ShintaidoWiki:About

From ShintaidoWiki

Contents 1 Introduction 2 Our Own Wikipedia 2.1 What is a Wiki? 2.2 Wiki Benefits 2.3 Wiki Concerns 3 Proof of Concept 3.1 Disclaimer 3.2 What Do We Have? 3.2.1 An Apology 3.3 Features 3.4 Login 3.5 Edit a Page 3.6 Browsers and Unicode 3.7 Media files 3.8 Next Steps 4 For Webmasters 4.1 Download 4.2 System Requirements 4.3 Installation

Introduction

Welcome to the ShintaidoWiki experiment. My name is Rob Kedoin.

On November 3, 2005, David Franklin made an entry on the European Shintaido College weblog where he announced his Shintaido Lexicon and his plans for it.

I was very excited by the idea of having a multilingual dictionary of Shintaido terms available on the Internet. However, I thought there might be a few drawbacks to using one large web page to hold the information.

1. As a traditional web page, no changes would be able to be made to the Lexicon until David had time to incorporate the information into the new web page and upload it to the server. This seems like it could make a lot of work for David and could delay information being posted to the web, which might discourage authors from participating.
2. The current page is easy to view, but it only holds definitions for terms in English. If it were to expand to include definitions in Czech, French, Italian, Japanese, etc... I think the current display would prove to be very difficult to read.
3. In reading through many of David's definitions, I realized that it would be beneficial to be able to see a list of terms that belong to a certain category. For example, if you were interested in seeing what terms were related to meditation or bojutsu, it would be good to be able to view those categories and see what terms were related to those disciplines.

The more I thought about this, the more I realized that I had seen this problem solved before. What we really want is more of a Shintaido encyclopedia - something like the free encyclopedia, Wikipedia.

Our Own Wikipedia

Thankfully, the people who developed Wikipedia, distribute the software that they use and we can use the same software for free.

What is a Wiki?

A wiki is a system which allows people to work together to create a collection of web pages. For a more extensive definition, please visit the Wikipedia entry by clicking on the two letter international abbreviation of your favorite language. ( cs, en fr, it, ja)

Wiki Benefits

I think a system based on the Wikipedia software would help us because:

1. It would eliminate the need for one single person to be burdened with making centralized updates.
2. It is very simple to place terms into categories.
3. It is very simple to create links between terms. For example, if you were defining, "ageoroshi" you can make links to "shoko" and "tenso" and the reader could follow those links for more definitions if they needed to.
4. The Wikipedia software makes it very easy to switch between languages. When you visit a page in the Wikipedia, a list of languages appears on the lower left of the screen which shows all the languages that term is defined in - clicking on the language name takes you to the definition of the same term in the other language.
5. Since anyone can make additions and edits, the encyclopedia can grow more quickly than if only one person was working on it. This organic growth is one of the most appealing things of a wiki-based solution.
6. People who wish to contribute, do not need to know HTML. HTML is the markup language used to create web pages. It is somewhat ugly to look at. Rather than using HTML, The Wikipedia software uses a different set of markup which is a little simpler to learn and use. Using the markup, you specify the levels for headings, when text is bold or italic, and provide extra information about the article you are creating. For some features, the markup you need to use is presented in the local language. e.g., "Catégorie" is used in the French wiki while "Category" is used in the English and Japanese.

Wiki Concerns

As I said above, anyone can add information or make edits. This can be a great strength of having a wiki. However, it might also be construed by some as a drawback. For example, it is possible for a very motivated, junior student to start entering definitions for terms. More senior people may read those definitions and feel they are incomplete, or worse, incorrect. So, for some period of time (until a more senior person corrects the definition), the information provided by the wiki might be inaccurate.

Some people might feel more comfortable with senior people such as those found in the Shintaido of America National Technical Committee, European Shintaido College, or Internation Shintaido Federation Technical Committee agreeing on definitions for terms and then distributing them to everyone. I would like to suggest that a wiki-based solution could free these organization to pursue more challenging subjects. The wiki's could provide discussion points for these committees when discrepancies are discovered.

The other possible downside of having everyone being able to edit can happen when people simply cannot agree on the definition of something. This has happened in the Wikipedia and resulted in "edit wars". ( en, fr, ja) Edit wars are not a very large problem because the software keeps a history of the changes that have been made to any page. You can see the history of any page by clicking on the "history" tab at the top of the page. On that page you can see what changes have been made and by whom. I hope that the Shintaido community would not have many of these, but we are all human. I imagine, if we decide to have a Shintaido wiki, we will have this problem sooner or later.

Proof of Concept

Disclaimer

Before describing more about this proof of concept, I wanted to make a few things very clear:

1. Shintaido of America is not making any commitment or promise to host any versions of the Shintaido Wiki in the "shintaido.org" domain. Shintaido of America is only providing the server space and bandwidth for this experiment.
2. I am not making any commitment or promise to host any versions of the Shintaido Wiki in the "kedoin.com" domain. I am only donating server space and bandwidth for this experiment.
3. I am not making any commitment or promise to being the administrator for any version of the Shintaido Wiki, though I am quite willing to help people get setup.

What Do We Have?

To start with, I have setup the Shintaido Wiki in four languages - Czech, English, French, and Japanese. In order to view the Japanese Shintaido Wiki, you will need to have Japanese support on your computer. If there is interest in setting up wiki's for other languages, please send email to me at robert@kedoin.com and let me know.

So, for example, if you were to visit the definition for ageoroshi, in the lower left corner you will see that the same article is available in Czech, French, and Japanese.

One of the advantages of the Wikipedia software is that it makes it easy to interconnect wiki's on seperate servers. To demonstrate this ability, the Czech, English, and French wiki's are all hosted on shintaido.org, while the Japanese wiki is hosted on kedoin.com.

An Apology

Please accept my apologies as I only speak American English. While I say that there are definitions available in 4 languages, in many cases the definition will be empty of any useful text. In some cases, I have copied definitions from other places on the Internet. In other cases, I've left the English text and mixed it with another language. e.g., the Japanese entry for ageoroshi. My goal was to show everyone what is technologically possible, but I am unable to provide the content myself.

Features

For the Western languages, I included images from David Franklin's Lexicon to show the Japanese characters. This ensure's that people will be able to view the Japanese characters without needing to make any modifications to their own computers.

In the Japanese Shintaido Wiki, the only information in most entries are links back to the Western language translations.

In the Czech Shintaido Wiki, I used the Czech pronunciation provided in David Franklin's Lexicon as a caption beneath the Japanese text. Note: This probably doesn't make the most sense for the long term. Ideally there would be a Czech sentence at the beginning of the article that says, "Pronounced as ..." but since I couldn't write that, I thought it would still be beneficial to show the pronunciation in the caption.

Currently, there are 9 different terms defined. They are categorized into 4 categories. The terms were chosen at random. Some features to notice are:

• ageoroshi shows how one definition can contain words which are also defined elsewhere in the Shintiado Wiki.
• ageoroshi shows how one defintion can exist in multiple categories.
• ageoroshi shows how a word, "bokuto", can be written in a definition and marked as a word which should be added to the encyclopedia. The word, "bokuto", displays in red since no definition has been created yet.
• tenso demonstrates a link to an external site by linking to the search page of the Shintaido of America gallery.
• Kenko taiso and Tenshinjusoho have a "See Also" section where they link to each other.
• ushiro-e shows what happens when an image is called for, but does not yet exist.
• bo is a page which redirects you to boh in the English Shintaido Wiki. In the United States, I do not believe we are consistent about how we spell boh and the Wikipedia software allows us to have multiple spellings for a single definition.
• Free hand Shintaido exists only in the English Shintaido Wiki. It is an example of an entry which has not been translated into any languages.

Login

To see what the markup text looks like or to add or modify any of the pages, you need to login to the Shintaido Wiki. A link is provided in the upper right corner of each page.

Since each language wiki is actually a separate software installation, you need to create a login for yourself in each of the language wiki's you might want to edit. Once you create a login name for yourself, you can change your language preference to display the user interface in your native language. For example, I have a "kedoin" account on all four wiki's, but they all use the English user interface or I would be lost completely. And, having once erased my computer's hard drive because I was using a Japanese user interface, I tend to be a little frightened of using interfaces in other languages.

Edit a Page

Once you are logged in, you can edit any page you can view by clicking the appropriate tab at the top of the article.

There you can see how a page is marked up. The software uses "wiki markup" which is not HTML. For many things, it is simple to use an "=" or square brackets "[]" to describe how you want text to be formatted. For some functions, keywords are used and in some instances the keywords have been localized into the language of the wiki. For example, in the Czech wiki, a term is added to the "Bojutsu" category by adding the text, " [[Kategorie: Bojutsu]]". In the English wiki, the same thing is accomplished with, "[[Category: Bojutsu]]".

I've found that the easiest way to find out how to do something with the wiki markup is to find a page in the Wikipedia and look at it's wiki markup. (You do not need to login to the Wikipedia to be able to edit its pages.)

Browsers and Unicode

The Wikipedia software is able to support so many languages since it uses Unicode. Unfortunately, I've noticed that not all browsers support Unicode well in web addresses (URL's). For example, if you click on this link for the Japanese wiki's tenso definition, you'll most likely see a web address ending in, "%E5%A4%A9%E7%9B%B8". The only browser's that I have found that display the Unicode in the web address correctly are Safari on the Mac, and Opera on both PC and Mac.

Media files

Adding images and other media files to the Shintaido Wiki is easy. You simply need to click the, "Upload file" link on the left side of the browser.

Note: Media files are not shared between the wiki's. If you want to use an image on multiple wiki's, you must upload it into each wiki separately.

Next Steps

1. These wiki's will remain available until March 1, 2006.
2. Everyone should try to login and then edit entries or create new entries. Now that we know the technology is feasible, we need to know if people are willing to use the system to create a Shintaido encyclopedia in their regions.
3. People should leave comments and questions on the discussion page. Please sign all your entries, either by clicking on the "signature button" which appears as the second tool from the right on the editing toolbar, or by entering --~~~~ at the end of your comment.

For Webmasters

Download

The Wikipedia software is called MediaWiki. It is written in PHP and can be downloaded here.

System Requirements

MediaWiki requires PHP, and MySQL to be present. If available, MediaWiki will use it's own MySQL database. If not, it can prefix all of its table names during installation.

• MediaWiki Prequisite Tools

Installation

The MediaWiki installation notes make installation fairly simple.

After following those directions, I usually:

Modify the LocalSettings.php to require users to login before they can make edits.

# from: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Access_Restrictions
#
# Permission keys given to users in each group.
# All users are implicitly in the '*' group including anonymous visitors;
# logged-in users are all implicitly in the 'user' group. These will be
# combined with the permissions of all groups that a given user is listed
# in in the user_groups table.
#
# This replaces wgWhitelistAccount and wgWhitelistEdit
#
# The following line should be commented, otherwise these settings will
# throw away the settings on DefaultSettings.php (you probably don't want this).
# With this line commented you will only overwrite the settings you explicitly
# define here (that's what you probably want).
#$wgGroupPermissions = array();
$wgGroupPermissions['*'    ]['createaccount']   = true;
$wgGroupPermissions['*'    ]['read']            = true;
$wgGroupPermissions['*'    ]['edit']            = false;

Lastly, modify the database to interconnect the various language Wiki's:

mysql> insert into mw_interwiki (iw_prefix,iw_url,iw_local) VALUES
    -> ('fr','http://wiki.shintaido.org/fr/index.php/$1',1),
    -> ('cs','http://wiki.shintaido.org/cs/index.php/$1',1),
    -> ('en','http://wiki.shintaido.org/en/index.php/$1',1),
    -> ('ja','http://www.kedoin.com/Shintaido/ja/index.php/$1',1);