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Proposal talk:Move to an OpenURL-type mechanism for linking to sources / references

From Strategic Planning
Latest comment: 15 years ago by Tgr in topic Adding metadata

Impact?

The impact of this on various participants would be:

  • Users Slightly increased accessibility and availability of referenced works (both electronic and pulp-of-murdered-tree works).
  • Editors Increased amount of information required when adding references to pages, since more complete bibliographic information would be required. However in principal this could be lower even below today's standards by interfacing for z39.50 servers (i.e. library catalogues) for metadata for print works.
  • Tool builders Significant increase in workload. All current referencing templates would need to be scrapped. All current ISBN/ISSN templates would need to be scrapped.
  • Data Consumers Those interested in seeing wikipedias not as an encyclopaedia but as a database would be have significantly more structured data about references (have to check whether they're interested in this kind of data, I'm not really sure).

Adding metadata

Adding metadata should not be a manual task; filling the cite templates is probably the most tedious part of editing, and in theory much of it could be automated. Zotero has a database of scripts for mining metadata from a given url; although they are designed to run in a browser and thus written in Javascript, I have played around a bit with running them in Jaxer as a web service, and it seems doable. --Tgr 08:15, 28 September 2009 (UTC)Reply