Discontinuation of Librarybase

[James Hare]

All,

After discussing it with Adam Shorland and Thomas Arrow, I have made the decision to discontinue the Librarybase wiki. The wiki and its associated SPARQL endpoint have been deleted, with dumps of the database and the MediaWiki application code saved on my computer if anyone is interested.

Librarybase started in September 2015, before WikiCite, before federated Wikibase, before the Wikibase Docker container. Aside from the wonderful technical developments that have occurred since, the aims of the project – to build a comprehensive database of Wikipedia’s references – have gained much more ground on Wikidata than they did on the Librarybase wiki. Since the Librarybase wiki subsequently fell into disuse, I figured it made the most sense to close the wiki.

This does not mean federation is dead. I continue to believe that getting the most out of WikiCite will require specialized Wikibase instances – and the good news is that it is easier than ever to set them up. However, because the Librarybase wiki was so old, the way in which it was set up was simply not sustainable. My hope is that future Wikibase instances set up for WikiCite are much easier to set up and maintain.

As part of discontinuing the Librarybase wiki, I am also discontinuing the Librarybase brand in favor of consolidation around WikiCite.

Best regards,

James Hare

[Luca Martinelli]

Dear James,

I'm somewhat sad for your decision, even though I completely get why
you did it, and do share your intention of consolidating WikiCite.

Thank you anyway for this brave decision, and let's keep up the good work. :)

Cheers,

L.

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Luca "Sannita" Martinelli
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utente:Sannita

[Dario Taraborelli]

Hi James,

I wanted to thank you and the rest of the LibraryBase contributors for this work and acknowledge that the project had an incredibly important role in shaping the vision behind WikiCite: I am very grateful that it happened and that you and others started mapping this uncharted territory way before others did. If there are ways in which we can learn and reuse anything from the project going forward — from data models to code to actual data — where is the best place for people on this list to find these resources?

Also +1 on raising the question of federation. While it's been a very hot topic in the Wikidata community (and beyond) over the last 1-2 years, I am still struggling to understand how a graceful migration of content already in Wikidata to a dedicated Wikibase instance would work. I am emphasizing "graceful" as I am not thinking of the technical problem (a JSON dump import and custom Wikibase configuration is not rocket science), but of an approach that wouldn't break things, processes and community expectations in Wikidata. I feel that going forward, learning about how to spin off existing projects from Wikidata (and determining when it's appropriate or not to do so) is going to be one of the most important things for the community to sort out.

Dario

Dario Taraborelli  Director, Head of Research, Wikimedia Foundation
research.wikimedia.org • nitens.org • @readermeter 

[Samuel Klein]

As part of this conversation, it would be great to have a subpage about WikiCite describing the plan-of-record for where wikibase-format data on the set of {{all items with DOIs}, {all webpages cited in journal articles + WP articles}} should be stored.

I wish the answer to be 'WikiData', but my sense is that this is not currently desirable to many contributors.

[Melody Kramer]

Hi all,

The blog would be very interested in a post from you, James, about this decision. Sunsetting a project is a difficult decision and I think others could learn from the history of this project and the decisions you made. Please reach out to digita...@wikimedia.org if you're interested in this! We'd love to feature your writing!

Mel 

> email to wikicite-discuss+unsubscribe@wikimedia.org.

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Luca "Sannita" Martinelli
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utente:Sannita

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Twitter: https://twitter.com/wikicite

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Dario Taraborelli  Director, Head of Research, Wikimedia Foundation
research.wikimedia.org • nitens.org • @readermeter 

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-Mel
@mkramer
This is my website: http://melodykramer.github.io/

 

[Melody Kramer]

Hi all,

Dario just let me know that a giant warning sign appears on my previously-sent email. It's me. You can email my work address (mkr...@wikimedia.org) to double check. (Though if phishers decide to go the route of "please post your knowledge to the Wikimedia blog," I will be quite impressed...)

Mel "not a phisher" Kramer 

[Thomas Arrow]

Hi, 

I'd also like to thank everyone who put time into the project and listened to us ramble on about it :).

I think it's actually a good sign that we've sunset it; mostly because of the huge amount of work people have put into similar items on Wikidata.

One thing that is missing there (compared to Librarybase) though is tracking WP citations of the works; I think we could still put up a Wikibase to do this.

Cheers,

Tom

[f...@imm.dtu.dk]

Hi James,

Thanks for your work on Librarybase and Wikidata. It would be nice with
some kind of information about Librarybase for the sake of posterity
(both technical, social and "philosophical), e.g., in - as suggested - a
blogpost on the Wikimedia blog.

/Finn

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[Daniel Mietchen]

Thanks, James.
I agree with the other commenters that
- it was good to have Librarybase for inspiration and initial experimentation,
- it was probably about time to retire it in its original form
- it would be good to explore how the missing pieces from its original
mission can be tackled now that we have begun to explore the
bibliographic and Wikibase spaces a bit more.

Are there any screenshots around from when it was live? Was it
archived with the Internet Archive? If so, that could help address the
HTTP errors.

I'd also like to document it in more detail at
https://wikibase-registry.wmflabs.org/wiki/Item:Q3 .

For this, we would probably need a new property "End date" (similar to
the existing "Creation date").
For this, we would probably need a property proposal.
For this, we would probably need a property proposal page.
Which namespace would be best for that?
To discuss this, we would probably need a project chat - where should that go?

d.

> email to wikicite-discu...@wikimedia.org.
>

[James Hare]

On the subject of re-using Librarybase’s knowledge: honestly, I think most of it is incorporated into current WikiCite practice.

The main idea I want people to take away that has not yet been incorporated into practice, as far as I can tell, is the different components needed to build a database of citations on Wikipedia. I would like to see a three part system: the first component works to map identifiers and databases together (PMCID vs. PubMed ID vs. DOI vs. ISBN vs. Wikidata and so on), regardless of a given document’s appearance in Wikidata; the second component is an immutable database of citation event/objects for a given wiki, and the third component is Wikidata. So you might have citation #57 in an article on cherry trees, which is then mapped to Q123456 on Wikidata, which should also tell you all the other identifiers that paper has. The key thing here is treating the citations and the thing being cited as separate entities. For the record, I don’t think citation events should be on Wikibase; they should be treated as immutable (i.e. un-editable) objects in a database.

Most of the interesting code grew not out of Librarybase but from my work on Wikidata, and I am gradually working on giving the code better structure and making its operations scale better.

Cheers,

James Hare