[open-bibliography] Bibliographic standards for citing versioned documents?

[Daniel Mietchen]

Dear colleagues,

if a wiki contains information originally published elsewhere, the
question arises how the updated wiki version of such information
should be properly cited. Are there any bibliographic standards for that?

The National Library of Medicine has some guidelines on how to cite
internet resources,
including a section on wikis (cf.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK7266/#A61262 )
but it handles revisions by date and thus ignores that many revisions
may take place during
a day on some wiki pages. It also does not address the issue of how to
cite content that started out
elsewhere and has continued to evolve on a wiki.

The Species ID wiki ( http://www.species-id.net/ ) has recently, in
collaboration with the journals ZooKeys and PhytoKeys as well as the
Plazi repository, imported a number of taxonomic treatments as wiki
pages, and the above-mentioned issue was addressed by incorporating
the generic link to the wiki page into new journal publications, and
providing a suggested citation format on-wiki that includes the
original work along with a permalink to the most recent wiki version
and the wiki contributors until that version.

For some example pages, see
http://species-id.net/wiki/Neobidessodes_darwiniensis or
http://species-id.net/wiki/Sinocallipus_catba .

The publisher's news release on the matter is at
http://www.pensoft.net/news.php?n=53 , and I have commented in my blog
at
http://www.science3point0.com/evomri/2011/04/16/citing-versioned-papers-robots-and-reviewers/
,
touching upon the need for a karma system compatible with
collaboratively updated documents.

Comments and suggestions very welcome.

With my best wishes,

Daniel

-- 
http://www.google.com/profiles/daniel.mietchen