Wikicite – a Universal Citation platform

Names: Samuel Klein
Affiliation: Wikimedia
Partners: Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, University of Colorado at Boulder; David Smith, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; The Boston Wikipedia Society
URL: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikicite

This Beta Sprint project updated a proposal for a wiki citation project (Wikicite) to place citations in context and visualize the network of relationships between works for all cited sources.  The team identified three components of this project: a public wiki with structured data, a service resolving passages or titles to citations, and a suite of tools for visualization and data-gathering.

Wikicite: Citations in Wikipedia articles would be converted to point to their Wikicite pages.  Each Wikicite page would show the citation in the context of related literature, where the original work can be found, and any summaries or literature reviews.

The Citation Finder: A citation-finding service would help resolve a passage into a valid citation.

The Tool Suite: Citation alignment enhances visualizations.  Clustering of sources and referrers can help readers understand at a glance who else cites a given source, and what is often cited along with it. Browsing tools can let readers highlight a title and automatically pull up its citation, or automatically add new metadata about it to the wiki.  A “permanent link” tool can adding permalinks for digital sources.