[pmwiki-users] bibliographies revisited

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Wed, Sep 27, 2006 at 12:20:23PM +1200, John Rankin wrote:
> 1. what is the downside to storing each citation in its own wiki
>    page, where the unique reference id becomes the page name?

I've never done much in the way of BibTex or bibliographies, so
my comments should be discounted accordingly.  However, I know that
sometimes it's a pain if an author is limited to a one-to-one
correspondence between pages and data.

As an example, early versions of the RandomQuote recipe (for 
displaying random text) required that each quote be in a separate
page; but sometimes authors just want to be able to maintain a
bunch of quotes together in a single page.  

To make sure I'm not misunderstood, I'm not saying that citations
should never be stored one-per-page, just that some authors might
find it nice if both approaches could eventually be accommodated.

(And yes, there are huge advantages to having each citation in
its own wiki page.)

> 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)

I like Cite:ref-id, it seems natural.  At some point it makes me
wonder if there exists (or ought to exist) a "cite://" url-like
syntax that is similar to the cddb:// urls used for identifying
audio CDs.  Then one could potentially make reference to bibtex
entries stored on other (wiki?) servers.  :-)

>    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)

I don't see anything wrong with these, FWIW.

> 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?

I'll be glad to lend whatever support I can, I think this
is a really useful component for PmWiki.  My actual code
time is a bit limited, but I'll be glad to provide comments
and possibly core modifications that may help.

Pm