Thursday, January 19, 2006

NPOV and sources (continued)

In the blog entry titled NPOV and sources, I mentioned the need for one resource where the sources are given for the Wikipedia articles on one subject. The consequence is that you may end up with a resource that is truly big. Today I learned about a resource of the UNESCO that has 1.600.000 references in the Index Translationum. The Index Translationum is a resource of books and its translations.

This is marvelous resource; there are some caveats. The on-line data is only from 1979 onwards while the resource started in 1932. The printed edition is available in the UNESCO library in Paris...

There are many possibilities with a resource like this.. It is indeed one of the resources that would benefit on a massive scale from a GOOGLE Book action. Obviously I would not care who does the scanning and who spends effort on digitizing this conten. It is however an extremely important resource and everyone would benefit if the data from 1932 to 1979 becomes publicly available as is the intention of this project.

There is more to learn about this project. When considering using it for presenting our sources in Wikimedia projects, we would like an API to refer to it.. I have not looked into it.

Thanks,
GerardM

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi Gerard

On the French Wikipedia, we now have a new namespace called "Référence:" which is used for quoting references in articles. See for instance http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Référence:Histoire_de_l'Égypte_ancienne_(Nicolas_Grimal) fot its current state now. In the longer term, one can dream of a references.wikimedia.org where such sources could be found and linked to !

Thanks for your posts, always nice to read !