Citations: Public List

[garethrees]

Citations: Public List

Let’s showcase the growing list of citations in public! This will help further inspire and demonstrate how ATI can be used.

Before we start: Academic → Research

We previously generalised the types of citation. One further improvement that we should make before making these more public is renaming “Academic” to “Research”. This encompasses a broader set of similar work, and I think will be less off-putting to less formal links that we’d still be very interested in.

84cf979 has an example of what needs to be done here.

BEFORE: 🎓 Academic
AFTER: 📚 Research

The Citations Page

We’ll basically mirror the admin view at /admin/citations in a user-friendly way.

We’ll start off with a header and a bit of blurb about what citations are and why it’s useful for us to track them, and then a short description of each of the citation types.

I’m not over the moon with “Citations” as the main name for these, so open to options about how we communicate these in general. Loop @MyfanwyNixon in when we've got the bones of this in place and start thinking of the copy we need (the intro blog post could be useful here).

We’ll then render a paginated list of citations, 50 per page, ordered by most recent first.

We’ll just show the Citation#title if present, falling back to Citation#source_url, pointing at the InfoRequest#title and then the PublicBody#name.

Not rendering the names of requesters or the user who added the Citation helps reduce the chances of PII data indexing issues.

Where a Citation#description is present, render it underneath the Citation in relatively small/unobtrusive text, perhaps in a <summary> tag.

RSS / JSON

We should also add a way to programmatically access the feed of citations. JSON or RSS is fine – whichever makes most sense.

Citation Title & Description

Two small additions we’ll make as part of this project is to add some building blocks for a more human friendly display of the Citation, rather than the potentially long and ugly source_url.

title: A String attribute that we can use to display the citation. e.g. instead of rendering the source_url of https://www.mysociety.org/2020/01/14/has-your-foi-request-been-used-in-a-news-story-now-you-can-let-everyone-know/, we can populate the title attribute with “Has your FOI request been used in a news story? Now you can let everyone know.” and render that instead.

description: A Text attribute that we can later use to add a summary or excerpt of what the Citation is about. We should limit the length of this to about a paragraph of text.

We won’t expose these fields on the Citation creation form; only in the admin interface. These will be placeholders for future work – using AI to generate a description and fetching the source_url’s <title> attribute for example. For now, we’re just getting them in place and rendering nicely if we’ve manually added them via the admin interface.

[garethrees]

Fixed by #8400