Help:How to tidy imported pages
From BibleWiki
Many of the pages on the BibleWiki were created by importing the text of various public domain translations, dictionaries, and commentaries. This means that most of them are over one hundred years old. Much has changed in Bible scholarship in that time, and these articles all need to be brought up to date with modern thinking. This is, of course, a huge task, and it will take many years to turn this into the resource that we hope it will one day become.
However, there is also much work to be done just in 'wikifying' the texts that have already been imported. Most of the work on the BibleWiki at this point is concentrated on this "tidying" process. There are many steps to this process:
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Making Links
One of the key ingredients of a Wiki is links. So the first pass through an imported article is usually to turn all relevant text into links. Proper names should almost always links. Many "ordinary" nouns also have articles (or perhaps should have!) and can be turned into links also. Cited bible verses should also be linked: usually using the templates that we have created to make this easier: "Rom 1:14", for example can be changed relatively easily to {{Rom|1|14}} which will create a link that directly references the verse, the chapter, and the book: Rom 1:14.
Annotating Links
We are currently investigating the "Semantic Mediawiki" extension. This means that we can "annotate" links. So, rather than just saying, on the page for Shem, that he "is the first mentioned of the sons of [[Noah]]", we can make the link explicit: "is the first mentioned of the sons of [[child of::Noah]]". The link will function in the same way, but it also adds an infobox describing all the relationships on the page, and adds the relationship directly to a database that can then be queried - list all children of Noah. This is all still experimental, and slightly clumsy at this stage, but will hopefully become very useful later. This will hopefully replace the need for creating a manual Person Infobox too!
Linking Back
As well as fixing the internal links to the page, it is also useful to use the Search to find pages that mention this page, but haven't created the actual link yet. Then those can be edited to make the links.
Merging Related Articles
Often we have imported articles from different sources about the same topic. So, for example, there were pages on David imported from Eastons, the Catholic Encyclopedia, and the Jewish Encylopedia. For longer articles we generally just note at the bottom of the page that these should be merged by adding {{tomerge|DAVID (Jewish Encyclopedia)}}. For shorter articles, we tend to start by just adding the text from each to the same page, separated by a horizontal line, and adding the {{totidy}} template at the top of the page. The other pages can then be changed to a #redirect [[Page name]]. The main page can then be tidied up on an ongoing basis.
Developing the text
Once the page has proper linking, and contains all the information we have imported, we can then start the on-going work of developing the material: editing it together into a coherent entry, and updating it with modern knowledge and research. Information on how best to do that is for another page, another day!
