Quotation
dharmatech opened this issue · 2 comments
Not sure if this style of quotation is feasible given the current design and architecture, but here's a feature request regarding quotation:
A user should be able to select text in another document and use it as a quotation in their own document.
This quotation should be a link which will take a user back to the referenced text.
This quotation should link to the particular version of the document that is referenced.
Users should be able to query a document to show a list of other documents which reference it.
Users should be able to query a document to see which parts are most often quoted.
This sounds like this could be an extension to the reference plug-in.
Would need to add the ability to let a site know that some content is being referenced, something similar would be nice when a page is forked. Might need to be moderated to prevent linking to spam.
Using the selected text will probably only work if this is being done within a neighbourhood - so not across browser tabs/windows - but could always use copy & paste to work around that.
The Reference Plugin could be extended to have a version property in the json. The version is known since we fetch the remote page's json in order to find the text for the reference. Perhaps a shift-click on the reference's flag would be the way one requests the cited version rather than the most recent.
Once the reference has been created the author is free to edit the text to be what ever is useful. I'm not sure how this mechanism can be improved without extending our (admittedly simplistic) user interface. Were there some way to naturally indicate a paragraph when the reference is created, then that paragraph's text could be used immediately (so long as it has text). We could also store the id of the paragraph and use that to scroll to and highlight the paragraph on retrieval.
Perhaps a reference that has been so augmented could be rendered with a double-quote mark in the flag. This would be suggestive of the large gray quotation marks that are popular in blogging software.
We have so far resisted operations that cause updates to remote sites. In federated wiki, one only writes to one's own site. This conviction makes some of the suggested use-based queries hard to implement.