Lost Plays Database:Transition to SMW

This document outlines some of the tasks and sticking points around transitioning the Lost Plays Database to leverage Semantic MediaWiki. Please feel free to add to it, but please keep questions and discussions to the Talk Page.

Overview

The work to capture data about each play started when the project moved to the Folger infrastructure in 2018.

Play articles at this point were text-based, making use of manually curated list pages, MediaWiki category pages, and links between pages to create navigational structures.

Some initial steps were made to begin the transition to leverate Semantic MediaWiki. A Play Form was introduced to help keep data capture consistent, and a Title List Page was created to demonstrate a reproduction of the manually curated list using the semantic data generated by the Play Form

Useful Links

• Play form
• The Play Category shows all Plays created using the semantic Play Form.
• Semantic Browse is a great way to see the data held for a given page.
• Special:Properties lists all properties in the wiki; clicking one explores their values

New Semantic Navigation Structure Prototypes

• Play Title
• Years

Current Status

The project has converted a number of Play articles over to use the new form, but the primary navigation cannot be switched over to semantic lists until all old text-only play articles are transitioned.

Conversion of Play Articles

All old text-only play articles must be converted. This can be a laborious job to do one-at-a-time, and so editors comfortable with editing wikitext directly might consider manually pasting and editing the template call into the source of each play. [Instructions to follow]

Conversion of Dramatist Pages

Dramatist pages are also manually curated lists. These pages should eventually all be transitioned to replace the manually edited table with a template which generates a dynamic table. [Instructions to follow]

Conversion of Auspice Categories to Auspice Pages

Auspices are currently implemented as MediaWiki category pages. These should eventually be transitioned to use a page in the main namespace with an embedded template to generated a dynamic table. [Instructions to follow]

Missing Functionality

Listing Pages

The following listing pages may need to be created to replace the manually curated lists:

• Dramatists
• Category Tags
• Auspices (Companies / Venues)