[pmwiki-users] Bibliographies

christian.ridderstrom at gmail.com christian.ridderstrom at gmail.com
Sat Sep 9 06:37:01 CDT 2006


On Fri, 8 Sep 2006, John Rankin wrote:

> observations.
> 
> The following seems to me a reasonable starting point:
> 
> - there is a wiki page per bib file

:-)

> - an author should be able to specify a default wikipage to use
>   for all bib references, rather than having to specify the
>   bib page in each reference

In LaTeX/BibTeX, the \bibliography{} both specifes the bibliography 
database as well as results in the actual bibliography.

If we want a bibliography to appear at the end of each wiki page, we could 
simply insert

	(:bibliography SomePage :)

in GroupFooter. Then it is not that much work to specify the page - it is 
only once for each group (or site if you use Site.AllGroupFooter).

However, I suspect you wish to be able to use citations without a 
bibliography showing up at the end of the page. So how about introducing 
an option to (:bibliography:) that keeps it from outputting the 
bibliography, but still lets us use that directive to specify which pages 
to use as bibliography database. Perhaps like this:

	(:bibliography SomePage show=no :)

Then we can still set the default bibliography database via GroupFooter 
etc. (Or we can just have a setting in config.php, but I generally prefer 
to keep settings in the wiki pages).

> - the author can over-ride the default bibfile page for
>   individual references

Hmm.. I don't really think we need this. It's probably better to instead 
allow using multiple database pages. We still have the problem of citation 
keys that are not unique, but I think we should address that problem 
instead, for instance by providing a mechanism to detect duplicate keys.

> - when viewing the page in html:
>   - the reference displays in an appropriate style, as a link
>   - clicking the link displays a correctly formatted citation [1]

What do you mean by "... displays a correctly formatted citation"?
I would expect that clicking the link would "move" me to the corresponding 
entry in the bibliography?

Oh... that reminds me. We need to distinguish between the wiki pages that 
define the bibliography database, and the location where the bibliography 
is actually shown. So something is needed to specify the default 
bibliography (and not just the default bibliography databases).

You can of course have many bibliographies in a wiki... I'd probably very 
often use one in the end of a page.

It's interesting that the concept of a bibliography gets more challenging 
in a wiki setting. For instance, we will probably want a bibliography to 
list citations occuring in more than just the current wiki page. This 
means that the directive that produces the bibliography also needs to know 
which pages to produce the bibliography for.

I'm guessing (:pagelist:) will be our friend here...

Anyway, as I've just realized this, there might be other conceptual issues 
that have been missed. Maybe it'd be a good idea to write something down 
about the overall desired structure. Any implementation doesn't have to 
support all the bells and whistles initially of course.

/Christian

-- 
Christian Ridderström, +46-8-768 39 44               http://www.md.kth.se/~chr


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