the software generates links and formats it in the desired citation style for you:
Entering this in the source code of the page:
{{cite book
| last = Cordell
| first = Bruce R.
| coauthors = Jeff Grubb, David Yu
| title = [[Manual of the Planes]]
| publisher = [[Wizards of the Coast]]
| date = 2001
| pages = pp. 198-203
| month = September
| id = ISBN 0-7869-1850-8 }}
Creates this when the page is viewed:
Cordell, Bruce R., Jeff Grubb, David Yu (2001). Manual of the Planes. Wizards of the Coast, pp. 198-203. ISBN 0-7869-1850-8.
But that's still annoying to use; it's slow to copy and paste each field into each field, the template names, available fields and field names are hard to remember, and so on.In the future, a new citation system should solve all these problems, but that's probably far in the future. It would be great if Zotero could help with the citation process in the meantime.
Ideally, I'd like Zotero to know all of the books I own, and when I want to cite one, I just click on it in Zotero, say "export to Wikipedia" or something like that, and it would generate a citation template for me from the bibliographic information it already knows and copy it to the clipboard for pasting into an article. The citation would have as much information as possible, including meta-data, ISBN numbers, DOIs, and so on, so that the reference in Wikipedia could be robust and a reader could find the actual resource easily through URLs or OpenURL or whatever. Is this possible?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Citing_sources#Zotero_Firefox_extension_for_citations
Where should discussion about development of the export format be centralized? Here or Wikipedia?
Along with our limited developer documentation, you should also take a look at the CSL project page, which is separate from Zotero. You're welcome to discuss the development wherever you think you'll find the best support, but with CSL-specific questions you'll likely have the best luck directing questions to the CSL mailing list.
We pull CSL files from their SVN repository for use in Zotero, so once the new CSL template is done and validated you'll want to commit it there. That way it can also be used in the future by other projects that use CSL.
Note also that COinS, which you mention on that Wikipedia page, is used for embedding metadata in a page—e.g. (eventually) to automatically pull citations from Wikipedia to Zotero—and won't help much going the other way.
If I were to write to styles at zotero.org, would I just reach you?
Do I understand COinS correctly?
If fully implemented on Wikipedia, there could be one span in the HTML of each article that you are reading, which would enable automatic retrieval of citation meta-data for that article? So you could cite that Wikipedia article in another work?
We also have the list of references for each article, though. Would it also be appropriate to add a COinS span for each citation in the References section of an article? Is it meant only to provide information for the page you are looking at? Or is it meant to provide machine-readable citation information for any resource either referenced or viewed?
Yes, it would be appropriate to add a COinS span for each citation in the References section of an article. COinS is meant to provide machine-readable citation information for any resource either referenced or viewed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Omegatron/COinS_testing
I could add one to the "Cite this article" page immediately, but putting one in the article itself would either require a template to be added to every single article (possible, but a dumb idea), or a software change (best idea, but feature requests go ignored for a long time).
But I'm not even sure about putting one on the "Cite this article" page, since there's no format for online encyclopedia articles.
http://cavlec.yarinareth.net/archives/2006/10/13/i-hate-library-standards/
I don't know what the best-fit format would be. Here's an example with Journal article format. What do you mean by "tagging them as references"? I know. We don't have any string manipulation capabilities in user space, so I've requested a new feature in the software to strip HTML and wiki markup:
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8161
Would it be acceptable to go live with the reference COinS even though they still have square brackets in them?
Basically, CSLs with general appeal should be submitted to the XBib project. We pull new CSLs from there and put them into Zotero (and onto our server for existing Zotero installs to grab).
Can someone who is already familiar with the output styles help us? User:Circeus and I would really like to make Zotero output Wikipedia citations, so we can use COinS to input citations to Zotero and then output them to articles. I have a feeling this would go over very well.
I know all about the Wikipedia side, but I don't know where to start with the XML/Biblio/Zotero/whatever side. We're basically just taking a bunch of fields and plugging them from one format into another. Our citation templates are just collections of data with delimiters between them.
Zotero's Last name field goes in
| last =Zotero's Date field goes in
| date =and so on... Shouldn't be too hard.
Copying and pasting would be good. Dragging a citation into the textarea would be good, too, as was mentioned above.
Can Circeus and I get trac logins or should we just start a thread to report things in?
For me dragging citations into en.wikipedia.org works just fine (note that you can set a wikipedia site specific overrun if you prefer to have a different citation template active as default) - also grabbing citations from Wikipedia (provided they are formatted as COinS there, of course).
Does it not work for you?
I cannot export references from Zotero into Wikipedia and have them end up as a Wikipedia citation style. It simply shows up as the selected export style in my Zotero preferences. Are there any plans to make Wikipedia citations a style for Zotero? Or has that already been made? If so, why is it not showing up anywhere in the list of available styles?
Now I'll wait for someone to make it easier to switch between different export formats, because the Wikipedia format certainly is not my no. 1 used format.
Nevertheless, thanks Dan for helping me out here.