Citation Bar

The "citation bar" is a proposal for a new framing of the journal display in wiki.

The core idea is that we highlight "citations" when we visually display the journal. Citations include the following components: - Page Forks - Transported Content - Academic Citations

Content imported into wiki requires appropriate accreditation. At the moment we have a number of transporters that bring free culture content into wiki, and reference external content through embedding images, and linking to external sites.

We seek to do these things in a new manner. In particular we look to: - Avoid visual clutter - Avoid complicated markup - Expose data programatically

This proposal seeks to achieve these aims by placing the Citation data within the existing Journal Json array, and to visualise that simply using the new enhanced journal display that we are calling here the __Citation bar__.

# Why rebrand the journal?

Page history is important, but it is most important to the author, as it provides her with access to undo. More important to the reader and equally important to the author is the provenance or citation history of the page (and the items on it).

In rebranding the journal and therefore moving the primary concept and display function to the provenance of the page, and away from the idea of the history of the page we place the readers and perhaps even the authors needs foremost.

in doing this we do not lose the concept of Page History. Provenance is rather a specific type fo page history - dare I say the important part. When we wish to view a full page history all we need to do is click on the journal journal item and view the full page history form there.

# Viewing page history

We currently visualise page history by displaying the journal at the bottom of every page.

A recent modification designed to provide a reader only wiki experience had the unfortunate consequence of breaking a clear view of the provenance of the page. This I would argue breaks the Creative Commons license in spirit if not in fact.

The Citation Bar in contrast would give prominence to the provenance, that is the History of Authorship of the page, while at the same time giving access to an even richer experience of the full history of changes to a page.

This could be achieved by providing more information on what is currently the Page Revision wiki page that is displayed when a viewer clicks on a journal entry.

An intermediary Provenance Page could instead be displayed, which would give a rich perspective of the connectedness of the page to the rest of the federation, emphasising any fork citations that were present. At present this would require a form of Asynchronous Citation Search.

In the future the addition of Wiki Hooks could go a long way to speeding up the display of citation history, and the speed of search, and graph visualisation.

# Citation bar icons

It is proposed that we take the opportunity to create new icons for the Citation Bar. Different forms of citation may require different visual appearances

# Citation Transport A number of transporters import content into wiki with appropriate citations. These include the MediaWiki Transport and all the transporters that are proxied as part of the Imagine Transport.

The suggested behavior of these transporters is that they would be able to trigger a Citation Action in the upgraded journal display that we would call the citation bar.

# Journal JSON

What should we do with regard to additional markup for citations in the journal?

One suggestion would be that in order to keep backward compatibility and to stick hard to the concept of Fork is the new like or rather Forking is a Citation in the free culture space - we should create a subtype of the Fork Action in the journal.

The current fork json looks like this:

{ "journal": [ ... { "type": "fork", "date": 1510388725904 }, ... ] }