4 ms·
Sayre's Law: "In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s
by smitty1e 5y ago
Sayre's Law: "In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law
Was there ever a less essential fiefdom than citation formats?
- dsr_ 5y agoHave you noticed that search engines suck? Citation formats are an attempt to end up with a search engine that doesn't suck. (They can do lots of other things along the way.) Options: 1. Accept any format and try to turn it into your own internal representation. Problems: (a) your own representation is a citation format; (b) you need to write an infinite number of converters and hire an infinite number of trained people to work out the edge cases. 2. Accept a limited number of common formats. Problem: your search engine will not be useful for a majority of the corpus. 3. Convince everyone that your new citation format is unstoppable. Problems: (a) convincing everyone; (b) actually having that citation format cover, say, 99% of the cases; (c) XKCD#927 (Standards). Dublin Core is/was a terrible attempt at a type 3 solution.
- karaterobot 5y agoSome people catalog information every day, so it matters to them for practical reasons. Same with people who rely on those resources being accurately cataloged.
- smitty1e 5y agoI'm ok with obsessing about the data. Presentation, an order of magnitude less. Substance >>> style.
- karaterobot 5y agoCataloging format is to style as database modeling is to... well, style. It's got nothing to do with aesthetics, it's about describing the data in a way that makes it useful later.
- brazzy 5y agoYou're missing the point. Citation formats are not a matter of style here. It's about making research results easier to find, which directly affects the quality of new research.