Mailing List Archive

Re: [Wikipedia-l] Easton's Bible Dictionary
daniwo59@aol.com wrote:
> To me, a major part of the problem is that the material is so out of date. It
> fails to take into account the past hundred years of archeological research,
> which is essential. Furthermore, the statistics it gives about places are
> hopelessly outdated. For example, Anatoth, currently 'Anata, is a fair sized

I think I have a working solution to this sort of problem:

Old texts should be scanned (in facsimile if possible) and put on a
read-only website which allows deep linking. For example, the article
on the Electric Telegraph from a 19th century Swedish encyclopedia is
available on the URL http://www.lysator.liu.se/runeberg/nfad/0192.html
(have a look, nice pictures, all public domain).

The URL up to ...runeberg/ is the name of the website and "nf" is for
the encyclopedia and "nfad" is the 4th volume of the 1st edition.

Then in the wiki, a rule is added so the shorthand "nf:ad0192" is
automatically recognized and converted into a hypertext link, in a
fashion similar to ISBN numbers. The example is found on the wiki
page http://susning.nu/Telegraf
where the wiki text "nf:ad0192" is converted into (my translation)

See [http://www.lysator.liu.se/runeberg/nfad/0192.html the article]
in the 1st edition of [[Nordisk familjebok]], volume 4, 1881.

and then into HTML.

So, what you need is a stable and deep-linkable read-only website with
the old contents that you want to use, and a shorthand linking scheme
in the wiki software. You do not want old text copied into the wiki.

Easton's Bible Dictionary is available in a deep-linkable, stable,
read-only website, the Christian Classics Ethereal Library,
starting on http://www.ccel.org/e/easton/ebd/

For example, the article on Anatoth is available on the URL
http://www.ccel.org/e/easton/ebd/ebd/T0000200.html#T0000233
apparently with 100 articles per HTML page, and this is article 233.

If this is a work that you often want to refer to, add the following
pattern rule to the wikipedia source code for the English Wikipedia,

ebd:([0-9]+) e.g. ebd:233

translated into

'See [http://www.ccel.org/e/easton/ebd/ebd/' +
sprintf("T%05d00.html#T%07d", $1/100, $1) +
' the article] in [[Easton's Bible Dictionary]] (1897)

Adding this "ebd:" rule to the wikipedia software doesn't hurt
anybody, since 99.99% of all articles will not contain the ebd:
pattern. But as soon as anybody, who knows EBD and this rule, starts
to use it, it saves a lot of time and effort in creating links instead
of copying useless text into the wiki.


--
Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik
Teknikringen 1e, SE-583 30 Linuxköping, Sweden
tel +46-70-7891609
http://aronsson.se/ http://elektrosmog.nu/ http://susning.nu/