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  • From: Jodi Schneider <jodi AT acawiki.org>
  • To: "AcaWiki general (listserv)" <acawiki-general AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [acawiki-general] Fwd: comments on BibTeX import, from Jim Pitman
  • Date: Sat, 24 Oct 2009 12:43:31 +0100

Hi AcaWiki general list!

Jim Pitman gave permission to share these comments.

What's essential to change for our BibTeX import now? In particular--do you think the AcaWiki summary should be pulling from the note field (leaving the abstract field for the official summary)?

Let us know what you think!

-Jodi

On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 10:42 PM, Jim Pitman <pitman AT stat.berkeley.edu> wrote:
Hi Neeru,

I uploaded a couple of summaries to acawiki and mostly it worked fine.
Note these are almost verbatim copies of summaries of my own work, but I
hold the copyright for electronic distribution (even for the Springer volume!).

There are a number of bugs/issues with the bibtex upload, then some comments/questions.

1) bibtex allows names to be represented as Last, First
You have to parse this, else it becomes two names.

2) The bibtex "note" field was interpreted as the summary. This seems a bad idea.
It is commonplace to use the "abstract" field for a summary. I expected this to be
pulled in ut it did not happen.
In any case, none of this is standard bibtex, and it needs to be documented.

3) You explicitly invite contributions about books, and I provided one, but the metadata
format is unitype for a journal article. This means some shoe-horning in the metadata which
lowers its quality.

4) There is only room for one url in "Online Version". It is common that there is more than one,
e.g.
author's homepage
digital repository
publisher website


As a general comment. You will do well if you oblige users to provide clean metadata. The big
reviewing service in Mathematics, Math Reviews, which became MathSciNet, originally regarded its
prime content as reviews. Over time it became clear that the main value was from high quality metadata
acquisition and search over that. Reviews/Summaries are great, but primarily their value is for searching
not reading.

Now here is a radical idea.
Say I have an article where the abstract is copyright by a publisher.
So fine, I have a copy of the abstract, and I upload the words of the abstract to Acawiki in random order.
It is not human readable, but it is great for search engines, and it is arguably fair use!
Now if someone wants to take these words and rearrange them in to something useful, or add their own, more power to them.

A question is what if anything you would do to stop a user doing that, not just for their own article, but for someone else's.
For that matter, what are you doing to prevent copyright violations. If someone posts an abstract verbatim, that is not their
copyright, are you legally protected?

enough for one email!
--Jim







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