User talk:Jakob.scholbach/Archives/2007/December

references

You had asked for an updated reference list. I made it and sent it to the .edu email address you have contacted me with. — Carl (CBM · talk) 16:20, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

Hi, the referenceing tool looks good. A minor bug, I looked up mardia as an author, however the source page listing was a mangle link rather than link to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilks%27_lambda_distribution it linked to just http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilks. --Salix alba (talk) 00:33, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. This is now fixed. Jakob.scholbach (talk) 09:27, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

I am not sure what to do about the problem that some people prefer full first names, some people prefer abbreviations only, and some prefer abbreviated middle names. It looks like there is no support for tying several spellings to one author. I ran into this when I replaced H.-D. Ebbinghaus by Heinz-Dieter Ebbinghaus for an existing book. I was asked whether I really wanted to create a new author. (No option to connect the new string with what was already in the database.) So what's the intended semantics for "author"? Just a string, possibly tied to a Wikipedia article? I am asking because this business about creating the author looks like it could be more than just a safeguard against typos.

I am also slightly puzzled by the "verification" options. Do they have any effect? Moreover, what's the unique column (forgot the technical term) in this database? Is it the ISBN? --Hans Adler (talk) 00:34, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

Ad 1: I personally think that an author should always be given with full firstname. Most people, however, don't seem to follow this idea. At the moment the DB does not find an (already existing) author like

"A. B. Lastname"

when you type

"Anton Bart Lastname"

which is something I will improve sometime soon. (The inverse should work, though). At this time, you can redirect one author to another one (in the detailed view of the author). THis will have the effect that when exporting reference templates, only the name,firstname,wikilink of the author which gets the redirect are shown.

Ad 2: Verification was only introduced due to the discussion with KSmrq above. At the moment practically all refs are tagged unverified. For later quality ensurance actions, this could play a more prominent role. The unique col is not ISBN (journal papers don't have one), there is an independent id field. Jakob.scholbach (talk) 13:18, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, your replies make me very happy. You seem to approach everything in the right way :-). Now I have also read your earlier discussions here, and it turns out you are also dreaming of the centralised bibliography database. I have some ideas related to this that I would like to discuss with you if/when zeteo is stabilised and you want to extend the project. But I almost expect I am not going to tell you anything new. --Hans Adler (talk) 15:00, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, I appreciate your kind words. Some of the ideas I have in mind are:

• adding information concerning online copies of journal papers (lots of journals publish at least a part of their papers online for free - the system should inform the user that at this and that url there is probably a online copy).
• more or less automatic updating of the db according to the growing use of ref templates in WP articles
• extending this to multiple Wikis, e.g. German, French etc. (need multilanguage support, but also separate wikilinks according to language etc.)
• extending this to other areas, Physics, Computer Sciences etc.
• user management, which will become necessary when the DB gets the attention of vandals etc. Jakob.scholbach (talk) 17:08, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

Hello Jakob. This new zeteo program seems to have potential. When I saw the discussion here it reminded me of http://www.usin.org. An article link in that system could be like [1]. Of course there are also DOI links and JSTOR links that some online systems already understand. You may already have seen the list of tools at Wikipedia:Citing sources#Tools. The French Wikipedia already has a central system for citations of math textbooks that are used in more than one article (example at [2]). Other interesting tools are CiteULike, Zotero and LibraryThing. The latter database will, if given an ISBN, return the list of articles in Wikipedia that mention that ISBN. Your system might also be of interest to the people working on Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals. EdJohnston 16:42, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, Ed, for your feedback. I've contacted both the French Math Wikiproject and the Academic Journals Wikiproject. Let's see whether they are interested in cooperating. Jakob.scholbach 14:24, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

Here is a trivial bug report: If an ISBN looks like this: "0521007585 (pb.)", then it is not converted. --Hans Adler 00:08, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

This is now fixed. Jakob.scholbach 14:30, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

Small improvement to zeteo

The fastest way for me to input data is to get it from MathSciNet in BibTeX form and then import it into the database. The page numbers in mathscinet use TeX form (--) for en dashes. If zeteo could automatically change -- to – or – in page ranges, I would be able to do the import without having to edit anything. — Carl (CBM · talk) 20:45, 2 December 2007 (UTC)

This should actually already be the case. For example, look at http://zeteo.info/references.php?id=295. The page entry in the datbase "1055--1070" (with double hyphen, as it comes from MathScinet), but the citation template reads

• Chernousov, Vladimir; Serre, Jean-Pierre (2006), "Lower bounds for essential dimensions via orthogonal representations", Journal of Algebra, 305 (2): 1055–1070, ISSN 0021-8693, MR 2266867 {{citation}}: Check |author2-link= value (help)

(with an en dash). My idea behind was not to change the user's input (either manual or via parsing Bibtex etc.) in order to avoid confusion and possible maltransformations. Only the citation template output (which is effectively the only real purpose) gets formatted. Jakob.scholbach 22:21, 2 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, I didn't notice it gets changed when the citation tag is produced. The BibTeX import is very helpful, since as I said MathSciNet already has info for many papers.

Do you run a regular backup of zeteo? I would appreciate the opportunity to download a database backup from time to time, so there is an extra layer of redundancy in case you need to leave Wikipedia. — Carl (CBM · talk) 14:58, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

I need to figure out how to set up a good automatic backup. For the moment, I'v send you via email the contents of the database. Jakob.scholbach 19:45, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

Adding [[en:blah | blah]]

Hi. When adding references to articles, your links include a prepended interwiki en: that is unnecessary within english wikipedia (and also apparently causes problems with WP:AWB). You've also been adding these to references that already had working links (see for example [3] and [4]). It seems like you have some sort of database you use, could you please modify things accordingly. Thanks. RobHar (talk) 23:47, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

I agree, btw. I've been using zeteo for all new references when available, and it is quite handy. The en: thing I usually have to fix. Another silly systematic problem is publisher=[[Cambridge University Press]]|place=[[Cambridge]] which happens to be a violation of section 3, subsection 46, paragraph 12 of Template:Citation which says not to include the place name if the place name is included in the name of the publisher and the publisher is a university press. I don't know how you could have missed that one.

• publication-place (or place): The city of publication. If more than one town/city is listed on the title page, give the first one or the location of the publisher's head office. If the city is not well-known, you may add a county, region, or state. States in the U.S. are denoted by a two-letter code; for example: place=Paris, TX (no period at the end). Where the publisher is a university and the place or location is included in the name of the university, do not use this parameter.

Thanks for zeteo, it has made it much easier to improve references (cost in my time of adding a reference much lower) and improved the consistency. JackSchmidt (talk) 00:02, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

OK, I see. I will omit the "en:" prefix when exporting the templates. (This was intended for later, when the database is hopefully serving not only the en.wikipedia, but also others. But for now it is clearly meaningless, I agree). As for the other problem with the location of publishers etc.: I cannot be responsible for the validity nor the formal adherence to every paragraph written in some guidelines. I imported the information from Wikipedia articles and some also from Bibtex files, so this information was there somewhere. So, Jack, if you come across such a problem, please just edit yourself the publisher, in this case CUP and delete the location parameter. The quality of the database is in need of some manual work. For example, if you look up all publishers "Cambridge" it gives you 18 publishers, 15 of which are effectively the same, namely CUP. Some of them do have a location in the name, some have abbreviations... You can help by redirecting the "malformatted" publishers to the one which is good. (To do so, edit the malformatted item, input Cambridge in the redirect field and choose the corresponding well-formatted item. Then, when exporting a publication of the malformatted one, the wikilink, name and (if existing) location of the well-formatted will be shown instead). Many thanks for your help! Jakob.scholbach (talk) 10:15, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. I will endeavour to fix exisintg "en:"s, note that they are also being generated for some of the "...link =" arguments. Rich Farmbrough, 12:18 6 December 2007 (GMT).

I've fixed the problem. (I didn't know that AWB moves the [[en:blah|blah]] links to the end.) Thank you, Rich, for cleaning the stuff up. Jakob.scholbach (talk) 16:14, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Discussion of bibliographic tools at WP:VPT

Hello Jakob. The Zeteo tool is one of those being discussed in this thread. EdJohnston (talk) 19:05, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

SICI, in case you don't see it there.  :-) It's not good for regular users to be used in links, though. — Omegatron 06:08, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

References

Hello, I am a user on the French Wikipedia site, and I am interested in your database of mathematical reference. I do not know yet how you use it (is it possible to export directly a reference from the database which creates the model and the reference page? The current system with its two steps is really a bore ... What would you like us to do, concretely ? My pseudo is Cgolds on fr:wp. Thanks for your proposal! --82.123.212.2496:51, 8 December 2007 (UTC)