[pmwiki-users] bibliographies revisited

[John Rankin]

On Thursday, 28 September 2006 8:39 AM, christian.ridderstrom at gmail.com wrote:
>On Tue, 26 Sep 2006, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
>
>I don't have time to follow up on this properly right now, so this is just 
>a quick reply.
>
>> 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.
>
>My reaction is that I'd probably be very annoyed if I was forced to use a 
>one-to-one mapping. My experience is that it's a PITA to do it
>that way.
>
>Using *virtual* pages on the other hand might be a good (parallel) 
>solution.

I don't understand this comment, I'm afraid.
>
>The rest I'll hopefully have time to read and give comments on
>tomorrow.

While commenting, perhaps give thought to how much of a PITA
this would be. There appears to be a *lot* more development to
support a multiple citations per page solution, as you lose 
the ability to re-use a whole lot of existing code.

Why, exactly, would it be a PITA? Is removing this pain worth
increasing the budget by 10%, 20% ... 100% ... whatever it takes?

Is multiple citations per page a "must have on day one" or
a "could be added later" requirement?

In particular, check
http://www.wikipublisher.org/wiki/index.php?n=Bibliographies.Plan

This is attempts to define a practical work plan of small
chunks, in a logical build sequence. Feel encouraged to
add to or resequence the plan, but please don't remove any
of the items. My feeling is that the first 3 stages are about
2:1:2 in relative size.

FWIW, a citation per page could work like this:

- an author writes [[Cite:Ridderström (2006)]]

- this doesn't exist, so the wiki displays a ? link

- click the link and you get a form that displays
* the new pagename in the Bibliography group (or the author's
  specified group)
* a pick list with the type of citation
* a text area into which an author can optionally paste or
  type bibtex markup
* a submit button

- when you press sumbit, you see a form appropriate to the
  type of citation, with either blank fields or the values
  you wrote in the text area, and a Save button

- the wiki page itself would use :field:value markup, so can
  also be edited like any normal wiki page

One might, for example, use BibDesk as the model, to the extent 
that one can replicate its functionality in a web browser.

I can see it would be nice to have the ability to enter
multiple citations per wiki page, but not why the above
would be very annoying and a PITA to use.



-- 
JR
--
John Rankin