Lady Wu wrote:I think part of the reason why there hasn't been overwhelming support is because people don't know how they can contribute. And I mean, even I didn't figure out how this is supposed to work until today. It takes time to think of stuff to contribute, and anyone who's managed an information page can tell you that users tend to be very reluctant in giving constructive feedback (in terms of additions and modifications).
I can think of other reasons too.
That's why I'm quite optimistic at this point. This isn't the first project I have introduced and I expected participation to be slow at first while all the gears were being worked into their proper places. Once it is wrapped up and made shiny I'll break out the black bags and we'll go snatch ourselves some
unwilling happy! participants.
If I knew how smoothly things would have gone I might not have even bothered with the 'idea' announcement. Instead I probably would have
charged plunged! right into the idea, showing people how it works in practice.
Lady Wu wrote:The announcement was also announced as a test project. The general public doesn't like participating in test projects. Once we've got a bunch of pages set up and people figure out what kinds of stuff make it to KMA, I'm sure the contributions will come trickling in. [...] I would suggest making another announcement once we've got a bunch of articles going, focusing on how exactly people can contribute and on how shiny the outcome can look, rather than on trying to sell it as a new idea.
Your thoughts are as my own.
Lady Wu wrote:The reason why I asked if this was only for games, James, was that I wanted to make changes to some of my earlier SGZ bios, and didn't want to have to bother you with ever wording change I decide to make. I don't know how hard it'd be to make the footnote system work with this new code stuff, and I guess you'd have to take the current pages off, post here as a new topic, and re-upload it to KMA? I haven't the faintest how this works, but you have until I get back from Kyrgyzstan to figure it out.
(Go goof off tomorrow.)
This, unfortunately, will not be compatible with the biography project. The biographies, as something far more advanced than anything we will be doing here, is being integrated with the development project. I've already created a generally functional tool which can be used to edit biographies on Kongming's Archives and it uses its own dedicated markup (which is also like BBCode). The markup for biographies is actually quite simple. There's no need to worry about block-level elements. You pretty much just have two types of notes (Pei Songzhi, Translator, whatever), references for each note, and some special goodies like [poem][/poem] and [memorial][/memorial]. Many biographies are still hard-coded over at Kongming's Archives but I have started moving a few over to the database (thus making them available to this tool).
The tool is crude in the sense it cannot differentiate between authors (e.g. it only has an administrator mode which allows access to all biographies) and it cannot delete or add biographies. It can, however, edit every biography on the database and it does so quite reliably. Steve's translation of
Liu Bei’s Sanguozhi Biography, for example, exists in the database and is managed by this tool. It does most of the advanced stuff any other biography would need to do and
Sanguozhi biographies are fully supported.
If you like, just let me know what biographies you would like to start editing and I will transport them over to the database. It should be pretty obvious what needs to be done from there (and I will give you access to the biography tool so you can access them). Or if you want to be really creative I'll add some blank entries to the database (thus making them available to the tool) so you can just start adding them as you deem appropriate. I don't mind transporting them, though. Using regular expressions I can do it with reasonable speed and I'd be happy to save you the trouble.
This might also be a good time to let you know that the note system there gives you the ability to enter note numbers but also completely ignores them when rendering notes at Kongming's Archives. It automatically numbers each note by order of appearance. This allows you to add a new note seven and do something like change the old note seven to note '7b' rather than re-number every note in the biography.
