We should probably formalize the citation format for nostr sources before normies make it client-dependent.
Discussion
oh.
Calling the real experts :)
Yeah, we have a plan. My husband thought it up, since he babysits people writing STEM academic papers at his company, and we'd be solving a new problem they all have.
I'm glad you brought that up.
I'm working on a NUD draft, at this very moment, because we need it for the Euler (v0.2.0) edition of #Alexandria, due to the focus on research papers. I think you'll like it because it'll include something novel for Nostr to specialize in.
Ignore the normies, in this thread. 😅 No point, not going full shock-and-awe.
This thread is not answering the important questions of WHERE DO YOU PUT THE CITATION DATA? and WHAT SORT OF CITATIONS ARE POSSIBLE?
Once you figure those two things out, the citations are WORA, and the client dev can format them however they like.
You only need to formalize the URI. Something like nostr://blah, instead of http. Also see DOI, and their standard URI.
https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/pull/1708
nostr:npub1wqfzz2p880wq0tumuae9lfwyhs8uz35xd0kr34zrvrwyh3kvrzuskcqsyn
nostr:npub1m3xdppkd0njmrqe2ma8a6ys39zvgp5k8u22mev8xsnqp4nh80srqhqa5sf
nostr:npub1gcxzte5zlkncx26j68ez60fzkvtkm9e0vrwdcvsjakxf9mu9qewqlfnj5z
It's not very polished, since I just hacked it together, but it gives the general idea, that you document the citation information once, and then plug it in, with different styles and formatting.
You can then write an endnote that is also a footnote or an in-line reference within the publication. Or cite a LLM result with proper documentation of how you achieved that result.
I put the simple formatting directive at the top, for people who will be like TL;DR.
This means that we don't have to agree on how to format citations, just how to structure the data contained in the citations. This is really important because different academies have different mandatory formats, for their papers.
I went and checked on the common citation formats (APA, Chicago, MLA), and suggested some additions to include data needed to generate those. I've probably missed something. All three use the same basic data for web citations, but there is more variation for hardcopy publications.
I agree with the approach wholeheartedly. Let's define the citation data in machine-readable form, and let clients determine the best way to format it for use in a human-readable document.
Why not just use bibtex. Optionally add bibtex to events. There are libraries to render bibtex in any citation format. Include a url field in the bibtex, and set it to nostr://whatever
We have an opportunity here to suggest a citation format for traditional formats to cite Nostr events, as well as the other way around.
Nostr is odd because it's not a website, and thus the same cited Nostr event may be accessible on multiple different websites. There is no concept of that in the traditional formatting style guides. That means we get to define it.