WikidataCon 2021

Shared Citations - A proposed citation management database for Wikimedia
10-31, 12:00–12:25 (UTC), Room 3

'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 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: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiCite/Shared_Citations


Link to notes

https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/WikidataCon2021-SharedCitations

What will the participants take away from this session?

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.

Language

English

Recording

Yes

Link to slides

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Shared_Citations_proposal.pdf

Also known as 'Wittylama'
Program manager at the Wikimedia Foundation, responsible for the WikiCite program 2019-21.