A system for external citations

[jkomoros]

Would show up in the info panel of a card (with a possible shortcut to it showing on the card itself).

A citation is a title, a link, an optional page number or other secondary information, and then a blob of markdown text

[jkomoros]

Some of the manual todos in the content library actually are citations

[jkomoros]

These should actually be called "References", with a citation boolean on them for ones that are an explicit citation. Otherwise they're just "see also, but for non-cards"

[jkomoros]

And then references should also have a "Same author" bool, which is to say, content from the same person who authored the card--which is more of a reference to an alternate medium for that content.

[jkomoros]

Should references be factored somewhere central? That would allow in the future doing something like "Show all cards that reference seeing like a state"

[jkomoros]

Have the references (should they be called citations in the internals, since that's more clear than the more general 'reference's) be a card, of type=reference. Cards that are references can also reference other cards. These references can be of reference_type tweet, person, publication. Each one has different fields that are expected. Like url, picture, etc.

Will need to factor it out so you can do queries on non-content cards. Maybe have an implied queryPrefix that the dialog normally sets to card-type:content but that can be set to card-type:reference.

Cards have a references map, which is just a map of card_id to true. Or, the key can be a string, which then means that the string gives more information about the reference, for example what page within the reference the thing comes from. (How to allow for direct vs indirect references, as noted above? most will be 'inspired by'). Could have two separate maps, or could be that the values of the keys of the map can have more information in them.

See also the issue about more formal ways of cards being related to each other (e.g. see also) and see what about that design makes sense to use.

... Should every author of cards or comments in the card web have their own reference card?

Create a separate issue to track having content-editable for different fields that's easy to do instead of highly intricate and bespoke like body. (Although if it's just a single text with no styling allowed the other fields will likely be easier)

[jkomoros]

Fields would include description, twitter link

[jkomoros]

Some citations are soft, e.g informed by a conversation with that entity. Some are very formal and specific, e.g. a quote. Some are more indirect, a general idea. That specificity might be implied in what you link to.

E.g, link to a person: very indirect. Link to a broader body of thing: more specific. Link to a specific page of a specific thing: most specific.

[jkomoros]

The idea of having these be literal cards, which would have to be explicitly excluded from all kinds of stuff, like similar cards, etc, seems messy. Derived cards (#344) feels like the right path.

[jkomoros]

When adding a new reference-type (as in #354), perhaps add a configuratino field for each of whether they should have any restrictions on what types of cards you can point to

[jkomoros]

Now with concept cards being fully fleshed out and all of the other associated machinery, this might not be THAT hard to do. There's still the question of if the data canonically lives in special fields that are only on citation cards or somewhere else.

[jkomoros]

There's two new type of card, a citation-author and citation-work card. They're both citations type cards. (Should we formalize the notion of sub-types of cards? E.g. a full-bleed card and quote card (#465) could be sub-types of content cards)

A new type of reference, a citation, which can point from any card to any card of type citation-*. If the link to the citation card has specific text (e.g. a page number) then it's a 'hard' citation, otherwise it has a soft citation. (What's the UI for setting this?)

Each citation card has the following types of derived fields (some of which might be empty):

• An author field, listing the names of 0 or more authors
• A Title field, the title of the work
• A Link field, the URL of the work (perhaps allow mutliple? maybe a primary_url and other_urls?, for example for link description

Notionally every citation reference points to a citation-work card. The work card has a set of authors, which might be set directly on the card (e.g. in a title_alterrnates-style field) or it might itseld cite citation-author cards, and extratct their titles to use as the set of authors.

In some cases though a specific work doesn't exist to cite; maybe it was based on an unciteable conversation with that person. Or maybe we don't yet have the specific work to reference, a kind of TODO. In either of these cases the card can have a citation reference directly to the author, which is effectively sugar for an implied citation-work card with a blank title and that one author.

A citation-work card will backport its authors field based on backported titles of author cards it cites. A citation-author card may not use a citation reference to any other cards. A citation-work card may only use a citation-reference to cards of type citation-author.

A citation reference backports text from the citation card it links to of the form <work-title> :: <author>, <author>. That structure allows it to have that data factored out on the card itself.

(Check the titles of works to ensure they never have the ::. Or maybe the delimiter should be \n, with the first line being work title, then each subsequent being an author).

[jkomoros]

backportFallbackTextMapForCard could be extended so instead of fetching title directly from other card, it uses cardTitleForFallbackText(card, reference_type). But the transitive nature of citation-work to citation-author still implies that citation-work have their titles done first before that...

But then that also breaks the "unset text for soft citation" thing

It's not that big of a deal to do the citation-work title generation by first backporting the text of citation-author to citation-work. synonymMap has a TODO to do multiple iterative runs on backporting, which is more annoying than this is, for a simple two-phase backporting

No need to treat Links specially; they can just be bullets lists in the body field.

It's not a big deal to have getCardTitleForBackporting manually go back for each card that has refs to an author, because it will be relatively rare and also only one ply backward.

[jkomoros]

• [x] Add a work and person card type (not having a citation- prefix helps avoid ugly slug names in URLs)
• [x] The card type drop down should show descriptions of card types on hover to make sure you pick the right one
• [x] Have both citation and citation-person reference types so the card can tell itself what kind of citation it is
• [x] Add a citation reference type (with allow/deny lists set as described above for card types)
• [x] Double check the from/to card types to make sure it's not possible to get in a weird citation loop (they need to forbid linking from the same type as themselves, and person needs to not allow citing from a work either)
• [x] Make sure citations get auto-slugs based on work title and author name
• [x] Persons should render out works that cite them above other non-works that cite them
• [x] Citation-work renders authors on the page directly
• [x] Exclude citations from "cards that link here" side panel
• [x] Update default WORK card body text
• [x] Suppress missing reciprocal links to person and work cards (captured in #496)
• [x] Print out disabled concept types to reference
• [x] Add Citations for a card to the right rail
• [x] Add a person/book icon for work and author
• [x] getCardTitleForBackporting derives a title for citation-work that also includes the title of cards of type citation-author it references via citation. it doesn't recurse, but just directly uses the author title.
• [ ] An auto-todo for a non-work card citing an author, since really there should generally be a work (they can force disable it if it's a conversation or other unciteable thign)
• [x] Figure out why backporting text doesn't seem to be working for title
• [ ] Have a publication card type. they can point to a person. a work can point to a publication can point to a person. E.g. "Stratechery", and anything that wants to cite stratechery would point to it
• [ ] Verify creation flows work
• [ ] Add some way to have a 'hard' citation to a specific page
• [ ] Allow authors sepcified directly on the work card as title alternates and not just as outbound references
• [ ] Allow a "work_type" field (book, tweet, article, etc) (requires a config for a field to only be one of an enum)
• [ ] In the future consider having special fields for twitter link, main link, etc so they can be rendered specially.
• [ ] Do quote cards (#465)
• [ ] Add a twitter link type
• [x] Don't allow saving a card that has an invalid link type (e.g. not a URL)
• [x] Clean up rendering of external_link.
• [x] Disallow external links of certain types for certain cards (update mayNotChangetype reason or whateve rthat logic is)
• [ ] Render out external links within the body of work/person cards
• [ ] When navigating to a person or work, it should go to it in the /c/everything/work/ collection. (See #680)
• [x] Allow editing of external links
• [x] Icons for external links
• [x] Merge branch citations to main and deploy
• [ ] Person and work cards should have a picture (of the person, or book cover)