Kongming's Archives Development/Encyclopedia Project

[James]

Things Editor: Suddenly So!
http://kongming.net/development/things/

Update Commentary
In typical fashion, I spent some time today doing something I hadn’t planned, and ended up building the Things Editor from scratch today! Boy did all the suffering of that previous challenging update make a difference in how easy it was to put this tool together!

Things Editor
Most of the fields here should look familiar! It builds on many concepts which already exist in other editors.
As usual, though, there are a few new features coming into play.

Relation IDs
The Things Editor, under Information, has fields for linking to “Type of Thing ID” and “Variation of Thing ID”. A type of thing would be used to create a relationship where one thing is a type of another thing, but not the same thing as that thing. For example, Guan Yu’s Green Dragon is a type of Guandao. A variation of a thing is an entry which is functionally the same thing as an another thing, but due to some peculiarity or another, a new entry is created. This is probably going to be a rarely-used field. Drawing from the Locations Editor, the “[Within the] Four Seas” entry would be “variation of” an entry for China proper.

Manual Color Definition
This is more of an administrative field, but it is visible to all editors for the time being, so I ought to make a comment on it. This allows the color associated with an entry to be changed to a unique value.

Other Tools
The “Nominate Removal” feature has been rolled out to all other editors but Reign Years, which needs to be updated to the new code base.

[ZL181]

The Things Editor is a good little editor that can chronicle important Chinese items and their provenance, so I really like it. As I mentioned way earlier, this could also be the appropriate place to place our favorite steeds, Red Hare and Dilu, so they do not act as officers. I think it could also include concepts without making a Concepts Editor for things like types of divinations, Confucianism, or Daoism? It might take me time to add in objects, it is way easier to think of obscure officers such as Sun Ben than an item other than the Hereditary Seal! We can even include books such as the SGZ and SGYY!

I also like the Manual Color Definition idea, it makes items pop out, but it seems less appropriate in other editors where assigning faction colors makes much more sense.

Now I know why TigerTally has not been active, you put his soul into the Editor! But all jokes aside, I miss having him here frequently and he would have been a great asset to this editor.

[ZL181]

A traditional Chinese translation should have examples to demonstrate the usage of characters. I was thinking about also its description from a contemporary Chinese dictionary or something like that to prove its meaning.

[RE: Translation Dictionary] Something like that. Maybe add fields for verbs, adjectives, the like. I’ve been exhausted lately so I’m not explaining things as well back then and still now. My hope is that this dictionary can help be a free source of learning Classical Chinese.

This does seem very viable, still. Could you provide me with a couple example entries and details that would be worth providing? That would give me a starting point to organize and visualize what the tool might look like.

Dictionary example：

奇
Adjective
Odd, strange, extraordinary, wonderful.
Example: The masses discussed and all said, "Tian Chou may be young in age, but he has been acclaimed for being wonderful many times."
衆議咸曰：「田疇雖年少，多稱其奇。」
Ambush troops, as in ~兵.
Verb
To think one extraordinary.
Examples: [Kong] Rong said, "Indeed, my ancestor Master Kong and your ancestor Elder Master Lao had the same virtue and stood together in righteousness. They taught and were friendly with each other. Thus, me and you have been interconnected families for many generations. The seated masses all thought him extraordinary.
融曰：「然。先君孔子與君先人李老君，同德比義而相師友，則融與君累世通家也。」衆坐奇之

People can also fix any erroneous entries.

I wanted to resurrect the idea of the dictionary, perhaps by a Dictionary Editor, while providing translation examples or identifying variants of other characters. Would this be feasible?

[James]

I wanted to resurrect the idea of the dictionary, perhaps by a Dictionary Editor, while providing translation examples or identifying variants of other characters. Would this be feasible?

Hmm… I was going to ask some more questions, but instead I will just build it. And it can evolve to be what it needs to be. I don't think it will be very complicated, at this point, to build something in its basic form.

[James]

The Things Editor is a good little editor that can chronicle important Chinese items and their provenance, so I really like it. As I mentioned way earlier, this could also be the appropriate place to place our favorite steeds, Red Hare and Dilu, so they do not act as officers. I think it could also include concepts without making a Concepts Editor for things like types of divinations, Confucianism, or Daoism? It might take me time to add in objects, it is way easier to think of obscure officers such as Sun Ben than an item other than the Hereditary Seal! We can even include books such as the SGZ and SGYY!

I also like the Manual Color Definition idea, it makes items pop out, but it seems less appropriate in other editors where assigning faction colors makes much more sense.

Now I know why TigerTally has not been active, you put his soul into the Editor! But all jokes aside, I miss having him here frequently and he would have been a great asset to this editor.

Oo… good point! About the actual present-day books. I hadn't thought about it so much in the sense of pertinent Things that exist in the present day. Very fun thought.

Yes, I built in support for the horsies with the idea that they could end up living there. It warrants a moment of thought, however, as those things enjoy all the extended support the Officer Editor allows for, such as the biographies and things like fact vs fiction. Which may just be an argument for something like the Things Editor eventually supporting many of the same things. For example, a fact vs fiction section makes just as much sense in the Things Editor as it does in the Officer Editor.

It also currently supports a field called Concepts & Ideas (presently, confusingly, under 'Other') with the idea that those things could be stored there. The categorization could be refined. I thought it might make sense to create the editor and evolve categorization as it was revealed what sort of things actually want to live inside it. In a sense the Things Editor is quite important, as it becomes the home for literally everything that doesn't have a home somewhere else.

I suspect the novel is going to be a very good source of things to populate.

Heck, it is going to end up with some curious entries like deer-horns (chevaux dejrise).

[ZL181]

Moderator note: Moved this topic from SGYY Symposium to Kongming's Archives since putting this topic in the latter would help with organization.

[James]

A Big Update With Little Feet
I have finally published a big code revision I have been working on for a while now. I stumbled down this rabbit hole when ZL181 suggested changing the formatting of the officer relations list in the encyclopedia.

Some challenges:

• The encyclopedia uses old code which does not interface well with all of the new code and features written for the development project in 2023
• The encyclopedia does all of its processing itself whenever a new biography is loaded and refreshed
• Relations is a special case because it involves database interaction and officer links
• Writing a bunch of temporary code for the encyclopedia when its interface is to be rewritten is not a good use of time
• An important feature to develop for the encyclopedia is a code base which efficiently loads and searches “entities” like officers, factions, etc.

Some solutions:

• Entities do their own processing and updates, so a good way to update the encyclopedia ahead of a bigger revision is for the entities (officers) to write their own HTML code (e.g. for relations). So an initial goal is for officers to write their own relations.
• Relations offers a good starting point for a code base that can search and load “entities” (officers), but which will also be used for encyclopedia searching, etc. So I started writing that code base for relations.
• To keep things as clean and clear as possible I started writing new code bases for handling validation and database interaction based on the development project which can be used anywhere on the website (and which will be ported back to simplify the development project)

So yeah… this update just kept involving more and more work, but it was a worthwhile pursuit.

But… all of the above is now finished in an initial and sometimes fairly developed state, is now online, and is now functional. What can you see of it? Not much! Yet. But this was the most important step for updating all of this development project stuff on the website, so that is where I will be spending some time, now.

Officer Relations
One thing that *has* been updated is officer relations in encyclopedia entries. You can see an example here with Cao Cao. Relations will update themselves as caches expire and should also update whenever relations are updated. Right now there are multiple layers of cache that need to clear for updates (both entities and encyclopedia entries cache themselves). Down the road that will be simplified (the second level of caching won’t be needed).

Being tied in to all the new code also allows relations to do some cool things. Wherever there is an ID, a name offered by the officer over-rides the name provided in text, so those things stay up-to-date. An officer which has been redirected (e.g. Lei Bo -> Lei Xu) can now be transparently updated wherever it appears in these lists, and invalid IDs can be flagged.

It will be nice to start making things with all this behind-the-scenes code.

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What’s next?
Now that the complex code of this project can take a rest, I want to catch up on some tasks. Sharing Zhou Gongjin’s Maps at KMA. Adding a link for the new Koei Fandom page. And I am going to start splitting some time between development revisions and updates meant to actually put new content online at KMA.