Wikiversity:Colloquium/Cite namespace

Moved from: Wikiversity:Colloquium#Proposal to create a Cite namespace
-- KYPark [T] 05:24, 29 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Proposal to create a Cite namespace

KYPark wants to create a namespace (Cite) that has reference entries that could be used on multiple pages as a template. I will let him explain it. Ottava Rima (talk) 14:46, 24 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

KYPark

Prompted by User talk:KYPark#Warning, may I cordially ask the WV community members concerned to draw a consensus on the creation of the Cite: namespace, each of whose pages will essentially contain the citation or bibliographic record on a document? For further information, please refer to User:KYPark/Hi Ottava Rima, which keeps evolving, as everything ever evolves, I guess, whether naturally or culturally. BTW, I'm just a newcomer to WV, unaware of its culture and the right way I have to behave in it. Please do me lots of favor and justice. Thank you. --KYPark 06:06, 25 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Adambro

As it stands, from reading the discussions that took place at User talk:Ottava Rima, I'm yet to be persuaded of the value of a cite namespace. I think it would create a lot of work for not a lot of benefit. Each reference would need another page whilst many sources will only ever be used in one page. Spreading content across pages unfortunately creates more targets for vandals and so more pages that need to be watched and potentially requiring protection. I think the current system of citing sources is satisfactory. Adambro 07:40, 25 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Re: a lot of work -- I expect academics would do a lot of it to help themselves. kk :-) --KYPark 09:09, 25 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Re: many sources will only ever be used in one page -- WV need not bother having such trivial sources or pages. The greater repetition or redundancy, the greater satisfaction. Hence the first-thing-first principle. --KYPark 09:03, 25 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Re: vandalism -- The nature of citations or bibliographic records is so objective that sane vandals would not bother them. --KYPark 09:03, 25 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

"sane vandals" sounds like a good example of an oxymoron. Adambro 09:11, 25 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yes indeed in a sense. But sadly, to tell the truth, I've been so often made to feel like one here (I can't exactly figure out where), though I may be one in no way. Could you prove I'm insane anyway so far? I hope not, even though I've been treated as such too often here, not in WV. That is to say, "sane vandals" is too uneasy a term for you to use definitely. I guess there are lots of "sane vandals" suffering a lot unjustly by name of vandalism, as pagans suffers by name of anti-christianity in the West. --KYPark 10:35, 25 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Ottava Rima

I could see some merit if there was a Commons like project for reference entries that would allow one reference to be used in thousands of pages, however, I honestly don't feel that even in such high user that having a page dedicated to one sentence that is easily copied and pasted is worth while. On a much smaller scope (i.e. just Wikiversity), I see even less of a point. I have created hundreds of pages that use references, and I find copying and pasting easy. Templates, in general, take up a lot of space and room for little gain. Ottava Rima (talk) 16:44, 25 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Recall that each page will essentially contain the citation or bibliographic record on a document, which may be called the citational, transclusive or onlyinclude content that will be nested between the beginning and ending onlyinclude tags.

This essential content may well be compared to the tip of an iceberg, that is, the explicit, superficial, minimum-essential part of the whole page. That is, there is the massive, non-transclusive content or added value, which may be compared to the huge submerged mass of the iceberg. It should be pre-determined which features of a document should be added to the tip. The User:KYPark/Hi Ottava Rima#Additional contents may be taken into account.

Simply, such a Cite page could serve as a notepad, as it were, for learning and annotating anything from a scholarly document, whether a book, journal article, or whatever formal documentation. It may be regarded as a grass-roots or bottom-up building block of scholarship, whether research or learning, based on scholarly documentation. Such was the common idea of most hypertext prioneers, including Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, and Tim Berners-Lee in particular.

In a sense, most WP and WV articles are a top-down digest or synthesis of various scholarly documents, each of which in turn is such a one. Then, scholarship may well be said to begin with a web of grass-roots or source documents, which may be embodied as a Cite namespace!

--KYPark 01:32, 26 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Just checking in briefly with this idea. I put some references on their own page, then transclude them e.g., Survey research and design in psychology/Readings/Textbooks/Howell/2010 - what links here. What advantage would there for be for locating something like this in a separate namespace? -- Jtneill - Talk - c 11:16, 26 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I suppose the argument is that it helps to keep all references well organized and you know that they are being used as references. -- dark lama 12:14, 26 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Absolutely amazing, Jtneill! You've been already transcluding citations, though perhaps less easily or less plausibly than using the proposed Cite namespace. Your hierarchical and project-oriented way looks too special and hard for any editor to locate citations, I fear. Now my proposal seems to have been deliberately made for an easy alternative to your way of controlling citations. A definitely easy way would facilitate the weaving and other controls of citations. Please go to:

Survey research and design in psychology/Readings/Textbooks#SPSS manual to notice the links I've added in front, and
Survey research and design in psychology/Readings/Textbooks/AllenBennett/2008#Critiques to be advised of the possible extension of citational pages, whether yours or mine, toward the additional contents or features beyond the mere transclusion of a citation. Also note the above page could be very simply named Cite:Allen & Bennett 2008 for easy location and use!

--KYPark (talk) 05:45, 27 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

What if jtneil decided to add additional citations by Allen & Bennett from 2008? Where would they be located? The page name seems to severely limit the number of possible citations. -- dark lama 11:16, 27 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Recall Cite:Vannevar Bush 1945 AWM where the suffix "AWM" stands for "As We May Think," the article of Atlantic Monthly 176 (July 1945), pp. 101-108. Books, eg, Cite:Allen & Bennett 2008 are more likely to do without such a suffix. Along with this author-year naming convention, we might also attempt to do with Cite:As We May Think, Cite:World Brain, etc., depending on their celebrity.

--KYPark (talk) 12:12, 27 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Again, partly in response to Ottava's comment concerning a Commons namespace for citational transclusion to sister projects, WV should not be adversely affected to have a Cite namespace and make its entry easier as much as the transclusion from the Commons entry. And, any WMF community members concerned may read this Colloquium and preceding discussions first and perhaps invite me there.

--KYPark (talk) 13:28, 27 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Jtneill

Thanks for the ideas and explanation KYPark. Maybe you could create some citations starting with Cite: as a demo. Would they need to be created in a namespace? Or could such pages just be named Cite: (without it being a namespace)? I'm not necessarily opposed to the idea - especually as I transclude some commonly-used references such as textbook references within a course. I do tend to like in that case that the transcluded references are within the sub-folder structure - but the final reference could still sit within Cite: and be transcluded from there. But I am doubtful that such a namespace would be used very much. Has this been proposed and discussed elsewhere on the sister projects e.g., Wikipedia? -- Jtneill - Talk - c 11:58, 28 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

WV is the first WMF project to which I proposed this new grass-roots documentary namespace, from which, it seems to me, WV would benefit most from the researcher's, teacher's and learner's perspectives. Meanwhile, such a documentary system is not really new without but quite implausible so far, I fear. The w:CiteSeer and the w:ACM Portal are limited to computer science and too automated. The Google is developing a sort. This mundane state of the art is as far as my knowledge goes. I would not deny that my proposal may be worth an independent WMF project, but make it simple. as I see simple is beautiful!

Suppose you passionately take notes on cards, as old scholars and students used to do. There you put down the source at the end, as well as a passage, quotation or annotation, tediously as many times as the number of notecards you make from the same source document. With the corresponding Cite page established once and for all, however, anyone could do without this tedious repetition, and that much more easily on Cite:Allen & Bennett 2008 than Survey research and design in psychology/Readings/Textbooks/AllenBennett/2008.

Quotation is selection. Also consider how to select a specific notecard from the messy mass. (Also consider how to find your car out of the huge car park after you've forgot the parking location.) The celebrated hypertext pioneer w:Vannevar Bush (1945) took these two kinds of selection very seriously, as he used the term more than twenty times in his 8-page article! Read at least the first 4 paragraphs of the section 6 there to understand his motivation. He named his ideal machine the w:memex that would free you from that messy mass.

It took exactly three decades for many people to begin to take his ideal very seriously. Since 1975, cognitive science began to emerge to study the hypertext-wise w:mind map, w:cognitive map, w:conceptual map, w:mental model, and many other parodies. Bush (1945) "As We May Think" was to suggest that hypertext is not so much grouped and selected hierarchically as associatively as the way we may think, hence the title. Associationism, behaviorism, experientialism, contextualism, social constructivism, and the like were merging into a revolutionary power against rationalist nativism or innatism.

Soon a variety of hypertext systems were mushrooming, including w:Enquire (1980) and w:Guide (hypertext) (1982) from the UK. The development at the University of Maryland is highly remarkable in the US, resulting in w:The Interactive Encyclopedia System (1983) and w:NoteCards (1984), 3 years earlier than the celebrated w:HyperCard (1987) of Apple Computer. WP and WV pages are (like) such cards; the namespace is simply the card box, deck or cabinet.

In the beginning, there was a namespace in WP, now called the main namespace, where all the main pages are parked, located or "created equal" rather than levelled "down from subclass to subclass" (in terms of Bush 1945) or from subpages to subpages in WV parlance. Now all WMF projects have essentially one main namespace and some extra namespaces marked by a colon, such as Wikiversity, School, Topic, etc. of WV, in addition to User, Talk, Category, Template, etc. in common. Each is quite homogeneous in kind. The Cite would be another for the reference kind.

Pages parked equal in the main namespace should be marked or named proper or unique, avoiding overlapping. Then anyone can be very easily selected by virtue of its proper name, and you need not go up and down the ladder of subdivisions such as Survey research and design in psychology/Readings/Textbooks/AllenBennett/2008.

Instead of such a long hierarchy, you could simply have Cite:Allen & Bennett 2008 in the proposed Cite namespace, or even more simply Allen & Bennett 2008 in the main namespace. The simpler the better. Then why the Cite namespace? It is mainly to save the main from being overcrowded with too many Cite pages, which quite differ in kind from the main pages and may eventually count to millions.

The main namespace, looking like a grab bag, is making life easy or simple, but disregarding the grouping or categorization of relative pages one way or another. The Category pages are partly to make for this default. The idea of subpages is another breakthrough. For example, any pages relating to any textbooks are grouped under Category:Textbooks, while some pages relating to psychological textbooks are grouped under Survey research and design in psychology/Readings/Textbooks.

--KYPark [T] 08:36, 29 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Sooner or later I will try to edit Cite:As We May Think, Cite:Allen & Bennett 2008, and the like under the Category:User:KYPark.

--KYPark [T] 09:15, 29 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for these excellent examples, KYPark. The idea of a Cite: namespace is growing on me. -- Jtneill - Talk - c 09:23, 1 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

My great pleasure. I hope it grow fruitful. -- KYPark [T] 09:33, 7 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Abd

I think this is an excellent idea.

On Wikipedia This would be a place to build information about sources. Discussion of sources often takes place in articles, when, in fact, the information could cover many topics. Does the source generally qualify under WP:RS. Often this is a debate that takes place in an article, based on the perceptions and POVs of the editors of the article. The Cite page and attached Cite talk page would be a place to form neutral consensus on the source itself. Is it "self-published," or is the publisher independent? I've attempted to use w:Naturwissenschaften as a source and the argument comes back that this is a "life sciences journal," which is not true. But it can look that way. How many times does this argument need to be repeated? That is a question that was resolved under mediation, with consensus, but where would this information go? Cite space. Naturwissenschaften is a multi-disciplinary journal where the majority of articles, which are typically cross-disciplinary (that's what they prefer), happen to have something to do with the life sciences. But they have always published in all fields related to the natural sciences.

On Wikiversity, the Cite space would be like a university library. It might be organized through categories into topics, and one could quickly find all articles that use a reference. How much work would maintaining this be? Some. But it can be built slowly. As to vandalism, it would be entirely possible to semipro the entire space, for example, and to have, then, suggestions from IPs, on a page for that, allowing any registered editor to act in semi-administrative capacity. Besides, WV is still small, and I can monitor all the activity. Have a new space will not create new vandals, just a different space for them to use, it would still show up in Recent Changes.

I think it's worth trying. It costs very little, if anything, if I've understood this correctly. It would allow the use of a common citation format, if we wanted to specify one. But it's also possible to have alternate pages according to various citatation standards. Diversity is important, but the question is always which is more needed: diversity or efficiency. If it will take a huge battle to decide on a single standard, then we could define a number of them, and this is something that can be handled with templates.... --Abd 19:38, 29 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks a lot for your positive support, Abd. You got it from the very beginning, I thought. One thing I like to reassure you at the moment, however, is that the Cite should be far more than the librarian site just for sight. Yes, it is a library or collection but of the whatabouts of the library resources, that is, of information of information, the second-order or meta information. I wish this could be a melting pot or center for diverse information users with their own perspective or point of view, which should rarely be a shame! The w:confirmation bias is deeply engraved in the living, from the recent psychological perspective, which though may be no more than a point of view. Such is w:Karl Popper's argument in w:Conjectures and Refutations that all scientific theories are essentially conjectures, hence the name of the book. NPOV is an easy word but a hard warrant indeed. How could you make certain the neutrality of anything without a thorough tour through the messy massy mazy marsh of soures of sources of sources? The best thing we could do would be to allow readers for the easier tour and the final judgment. See w: Reader-response criticism and w: User-centered design.

"Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and to coin one at random, 'memex' will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory."
-- From:Cite:As We May Think#Excerpts.

Perhaps more comments may follow later.

-- KYPark [T] 03:34, 30 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

KYPark 2

Ladies and gentlemen, please have a look at Category:Linda Smith 1980 and the like Category (instead of Cite) pages, all converging to Category:As We May Think, where all of them gather together as a citing successor. From "edit this page," find how easy it is to weave such an objective, historiographical, causal web of preceding and succeeding scholarly documents, in sharp contrast to the non-causal hence rather arbitrary w:semantic web, conception of conception of conception (cf. citation of citation of citation), or simply w:intension, one of which Wikipedia and Wiktionary pages look like. There are two kinds of things in your world: what you have to pinpoint or enumerate and what you have to persuade. No doubt, the latter is what troubles you most.

In the beginning, the w:World Wide Web began with the two things: the semantic and the historiographic webs, simply the keywords and the reference numbers. Eventually, w:Tim Berners-Lee seems to have preferred the former (semantic web) to the latter (historiographic web) after all. Meanwhile, compare the traditional use of the Category namespace with the revolutionary use of cause-effect chain reactions for a historiographical, causal web!

-- KYPark [T] 10:11, 2 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

KYPark has requested comment on this. --Abd 16:53, 7 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

John Bessa

This makes me think of my "mediated citations" idea that categorizes quotes (preferably multi-paragraph) by significant authors that are cited indirectly via critical inquiry into the possible meanings of the quotes. It extends the idea of "annotated bibliographies" by inviting debate.

Under author name is the quote (and where the text is found) followed by comments on the possible meaning of the quote. Each of these meanings then would presumably link upwards to some writing that references the quotes. (And while I have your attention, please spend a few quality moments with my photography-which is not really me, but nature. John Bessa's Photography)--JohnBessa^talk 03:25, 23 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]