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  • From: Jodi Schneider <jschneider AT pobox.com>
  • To: dchandler AT mit.edu
  • Cc: acawiki-general AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [acawiki-general] How Browse displays and multiple authors
  • Date: Sat, 17 Sep 2011 11:22:55 +0100

Hi Dana,

Really glad for your questions and suggestions! More below...

On Sat, Sep 10, 2011 at 3:30 PM, Dana Chandler <dchandler AT mit.edu> wrote:
Hello --

I have a few questions about/suggestions for improvement, I wanted to run them by everybody.

First, is the browsability of article summaries. It seems rather awkward to put "journal" as the first field that the articles can be viewed by. There are way too many values for this to be a useful field to sort on first, especially since many articles are coming from conferences that might not be known. The most natural first category seems to be Subject because you can scan all the choices and decide what you're interested in. Next, it seems like it would be useful to add in an "Author" field to browse by.

I agree: how about this as an order?
Subject
Tag
Author (needs further investigation)
Journal 
Article Title

The browsing is run by Semantic Drilldown:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Semantic_Drilldown

The plugin itself was developed for another website where the values are more constrained -- the sheer number of different values (say, for journals, as you point out) makes it less usable on AcaWiki. I'd like to see us develop a wishlist of changes to the plugin itself, and find people willing to implement them.



Second, I was wondering about the author field and whether it accepts and parses multiple values well. So that if an Author were a browseable field, would it be able to pick out each of the multiple authors so that clicking on any of them would cause the article to show up? Also, authors are entered "First name, Last Name"... would acawiki be able to pick out the last name?

That's a good question. With authors entered "First Last, First Last, ...", it's difficult to parse some names (e.g. multipart last names like Jean-Claude Van Damme). I'm not sure. I tried playing around a new Semantic Form, based on their documentation, but I'm not getting the results I expected.

We may want to make authors first class entities, the way they are in Discourse DB:
http://discoursedb.org/wiki/Special:RunQuery/Item_query?ItemQuerier%5Bauthor%5D=A&ItemQuerier%5Bsource%5D=New&wpRunQuery=true
But that might make more work when entering items.

In particular, for BibTeX import, I'm not sure whether we can do more than separate each author's full name, since First Last and First Last and ... is used there.


Finally, for citations, is there any reason why Volume/Issue/Page number has been omitted from the citation for a journal? 

No -- I think we need to add that back. It's hard to make these forms easy to read/use and also comprehensive.

Do you mind filing this as a bug, Dana? 
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Wikimedia

-Jodi


Best,
Dana

-------------------------------------------------------------------
Dana Chandler
Ph.D. Student, Economics

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Department of Economics



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