The Brighton Toy and Model Index:Community portal
This section of the Wiki is for general project update info.
September 2013
- ~1000 exhibits listed
- ~1500 images online
August 2013
- ~900 exhibits listed
July 2013
- ~800 exhibits listed
February 2013
- ~700 exhibits listed, including over 200 FH150-related
- 600 FH150-related metadata-tagged images and scans
December 2011
Loco date categories
- There are now "decade" categories that refer to the date at which a locomotive (not its model) was originally built. This is useful for browsing the historical development of the steam loco, with the Museum's collection as a reference.
500 articles and stubs
- 500 exhibit articles!
Approval required for new accounts
- After some interference from spammers, new editing accounts now need to be set up by an administrator.
November 2011
450 articles and stubs
- 450 exhibit articles achieved
October 2011
400 articles and stubs
- Now 400 exhibit articles!
September 2011
350 articles and stubs
- Passed the 350 mark ...
300 articles and stubs
- Passed the 300 mark ...
August 2011
New listing page for display numbers
- The old system for looking up display numbers sucked, because the numbering system was being revised, so it was a complicated self-adjusting thing designed to re-route QR requests, and the like. The new listing page is hopefully a lot simpler.
250 articles and stubs
- The "exhibits" pagelist now has over 250 entries. That's not including category pages or pages on things other than exhibits.
July 2011
200 articles and stubs
- Now 200 online article pages for exhibits.
QR Codes
- Implemented QR codes: QR stickers now pasted onto most of the museum cabinets.
New templates
- Implemented "Exhibit" and "Display" templates, display browser, display area number reorganisation. The new templates also automatically add the basic set of categories for these pages. Editing on the more complex templates is protected.
- new specific templates for items in the Dinky, Spot-On and Corgi cabinets, using the manufacturer's catalogue numbers.
June 2011
New article pathnames
- After some tinkering, the main article pathnames are now more human-friendly (and easier to remember), and they now work like the ones on Wikipedia. For the main article pages, the "index.php?title=..." stuff's now suppressed, so if an outside site wants to link in to an article on "Fish", the URL will now be just "https://www.brightontoymuseum.co.uk/wiki/Fish"
External URLs for other types of page are still longwinded, but people probably won't want to link to those anyway. BTMM Eric 00:38, 7 June 2011 (BST)
- Of course, Google had just indexed the pages under their more long-winded names, so there'll be a few "page not found" entries in the search engine results for a few days. BTMM Eric 02:43, 7 June 2011 (BST)
>100 articles and stubs
- Now more than a hundred cross-linked articles and stub articles. We now just need to fill them up with lovely content! BTMM Eric 00:38, 7 June 2011 (BST)
No anonymous editing
- We just had our first spammer. Editing from anonymous accounts now disabled BTMM Eric 00:38, 7 June 2011 (BST)
Editing Policies
Initially, this Wiki is intended to only be edited by BTMM staff. After it's advanced past the prototype stage we can consider perhaps inviting outsiders with specialist knowledge to contribute, but first we need to establish the basic structure and wiki etiquette.
Availability
The wiki is currently //technically// online for the benefit of staff, but we're not linking to it or announcing it until it's better developed.
- Oooh, Google's found it! :) BTMM Eric 00:38, 7 June 2011 (BST)
Emerging styles
A few issues seem to be emerging:
Naming:
It's probably worth keeping with the Wikipedia naming system for things like capitalisation (Wikipedia assumes that the first letter of a title is capitalised by default, and it's traditional to make the rest lower-case unless there's a very strong reason not to.)
Prototype vs model: An article on "The Flying Scotsman" might be about a model, or about the original locomotive, or about both. I'm currently thinking that articles about the original locomotive probably don't need suffixes, whereas articles about models can be distinguished by putting the manufacturer name in brackets ( "Flying Scotsman (Hornby)" ). This leaves the question of what to do when there are different models of the same thing by the same manufacturer in different scales, but I guess we can work that one out when it arises.
Where there are two articles, and the model doesn't have an established manufacturer, I suppose we can use something like "Daddy Long-Legs (model)" to distinguish it from the article about the original. It's nice to keep the titles of articles about the originals short, so that they can be linked to just by putting brackets around the name (e.g. "Magnus Volk was also responsible for the Daddy long-legs railway that ran from ..."). Linking becomes more fiddly if the titles are qualified more than strictly necessary (to things like "Magnus Volk (person)" or "Daddy long-legs (railway)").
- Some pages are subjects, but also categories. By default, I'm putting the subject text into the category header, and turning the subject page into a redirect that points to the category page. So a display name redirects to a category, which contains a description of the display, and also a list of any exhibits that are in the display. If in doubt, just add content and I'll try to sort it out. BTMM Eric 00:38, 7 June 2011 (BST)
Visuals
We could do with additional visual cues to distinguish between pages about exhibits, pages about the Museum in general, pages about "originals" that have been modelled, pages about Brighton, and so on. I'll try to put together some easy-to-use colour-coded templates for this.
I thought that the "exhibit" template could include the catalogue number where available, but it turns out that hooking up to catalogue numbers is currently quite difficult. The exhibit's arch number would be useful, too (even though it's already available at the bottom of a page as a category).
I might also do a "star exhibit" template for items on Chris' list of "specials". This will probably be the same as the standard exhibit infobox, but with a different title and colour. Long-term it might be worth considering using more involved infoboxes with specific fields, but for now I think the priority is just getting the information loaded onto the pages.
Emphasis on text
The initial idea for the wiki is that it should be mostly or completely text-based: the equivalent of a set of online display plaques for the major exhibits. We're staying away from photos for now, partly because we're not sure about performance issues, and partly because we want to keep the focus on uploading background information. We might implement some standardised graphics for mapping, and the occasional authorised image, but there's a LOT of text work that needs doing first.
Similarly, although it might be nice to have cool "info" boxes for certain categories of article, editing infobox info can be intimidating for newbies, and it's difficult to get a good idea about what categories to include on an infobox until there's a decent dataset to work with. We can revisit the infobox idea later, once the wiki's essentials are completed.
Toy Manufacturers
Any time we mention a toy manufacturer's name in an article, I think it's worth putting square brackets around it, so that the name will turn into a link once someone writes a page on the manufacturer ("redlinking"). If you follow of these "redlinks" you'll be shown a dummy page, and the left-hand "what links here" menu entry should then be able to tell you how many other pages link to the same non-existent article. Obviously, the higher the number, the more useful it'll be if someone writes the article. BTMM Eric 18:13, 30 May 2011 (BST)
