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Database connectivity

The database connectivity table is biased towards the needs of academics in the sciences and tech sectors and so is misleading as to the real capabilities of the applications listed. Going by the table, RefWorks' connectivity looks terrible because (except for PubMed) all it offers falls under the "other" column. Now, I'm not a fan of RefWorks. In fact, I found the Wikipedia article because I was looking at alternatives. But the table ought to be rethought. Here are two columns that could be added, for instance. --Kartavyam (talk) 13:21, 19 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Software JSTOR ATLA Religion Database
Aigaion ? ?
BibDesk ? ?
Biblioscape ? ?
BibSonomy ? ?
Bibus ? ?
CiteULike ? ?
Connotea ? ?
EndNote ? ?
JabRef ? ?
ProCite ? ?
Pybliographer ? ?
refbase ? ?
RefDB ? ?
Reference Manager ? ?
RefWorks Yes Yes
Sente ? ?
Wikindx ? ?
Zotero ? ?
Software JSTOR ATLA Religion Database
It is currently limited, but I'd hardly call it 'biased.' We should eventually add MANY more online databases (in addition to ATLA & JSTOR). Feel free to add these! --Karnesky (talk) 15:17, 19 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Well "bias" is not necessarily intentional. As for adding columns to the table, is the best thing to just add columns with a bunch of question marks to the article itself? Or should new columns be staged on the discussion page and then moved to the article when they've been filled enough (e.g. > 50%). BTW, the table fragment above was intended for staging, people should feel free to edit it and add what they know. --Kartavyam (talk) 10:57, 20 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Ideally, neither: someone would do the leg work of looking up references (such as the other comparisons that this article links to) so that they could complete the other columns. One should not rely on their personal experience testing applications for adding information anyway. Rather than long tables on the talk page (such as the one above), a simple list of the databases that should be added might be more helpful. Perhaps a table would be o.k. on a subpage, but it seems "heavy" for a discussion page & would be harder to track & is unusual to find on other talk pages. If most of the rows can be completed, I think it is fine for their to be question marks in the main article. --Karnesky (talk) 13:32, 20 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Well, this ideal scenario is not something I can contribute to, for lack of time. As for personal experience, there's a difference between what somebody who relies on the marketing literature and documentation but does not use the software can tell you and what somebody who actually uses the software can tell you. For instance, yes, RefWorks exports to BibTeX but what the RefWorks people don't tell you is that it does not treat accented characters in a safe way (BibTeX chokes on what is exported by RefWorks) and it creates utterly useless keys to use in \cite commands. I've had to write my own python tool to clean up what RefWorks exports. In effect, this makes the BibTeX export capability of RefWorks useless for people who can't or don't want to deal with cleaning up the mess. This is a piece of information that could materially impact whether someone wants to use RefWorks or not but you don't get that from the literature provided by the company nor from people who perform a mere cursory inspection of the software. Only actual experience with the software will reveal this shortcoming. --Kartavyam (talk) 14:25, 20 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Please refer to WP:NOR. I never said we should rely on marketing literature--in many cases, features will be documented by some third party (such as those we link to) that hopefully satisfy WP:RS. --Karnesky (talk) 14:37, 20 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I think the databases that are added should not be a function so much of what each software supports, or what its marketing says, but what's potentially useful to various scholars (probably a lot more contentious!). For example, the current list very biased to sciences (pub med, IEEE, arXiv) and not the needs of e.g. Humanities scholars (say ... JSTOR would be a good inclusion there). However until I finish writing my thesis I don't have time to add this so feel free to ignore me. When I'm done I may come back and adjust it if no-one else has in the meantime. (For the record I use Endnote, for my secondary sources only. I'm finding it a bitch especially as I deal with Classics, whose ancient authors need to be cited in a specific way, along with object catalogues and specific abbreviations for special collections, along with the modern secondary sources in the usual styles, but it just cannot support two or more styles of referencing succesfully (it claims to, but implementation wise it sucks)). GermanicusCaesar (talk) 04:50, 6 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

API and developer extension points

I'm not sure if its what the previous commenter was after or not, but it would be really useful if this comparison could include whether or not each project offers api for working with the references/citations. For instance, I am trying to build an app which searches EndNote references and I learned that it only offers a C/C++ API (only desktop version of course). I was hoping the web version would offer some kind of web API for accessing the references, but no luck. Now I'm wondering if any of these other projects offer this capability. Other API/developer extension points could be interesting to catalogue as well. --Lmsurprenant (talk) 14:49, 2 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Bibliograph

Hi, I am the developer of the open source online bibliographic data manager Bibliograph (Website, GitHub, Sourceforge, Demo), which would fit very well into the list. Bibliograph is in constant development since 2006 and has been used in production at the Law Department of Humboldt-University Berlin since 2010. It is free to use, change and distribute. But before I start adding the info, I need to make sure that this doesn't violate any guidelines. Do I need a separate page before? Does it meet the standards of notability? Thanks for feedback Panyasan (talk) 19:59, 16 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

In general, adding corresponding rows in the respective tables, for the additional software, should be fine - facts are facts, a feature is supported or its not, the software has a specific license, and the homepage is what it is - there should be no contention re such comparison tables, just get in there and add the rows to the tables... — Preceding unsigned comment added by Zenaan (talk • contribs) 05:59, 10 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Potential mistake

I am not familiar with the information presented here, but I think I hove found a mistake. "BibBase Christian Fritz 2005 2013-07 (v3) Free No proprietary centrally-hosted website, intended for publication pages" This is one of the table entries. How can a program have a cost of free but be not free (look at the table if this doesn't make sense)? Again, I do not know the software but I believe it at least needs some clarification. Guy who couldn't get a username (talk) 17:20, 28 July 2014 (UTC) After looking back over the article, I found that there are several such entries. Can we work on a way to clarify this? Guy who couldn't get a username (talk) 17:22, 28 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Mendeley is not free software

Mendeley's license and terms of use clearly do not meet the definition of free software. So I am changing it's entry in the 'General' table to reflect this. SCRA5071 (talk) 13:19, 9 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

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On splitting the "General" table into "Proprietary" and "Libre" software

Splitting the "General" table into "Proprietary" and "Libre" software is not as good as keeping it united.

a) An alphabetical list allows readers to easily find the software package if they look for the name. A split table means that they have to look in two tables.

b) There is a color coded column with the heading "Free software" (yes|no) which makes it very easy to see in a combined table if a software is proprietary or not.

c) It does not make sense to include a column "Free software = no" in a table labelled "Proprietary software", and neither does "Free software = yes" in a table labelled "Libre software", but deleting this column in the split table would make it indeed harder to distinguish proprietary from free software. For these reasons, I propose to revert the split table to list all software alphabetically, regardless of whether it is proprietary or "libre".

Pahi (talk) 15:01, 7 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Disagree, and hold that combining the two categories into a single table is inadvisable for the following reasons:
1) Finding a particular package you already know about, is trivial in either case - each table is alphabetical, and search is otherwise trivial.
Searching using e.g. CTRL+F or auto-search-on-type makes no difference.
Searching two tables visually is a small difference.
Assuming that such an overhead is significant for any significant portion of the users of Wikipedia is insulting the intelligence of the average human user of Wikipedia.
2) Although a color coded column does allow one to visually identify "the current line" as being proprietary or floss software, when one is searching only for floss software, and wanting to compare floss software only, the intermixing of floss with proprietary makes it quite a bit slower to keep double checking each line, against the license, and the name, and any other feature one is interested in.
With a small monitor such as on my 12" laptop, and this large(ish) table, this also requires scrolling left and right, over and over again, which is very slow in comparison to having a table of just floss software (or proprietary when that is all I'm interested in).
3) Superfluous columns should perhaps be removed - in the split table, that means removing "floss=no" for proprietary software, and "floss=yes" for libre software; this is however debatable, as the "free-ness" of a license is indeed a feature (as in, software being proprietary is a positive feature for some), and some folks do appreciate being reminded of this;
I suspect in general that the proprietary vendors may prefer to not have this reminder be so obvious (see below).
3.b) If the issue of a color coded "license" feature column were considered significant as in "red looks negative" or something else emotional like that, then for the proprietary software, the column could be coded green, the heading be "Proprietary", and the text of each entry be "Yes". For some people, proprietary is genuinely seen as an advantage, and there's no scientific reason to trigger them in regards to their personal views.
3.c) Similarly, for the corresponding libre software column, it could just be header "license" and the text as the generally accepted abbreviation for that license (e.g. GPL2, GPL3+, MIT, BSD 3-clause etc).
4) It is posited that there is a significant and growing awareness of the benefits, and differences, of both proprietary as well as libre/ floss software.
Those who have either corporate imperatives to use proprietary software (e.g. due to perceived liability mitigation, perceived quality of customer support etc), and those who have a corporate or organisational imperative to use libre software (e.g. the human rights association I volunteer for), and are only interested in one subset, should not be penalised in their comparison research by the mixing up of these two fundamental categories.
Those who are ambivalent, are not disadvantaged with two tables except in the most minor way - and they're ambivalent anyway.
5) Combining proprietary with libre software into a single category table, can be seen to conflate proprietary, with libre/floss, software. This is not a good thing to do - it can be seen to be a political statement that those actually using the website table for comparisons, should consider both proprietary and libre floss software to be "roughly equivalent", when in fact the consequences to the user, and to the broader community, can be very significant indeed, and so papering over differences becomes a significantly political action.
When my company from some years ago had a corporate imperative to use proprietary software, it was decidedly irritating to continually reminded (both verbally and on the web comparison tables) of all the libre alternatives, when all I wanted was to compare the proprietary alternatives.
6) Libre floss software developers and corporate service providers, have a value proposition that libre floss software has foundations of benefit which ought not be glossed over nor conflated with proprietary software.
Proprietary software providers have a vested interest in conflating the benefits of libre floss software with those of proprietary software - that is, they have a vested interest in papering over the differences between proprietary and libre software, and their vested financial interest in creating such conflations causes a natural pressure upon sites like Wikipedia to aid and abett this conflation/ the papering over of the benefits (or even the differences) of libre software - it is unwise to submit to such pressure.
That is, combining the tables conflates proprietary with libre software, which is a disservice to both camps, whereas separating the tables preferences neither proprietary nor libre software.
7) As tables get larger, splitting them makes more sense regardless of categorization preferences. In other words, the less scrolling around the better, and so fundamental or broad category separation makes sense in this case, given that there are more than 5 packages being compared.
8) Those who have already made a decision that they require EITHER proprietary OR floss software and service providers, are given a disservice by mixing up the two tables into one large table; whilst those who are ambivalent are provided no real disservice by the separation.
So for these reasons, I propose we not combine the two tables into a single large table.
--User:Zenaan
Zenaan, we are not discussing if "combining the two categories into a single table is inadvisable" or not, but rather, if splitting the combined table into two is advisable or not.
ad 1) The article consists of 9 tables, not just one. Splitting just the first one but leaving the others untouched creates confusion.
ad 2) Wanting to check "any other feature one is interested in" against the proprietary/floss paradigm would mean that the other tables had to be split, too.
I agree that scrolling right and left can be tedious, but this is possibly due to Wikipedia tables not being very responsive. I also agree that some columns might be debatable and could be adapted, but deleting columns just to adapt the tables to cater for the limitations of a certain type of device is not advisable.
ad 3) We should consider features and characteristics, not what folks might appreciate or software vendors might prefer or not.
ad 4) As stated above, the whole article consists of 9 tables, all of them list the discussed software packages alphabetically. Do you propose to split all of them to make comparison research easier for those people that search along the lines of proprietary or floss?
ad 5) and 6) Let's keept political action out of the articles in Wikipedia, let's stick to being consistent. Splitting just one out of 9 tables along the lines proprietary/floss where these characteristics are discussed makes the whole article inconsistent, and this should be avoided.
ad 7) Your argument does not hold. If the items to be compared are many, the table will be as long as it will have to be. <irony>Or should we split the table of the planets of the solar system into separate groups, given that there are more than 5 planets being compared?</irony>
ad 8) Proprietary vs. floss is one possible characteristics and just one among many others people might be looking for. One could only be interested in software available for Mac, or software that has been updated in the last 12 months, or that is compatible with LaTeX. There are columns for these differences.
Summing up, since consistency would require all tables to be split, and since this would make the article less clear, I propose to revert the splitting of the first table into proprietary vs. floss software to make it consistent with the rest of the article.
--Pahi (talk) 17:32, 12 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Also, I propose RV of table split by User:Zenaan because of WP:NPOV concerns. User:Zenaan argues in 5) and 6) that NOT splitting the table into proprietary / floss software equals conflation of differences equals political action. This is a biased argument. In combination with the inconsistency introduced by splitting just one of 9 tables I propose RV the changes.
--Pahi (talk) 08:46, 13 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Fully agree.
Schlappwiki (talk) 10:43, 22 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]
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