News:Site news/archive01

This page is archived

This page presents news about the website. For an overview of installed features, see Special:Version.

This website contains 63,917 articles.

Planned features

A more specialised search engine based perhaps on the Special:RunQuery function of Semantic Forms
For registered users, additional links to the sidebar
Possibly, 'Bread crumbs' for navigational trails
Possibly, if time allows, export to BibTex through Semantic Result Formats.

2011

August 2011

I have long neglected this page, I'm sorry to say, so instead I will list a number of major and less significant changes over the next few days.

Simplified Form:Reference using the Semantic Forms "show on select" function.
Support for BibTex export is still in the pipeline.
Upgrade to MW 1.17; upgrade of extensions (See Special:Version)
New skin and several skin modifications
- The earlier skin we used had dropdown menus, but these ceased to work in MW 1.17. Another skin by the same developer (PaulGu) has been installed and customised for our ends.
- Recently tweaked the skin to prevent superscript (including citation numbers) from breaking line spacing.
Many of the templates that we use for semantic forms have been reworked, some more thoroughly than others.
Added robots.txt to tell web robots how to index the site and to prevent them from crawling through irrelevant content.
Upgraded to Semantic MediaWiki 1.6.1, which fixed a bug with limitation and continuation in semantic queries.
Wrote Form:MS TOC to be able to insert standardised (i.e. similarly looking) tables of contents in pages about manuscripts. Two possibilities have not been implemented: the form has not (yet?) been incorporated into the main form for manuscripts and there's no call to set_internal. For an example, see Dublin, Trinity College, MS 1354.
Some unprecedented behaviour. In newer versions of SMW and SIO, a call to set_internal using an inverse property caused a page, including its history, to become irretrievable (the affected page was Dublin, Royal Irish Academy, MS 23 P 12, i.e. the Book of Ballymote). A message "internal error" and backtrace appeared to the screen instead. Thanks to Yaron Koren for helping us diagnose the issue and for his suggestion to try Extension:DeleteBatch in order for us to able to delete the page.
About the same time, properties using SIO suddenly disappeared. Fortunately, the issue was unrelated: SIO calls had become case-sensitive, accepting uppercase initials only, so adjusting the calls fixed things.
Two pages have been created to collect texts which lack diplomatic, critical editions and/or translations: Edition wanted and Translation wanted. Pages will be added automatically if the Cite template is used with these names on the respective page about a text (e.g. {{Cite|Unedited}} and {{Cite|Untranslated}}).

April 2011

Some cleaning up. Bar a few exceptions, all entries for texts are now defined using their proper form and again with a few exceptions, all references are cited using the intended template.
The MediaWiki skin has been modified. The logo of the foundation will be added soon.
D. G. 09:31, 18 April 2011 (CEST)
Template:MS, the template used for listing manuscripts in pages about texts, has been slightly fine-tuned to cater separately for the numbering of folios, pages and columns, and even manuscript sections.
The navigational aspect of our on-wiki bibliography has been improved somewhat. Where previously references could be browsed only in our bibliography and the Category:References, there is now some support for creating separate pages for journals, publication series and authors, soon each with their own Semantic Form. A user-friendly interface for searching references would be a welcome addition, but nothing has been planned as yet.
A newly added extension is Header Tabs, which is useful for breaking up large pages into a number of tabbed sections. See for instance: keltensite:archief, Activiteiten/Archive1 and PONK.
D. G. 21:12, 6 April 2011 (CEST)

March 2011

The external links in our links section can now be defined using a template which associates data for each entry through Semantic Internal Objects. This means that at some point in the future an interface may be built which lets you search links using inline queries.
D. G. 15:34, 24 March 2011 (CET)
The MW installation has been upgraded to the latest version (1.16.2).
The MW extension Custom Sidebar has been installed to customise the navigation bar for each of the website's major sections, such as the main website of the foundation and selgā. More work is needed to maintain a consistent format.
D. G. 16:52, 15 March 2011 (CET)
Due in part to an omission in the software documentation, the *datlā database was installed using latin1 character encoding (the default setting) rather than UTF-8 as I intended. I'm still looking into this issue, but it will take some time, so please be patient.
D. G. 16:23, 15 March 2011 (CET)

January 2011

Forms for manuscripts and texts

Form:Manuscript and Form:Text, semantic forms to edit and creates pages about manuscripts and texts, are now available for use. This will supersede any previous approaches of maintaining such pages. Additionally, full references to manuscripts will henceforth be cited with Template:MS. This will also replace the use of separate Manuscript templates to produce formatted references to manuscripts.

D. G. 16:23, 25 January 2011 (CET)

On-wiki bibliography for **selgā*

At long last, after many rounds of trial and error, a flexible bibliographic system has been set up for the selgā catalogue! Some details still require attention, but the real struggle has been won. The system operates on three main levels:

For every reference, there will be a reference page, which is created or edited through a semantic form. Using Template:Reference, this form offers a user-friendly interface to structure bibliographic data.
To cite references in article space, the relevant data from these reference pages are transcluded and compiled through Template:Cite (which is itself supported by yet another template).
Finally, the bibliography page generates a list of all references for which reference pages are available.

Just follow the links to find out more. I would not have been able to proceed this far without having pestered a number of people with my troubles. A special thanks goes out to the team of the Lexicon Leponticum project (LexLep), in particular Martin Braun, who has been so kind as to explain to me some of the approaches he took to elicit the best results within the limitations of the software.

D. G. 22:23, 19 January 2011 (CET)

Manuscript templates

The semantic form for manuscript templates is now ready for use.

Miscellaneous

The present page has been created.
The extension Labeled Section Transclusion is added to the software.
D. G. 22:23, 19 January 2011 (CET)

2010

Late 2010

In a nutshell:

Only a few days before New Year's Eve, the old website of the foundation (shown on the right) is moved to a Mediawiki platform.
Semantic Mediawiki and a number of related extensions are installed.
A wide variety of entries for texts, manuscripts and authors are created. This allowed me to define a basic category tree.
A number of essential extensions such as Charinsert, Cite and Parser Functions are installed.
selgā and the *datlā project pages are launched.