Journal Info Prototype
From Eureka
| Antarctica Journal of Mathematics | ||||||||||||
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| Basic Info |
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| Editors |
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| Impact (eigenfactor.org) |
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| Price info (journalprices.com) |
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| Price History (AMS survey) | ||||||||||||
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This is a static prototype for how the Journal Info template will basically look. All the information in there is hard-coded, it's not a real template (that's why this page is in the main part of Eureka and not at the Templates namespace).
Go to Template:Journal Info Template Test and click on history and cycle through the revisions to see various versions of this box. Go to the Talk:Journal Info Prototype page to discuss it.
This is just a rough sketch, so that we can discuss how the thing should work. Don't imagine that I'm happy with it - I'm not ; it's far from a polished article. I included loads and loads of information in it, just so that everyone knows what we are dealing with... not because I think everything should be there.
The point of this prototype is twofold :
- It gives the Eureka community a chance to discuss how everything should look and work.
- It can be improved by technically minded wikiworkers.
Go to Editor Info Prototype to see the prototype template for editor's pages.
Contents |
Proposal for how it will all work
- Sometime soon, the second Great Download occurs : for each journal, a bot grabs this information from www.journalprices.com and www.eigenfactor.org. To be precise, that's all the data on the current template, minus the editorial board info and the Subject tags.
- This information appears in template form at the top of the source of each journal's page, like this:
{{Journal Info
| Name = Journal of X and Y
| Published by = So and So
| 2006 Price = such and such
... }}
Ordinary editing then takes place below that template call. (I'd actually prefer to have the template at the bottom of the source... don't know how to do this).
- This is exactly the same way as things work on wikipedia. See the source for the Zulus ethnic group (ed : Bayete! Wena WeNdlovu. transl. Long live the king!).
- By the way, all the parameters in that template call are optional.
- So... most journal pages will start off life just having these templates. Humans then arrive and edit the page as usual with human information. They can also add things to the template. For instance, one could add the editors and the subject areas for K-Theory. To do this, one would simply add these lines to the template call, eg.:
{{Journal Info
...
| Editor-in-chief(s) = people/person
| Managing Editor(s) = people/person
| Subject area = Topology, Geometry
... }}
That's the beauty of the wiki - we're not just relying on static data... we can generate new data and even new types of data as we go along.
Editor's templates
- Each editor gets their own mini-template too, which goes on the editor's page. Go to Editor Info Prototype to see the current version.
- It will include just a few fields, like (everything optional) image, university, and crucially, the journals he/she edits for.
- The journals A. Einstein edits for will not be editable on A. Einstein's page. It will be derived information, obtained via an inline query. This is a complex issue to think about, and has its advantages and disadvantages (see below).
- In other words, the source for an editor's page will start with a template, and then text-as-usual:
{{Editor Info
| Image = image
| University = U. of Karlsruhe
}}
A. Einstein is an editor for the Antarctic Journal of Mathematics. He currently resides in
Florida, and his is interests are ...
- However, in the code for the template Editor Info, an inline query is performed resulting in a list of the journals A. Einstein edits for, and this is displayed in the graphical infobox.
Don't forget possibility to add new data fields
The most important thing to understand is that we can add new data fields to this template, that users generate as time proceeds. Things like editorial boards and subjects, but also things like 2007 price.
Random points about prototype Journal Info template
- Observe the different kinds of functionality involved (also notice the hoverboxes). Clicking on Y.Eti and Sons takes you to the page for the publisher Y. Eti and Sons. Clicking on the magnifying glass takes you to the category Category:Journals published by Y. Eti and Sons.
- Clicking on Price per article takes you to the Attributes page Attributes:Price per article. Clicking on the magnifying glass does a search of all journals, ordered by Price per article. This is just a start. We must discuss how we want things to work.
- The AMS Price History data is overwhelming. How should we deal with this data? It is important data, it's tied in with the reason for this site! In fact, it goes back to 1994.
- Next to Eigenfactor I have placed a little token (32nd), which is meant to indicate somehow that this journal is "32nd in the ranking of Eigenfactors". This data could be (a) hardcoded - since we're only going to get updates of Eigenfactors once a year, or (b) obtained via inline queries (though there are issues in SMW 0.4 as opposed to SMW 0.7).
Final comments
The core idea of Eureka is still the fact that it's a wiki. Users add text to pages. The "human information" on Eureka - like why the editors of K-theory resigned - will always be more valuable than the Semantic marked up functionality.
Semantic data is just a bonus.
In fact, we're hardly using this functionality at the moment - the only part where it was used in the above discussion was the part where the journals that A. Einstein edited for were calculated from an inline query. That's partly because SMW 0.4 is a bit primitive and has an ugly search page, and partly because SMW (even 0.7) doesn't yet provide the low-level hands-on power one needs to really do some data tricks. Nevertheless, the option is always there; better to build it in from the start.
Also, it gives us the option of, at any point, doing an inline query on the data. For instance, you might make a page entitled "Expensive Topology journals", which then performs an inline query on 2007 data (which would have been filled in by users, lol) as follows:
Topology journals are getting expensive! According to Eureka, the 10 most expensive topology journals as of 17 August 2007 are : <ask format="ol" limit=10> [[Category:Topology]] [[Name:=*]] </ask>
Anyhow, that's just a fun game. It's not a do-or-die thing for the wiki... but it's nice to know that the functionality is sort-of there.
C00L
I just want to say that this prototype is friggin' cool. I'll go with whatever you guys come up with! I hope you can automatically set up journal info boxes for tons of math journals automatically, and get data into some from the available online sources without violating copyright law. But that's all obvious. I just want to tip my hat to you. --John Baez 16:18, 19 August 2007 (EDT)
- Thanks John. How should we display self-archive information (see the talk page)? I know you have some ideas on that. Let's hope we get the green light in terms of copyright; if I could just get my email working I'd fire off a few emails. Do you think we should email Thompson Scientific directly? --Brucebartlett 16:55, 19 August 2007 (EDT)
