2257 SDB Glossary goes wiki
austraLasia #2257


1,000 heads are better than one: now it's over to you!

ROME: 18th September 2008 -- The suggestion came from a member of the Region recently: why not turn 'Glossary' (on SDL) into a wiki and open it up to contributions from the region?  It was an excellent suggestion but SDL can't handle wiki and is for the world, not for the region. Bosconet is another matter; it is a wiki and exists for the region.  It took several weeks to convert the glossary to wiki format but the exercise also afforded an opportunity to update, correct.....and now it is complete.
    This may be the first truly collaborative digital project, using the means now available to us, in the Congregation.  As of now it is potentially 100% collaborative - over to you!
    Have no fear
    Turning 'Glossary', the Salesian terminological project, into a wiki means that anyone authorised may contribute. Have no fear of adding, altering or deleting, if you feel you have correct information to warrant it.  Fear not:

- if you are confident of what you wish to add, alter, delete;
- the system records your changes, which enables a return to an earlier version;
- there is a complete backup outside the system; should you create an almighty stuff-up, we can always recover from it. (But do let me know!).
    The austraLasia 'comments' wiki has worked without a single problem for more than a year now - allowing people to enter via the password offered in the last line of every news item (including this one). I propose that we use the same password for entry to the Glossary. This will 'protect' the work so long as you do not leave the password lying around or give it to third persons.
    Your knowledge is valuable
    'Glossary' is already substantial, as you will see: http://www.bosconet.aust.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Main.A .  But there are very many people around the region, and other regular readers of austraLasia with additional, invaluable knowledge. Perhaps there are terms missing,  an essential item of background, especially of a Salesian kind, absent. Perhaps there is an erroneous comment, or you have a better example of an authoritative text (always authoritative, please) that employs the term. Or there could be a regional variety of a term, including spelling (in which case indicate with EN-GB [-US, -CA, -IN, -SA, -IE, -PI......]).
    What you need to do
    Click 'edit' (top, or bottom of page) on the page you choose to edit.
    Scroll down (or use the 'edit-find' function of your browser) below the indexed items to the term you are interested in. For the most part you may only be adding,altering, deleting text which requires no extra markup than you find there.  The markup tends to be of a simple kind if you do need it, things like [[...]] which create a link, or ' '...' ' (two separate apostrophe's, not the double quotation mark) to achieve italics. %colour%  to give text that colour, and #abc to 'anchor' a word for later reference. Or use the buttons to achieve similar results; their icons are self-explanatory.
    If you add a new term please index it in its appropriate alphabetical place up top. Just copy what you see done for another word, substituting your choices. Don't forget to 'preview' your effort, then most importantly, 'Save'.
    Afterwards
    It would be courteous to drop me a line to indicate the change (and put your name in the 'author' box?), though 'the system' will to some extent have already told me. It's just that there's a huge amount of material there, and your telling me personally will facilitate things.
    Glossary has the potential to offer the Congregation a great gift - there is already interest expressed in translating (and adapting, obviously) the comments to other languages.  The uneditable version will remain on SDL but I will update and synchronise any changes you make to the wiki with the 'fixed' version.  Looking forward to your contributions.
    The wiki version facilitates other things
    Now that the time has been taken to convert Glossary to wiki, you will immediately see other advantages - navigation is so much more complete, cross-linking is now so much easier, and if a comment were to run to more than the three or four lines preferred for each term, creating a new page to contain as much information as required is as simple as surrounding the title of that page with square brackets, thus: [[new page]]. The term indicated between the brackets will now be a linked page in its own right.

 
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 AustraLasia is an email service for the Salesian Family of Asia Pacific.  It also functions as an agency for ANS based in Rome.  For queries please contact admin@bosconet.aust.com . Use Bosconet-wiki to be interactive. RSS feeds - just go to Bosconet, click on austraLasia 2008 in the sidebar. You will see the RSS orange icon in your browser address bar - add it from there.  Avail yourself of the Salesian Digital Library at http://sdl.sdb.org


Title: australasia 2257
Subject and key words: SDB General: Glossary wiki
Date (year): 2008
ID: 2000-2099|2257