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support citations

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Idea

 

+issues

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Wikirate.org specifically (and Wagn in general) needs a way to support citations.

 

In simple terms, this means producing an end result where there is a superscript number (in hard brackets a la wikipedia?), and that number can be clicked to see the citation somewhere outside of the body of the text.

 

Ideally we'd also like to be able to make use of typical wagn patterns:

  1. we should be able to reuse sources (without a bunch of cut and paste)
  2. we should be able to style the citations however we like (and different ways in different contexts)
  3. we should be able to query the citations even without looking at the full text
  4. we should be able to query citations from multiple cards at once
  5. we should be able to further restrict the citation list based on standard search criteria.
  6. we should be able to query all the cards that cite a given source

As discussed below, some these introduce some complications, but most are quite addressable.

 

 

+solution

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"cite" view

Squirrels are from Antarctica{{National Enquirer Article 2008|cite}}.

Note that this is different from Wikipedia, where all the citation info is included on the spot.  You're just using the name; the actual source info is in a separate card.  If you cite a source that does not yet exist, then you can create it later.  Some communities may want to restrict this socially, but there's no technical reason you can't cite a person, an image, another search, etc.  It also means that you'll be able to use our "inclusion" interface to enter citations.  It would be possible to build a special citation button; there's not that much to this part.

 

The cite view will be a superscript number.  Mousing over it will give a short summary of the source (needs design: how to configure?) with links to the full source page.

 

queries

 

At present it is straightforward to query all the cards referenced by a given card and restrict by standard parameters (eg, all the Source cards mentioned by a given Claim). We can't, however, search by the inclusion view.  We would need to upgrade our reference tracking (and CQL) for that to be possible.  It's also not yet possible to query cards based on order of reference, but that is not needed in this solution.

 

 

 

 

 

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Seems like you'll end up wanting one view for the citation wherever it appears in the text, and another that is used down in citation list section. Each can then automagically link to the other, etc. The inclusion above could even begin life as something like {{*citation wanted}} (an option in our link/inclusion builder?) which shows a link that offering to add a citation, then when one is added it converts to the appropriate inclusion markup to show the super-scripted number linked to the citation list below. --John Abbe

I just updated this card with a new proposal that would reduce complexity dramatically.

 

It's based on the idea that the traditional way of managing citations (journal style footnotes or endnotes) is really based on optimizing the user experience for people *looking at paper*. The above proposal is much cleaner for web experience and involves many fewer context shifts. It would be straightforward, as mentioned, to generate a list of sources for a given chunk (or chunks) of text, but I suspect it's best to be careful not to present this in a context where it will be experienced as clutter.

--Ethan McCutchen.....2013-10-01 22:41:05 +0000

+relevant user stories

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