Org:WikiCite

WikiCite is a project to make source metadata available for citation and analysis. This includes importing library catalogs into the Wikipedia ecosystem so that, for example, when anyone references a source in Wikipedia articles then Wikipedia can also provide publishing context. Example applications include the following:

• Report how often and where Wikipedia cites any given publication or author
• Create bibliographies for individual authors, or universities, or any arbitrary group
• Help identifying publications on a given topic, e.g. for research or wp article writing

Goals:

1. Library cataloging metadata must be within the Wikipedia ecosystem as free and open structured data
   1. Many people find this surprising, but for many publications library cataloging data (just title, author, year, etc) may not exist or may not be free
   2. WikiCite can lead in opening up this data - a movement goal
2. Backend Wikipedia resources must be able to compute the data. As of 2021 the Wikidata Query Service is unable to manage common queries related only to academic publications. An example query that fails: "all academic papers published at (university) in (2020)"
   1. Database science can fix this; also technology improves and becomes less expensive every year

Past events: 2016 WikiCite Conference in Berlin

• the WikiCite data collection has been the largest single project in Wikidata as measured by participants in events and amount of content in Wikidata (that is, bibliographic info about scientific publications)

Here in Wikispore the exploration is to make WikiCite its own Wikimedia project, and not only a part of the Meta-Wiki discussion about citation management for Wikipedias or the Wikidata discussion for collecting source metadata. Reasons for making WikiCite its own project include the following:

1. The collection of source metadata for all publications is a public domain dataset, but it is neither free or available. Wikipedia could free it.
2. This is a finite project. Eventually humanity will have a list of all publications for all previous years, and when this exists, it will be a library resource for everyone, forever after.
3. Having a collection of structured data citations would help fact-checking on Wikipedia's fact-checking, notably by making citations available across languages to back claims when articles use a different language than the cited sources.
4. There is a commercial product environment where major technology companies and publishers sell similar products which provide the same service, but for relatively low-cost and high impact, Wikipedia could make this free for the world
5. Besides usefulness for citation management and browsing literature, having a comprehensive collection of source metadata enables meta-research, such as reporting publishing interest by geography or matching other datasets to publishing outcomes
6. Beyond existing and conventional citations, there are needs to cite other media resources, and the Wikipedia community is ideal for developing those standards. Conventionally authors cite papers; but they may also cite software, datasets, or algorithms which increasing are themselves automatically generating media content and knowledge.

Possible partnerships

• Scholia can show reports on academic papers and their authors, delivering part what a broader WikiCite effort would do;
• The WikiCite group may partner with Internet Archive, an organization which may also want to support create and enable open bibliographic and citation data services through Wikidata or other Wikibases.
• The early draft proposals for a North American Hub (a federation of Wikimedia affiliates) imagine supporting WikiCite efforts more systematically. No specific project has been proposed or funded.
• Is [[[Org:DPLA|DPLA]] interested?

Links

• http://wikicite.org/
• meta:WikiCite
• d:Wikidata:WikiProject Source MetaData, which functionally acts as WikiCite in Wikidata

Activity names	WikiCite
Keywords	Wikimedia, citations, Wikidata, Scholia
Organizations	WMF, Internet Archive
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Wikidata ID	Q21831105