The Brighton Toy and Model Index:Community portal

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 etiquette.

Availability

All pages on the wiki are currently set to "noindex nofollow", which means that even if Google finds the wiki, it shouldn't index it. Once the wiki has developed a little more, we can consider making it Googleable, but it'd be useful to do some more work on it before that happens.

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.

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)").

We can always change this at a later date using the "alias/redirect" function.

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)

Will post more issues as they occur to me, BTMM Eric 17:57, 30 May 2011 (BST)