Wikimedia Gets Serious

…gets earnest, might be an even better way to put it. Perhaps stung by the various recent slurs on Wikipedia’s accuracy, the folks at the top have decided to construct the wherewithal for what seems to me will become a self-improving authority machine, harnessing the same distributed, free “improving” urge that got the ‘pedia ballooned to great heights in the first place.

The sharp end of the planned scholar’s movement is Wikicite, the aims of which are to:

Facilitate the citation of all factual assertions. Ideally every non-obvious factual assertion should connect to evidence which corroborates it… Most reference works do not have an elaborate citation scheme as proposed here.[1]).

Improve the quality of cited material. A source may not be “state-of-the-knowledge” within its particular field for various reasons: lack of original research, obsolescence, association with an untested school of thought or methodology. By mapping the authority relationships within a particular literature, editors can more easily discover authoritative research material.

Organize article review around fact and citation-checking. Number of cited vs. uncited facts, number of correct vs. made-up citations; these data should play central roles in determining the quality of an article and whether a particular revision deserves “publication” (e.g. stable, or version “1.0” designation) by the community.

Two supplementary “engines” are in the works to back up Wikicite. The first of these is Wikicat, which is to be pretty much what it sounds like: an open catalogue of sources. Not being a librarian, I’m unable to judge how good their plans are; but there’s a detailed analysis on the WikiCat site, and an interesting comment on PanlibusWhose author works for Talis, and so should know whereof he speaks.. It’s here, by the way, that discipline groups might play a good role, feeding the catalogue those authorities that are regarded well within the group.

The second support for WikiCite is WikiTextrose. This is

a text relationship database for mapping the various interactions between interpretable artifacts (i.e. “texts”). Though the project is inspired by long-established theories in the field of citation analysis, it expands upon these by considering all the ways in which one text may interact with another.

Yes, well. Dense as this is, there’s something in it that interests me strangely. Citation analysis ought, after all, to interest a legal researcher, no?

The lengthy explanations on each of the three sites repay reading. Citation is a subtle business (as the image above, taken from a typical law journal article, suggesgts), and if Wikimedia is going to get into the biz, it has to get it right. They’re certainly going at it with a will.