Wikimedia+Libraries/Program/Submission/Shared Citations

Slides for this proposal

Title of your proposal

shared citations

Name(s) and/or username(s)

User:Wittylama / User:LWyatt (WMF)

Email address: lwyattwikimedia.org

Program Manager, WMF

Topic

• Future Research - What are the initiatives/research that need to be done?
• Information Literacy or Data Literacy and Wikimedia projects

Type of submission (Please choose one)

• Individual Presentations (15 minutes)

Keywords and hashtags

References/Footnotes; WikiCite; Citation management; Wikibase

Abstract

'Shared Citations' is a proposal for the Wikimedia Foundation to create a database of Wikimedia citation records; and associated improvements to cross-wiki monitoring and editing. The 'spiritual successor' to the WikiCite project, this proposal has been available on Meta for a couple of year, and has received many endorsements.
This presentation would outline the proposal in the first portion of the session, then respond to questions from the audience about specific issues/questions arising from the audience in the second portion. In the third portion would be a discussion of the status and potential roadmap for moving forward with the idea itself (and/or its underlying architectural requirements). The proposed new database, aiming to centralise the hosting and metadata-management of individual references used in any Wikimedia project as structured data "records". Each Wikimedia project could then call upon these records and, according to its own citation style preferences, display them to their readers. By centralising, structuring, and sharing the content, the following can be achieved:

• much duplication of content curation effort can be reduced
• many workflows which improve knowledge integrity can benefit all sister projects simultaneously
• new processes and research can be undertaken to improve increase our understanding of Wikimedia references; and
• the architecture of how we store and update reference information can be made much more efficient.

Described on Meta at: WikiCite/Shared_Citations.

[Note, a variant of this presentation has previously been given at 'WikidataCon']

Expected outcomes

• An understanding of the status quo, and limitations of that status quo, of the current 'manual entry' citations model in the Wikimedia universe - by demonstrating what could be instead.
• A more nuanced perspective of what centralised and structured information could be, beyond a binary of 'on Wikipedia or on Wikidata'.
• An awareness of how citation management across Wikimedia is more than merely filling a Wikibase with content.

Duration (without Q&A)

...as long as permitted :-)

Interested attendees (Please add yourself, and you may indicate your questions to the presenter).

1. People have been talking about WikiCite for ages so I'm curious to see if it's actually going anywhere, haha. Rachel Helps (BYU) (talk) 17:07, 22 June 2022 (UTC)
2. Ngostary2k (talk) 10:12, 26 June 2022 (UTC)