[pmwiki-users] bibliographies revisited

[John Rankin]

The recent discussion on adding bibliography support to pmwiki 
has died down amidst all the 2.2 excitement.

I have developed a plan and approach that would progressively 
add rich bibliography functionality -- see
http://www.wikipublisher.org/wiki/index.php?n=Bibliographies.Plan

This reflects the priorities that people have expressed and a
crawl - walk - run development cycle.

I'd like comment on 3 big questions:

1. what is the downside to storing each citation in its own wiki
   page, where the unique reference id becomes the page name?

   assume we can import and export BibTeX files with such a 
   structure and can solve the issue of characters used in
   BibTeX ref-ids that are not allowed in page names

   our local discussions led us to the view that a page per
   citation is the best wiki way to approach this problem,
   but others may see issues with this approach that we
   have missed

2. what should the markup be to refer to a citation? options
   (and my thoughts) include:

   Cite:ref-id (behaves like a special intermap, but implies
   [[Cite:ref-id | alternate text]] is allowed and IMO the
   reference style should be standardised so alternate text
   would at best be deprecated and may be disallowed)

   (:cite ref-id:) (non-standard to use directive markup
   for a link so I like this the least of the options --
   the markup should fit within existing pmwiki usage)

   REF(ref-id) or CIT(ref-id) (Wikipublisher adds EQ(id),
   FIG(id) and TAB(id) to define references to equations,
   figures and tables, but this is not a standard pmwiki
   markup usage)

   some set of markup characters around a ref-id, such as
   [:ref-id:] (I can think of many possible markups, but
   none is particularly compelling)

   On the whole, I lean towards REF(id) but could be talked
   out of it, provided that the alternative also handles
   references to equations, tables and figures.

3. As this represents a fairly substantial development
   effort, is anyone able to support the development
   cost, either in the form of money or time?

TIA
-- 
JR
--
John Rankin