[pmwiki-users] Problems with multiple citation entries per page (Was: bibliographies revisited)

[christian.ridderstrom at gmail.com]

On Thu, 28 Sep 2006, John Rankin wrote:

> While commenting, perhaps give thought to how much of a PITA this would 
> be. There appears to be a *lot* more development to support a multiple 
> citations per page solution, as you lose the ability to re-use a whole 
> lot of existing code.

I think it might be fruitful to discuss this. Could you expand on what you 
think these problems are?

> Why, exactly, would it be a PITA? Is removing this pain worth
> increasing the budget by 10%, 20% ... 100% ... whatever it takes?

Let's first figure out what the drawbacks are with not allowing multiple 
citations per page. Primarily I'm worried about losing interoperability 
with the BibTeX format.

In my mind it would be great to be able to work on preliminary versions of 
documents online in a wiki fashion. These can then be typeset using e.g. 
your WikiPublisher. However, I believe that for larger works and finer 
control, it is still desireable to be able to complete the document with a 
separate system (LaTeX, LyX or whatever).

In order to do that you really want to be able to have consistency between 
a bibliographic database stored on the wiki, and the corresponding 
database stored as .bib-files. So it is not just about being able to 
import all your .bib-files into a single large bibliographic database on 
the wiki - you also need to be able to extract the .bib-files again.

To me the real gain is then the automatic interoperability you could get 
for "free" by storing one .bib-file per wiki page. If it is really stored 
this way or not is much less important than ensuring the interoperability.

> Is multiple citations per page a "must have on day one" or
> a "could be added later" requirement?

Regarding interoperability, I'd say it is something that is a "could 
be added later", although I'd phrase it as "must be able to have later".

Anyway, my purpose with this particular thread is to discuss the problems 
(and extra work) that would be required in order to allow multiple 
citations on one wiki page.

/Christian

-- 
Christian Ridderström, +46-8-768 39 44               http://www.md.kth.se/~chr