References

Mary Sue Ittner msittner@mcn.org
Sat, 15 Nov 2003 10:33:41 PST
Hi All and especially Jane,

I was wondering whether we needed to put the references on the wiki pages 
in the same way. Usually bibliographies start with the author, but listing 
them that way in a sentence seems awkward. I think the Color Encyclopedia 
of Cape Bulbs will be an excellent resource for so many of the Cape Bulbs. 
But if I add it as Manning, John, Peter Goldblatt and Dee Snijman, The 
Color Encyclopedia of Cape Bulbs (Portland, Timber Press, 2002)and a 
description it just doesn't seem to read very well. I started thinking what 
a pain it would be to have to enter that information for all the South 
African genera we already have wiki pages for.

Then it occurred to me that we could use the wiki for Jane's project. It 
wouldn't be nearly as sophisticated as what she planned, but perhaps it 
would be a start. On the main wiki page we could create a bibliography of 
reference books. Then on the genus pages we could link to the bibliography 
using a code for whatever book we are referencing. We'd have to come up 
with a shorthand for each book so people could quickly find it if they 
wished to know all the details. I suppose we could use a numbering system, 
but then the books wouldn't be alphabetical. So I'd suggest author and date 
as Jane initially proposed as a possibility and hope that some of the more 
prolific writers haven't published a lot in the same year, at least not 
major works like we would be adding.

How I would envision this would be adding a sentence for the reference to 
each genus page it applied to. So in using my example above, I could paste 
the sentence below on all the appropriate genera for the Cape:
References on the Cape Floral province species can be found in Manning et. 
al. (2002). I'd enter  the author and date like this: [Manning et.al. 
(2002) | url for wiki references page]
That would link the specific reference to the wiki page where the full 
details could be found. Obviously not everyone would be able to figure out 
how to do this, but if Jane would volunteer to help those people who had 
information, but didn't want to add it, since this was her original idea, I 
think it might work. In the long run it would save time and make the wiki 
pages easier to read for most of the people who won't care about 
references, but still would give them for those who did care.

And since the question of books always comes up with people who are new to 
the subject we'd be creating a general list at the same time.

What does everyone think of this idea?

Mary Sue

PBS List Administrator, Wiki Worker, TOW Coordinator (Whew!)


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