Illustrated Companion to the Latin Dictionary/RICH-2K/Technical aspects

This page explains how the Illustrated Companion to the Latin Dictionary has been implemented, thereby making it easier to a) understand the structure, and b) change some aspects should that be deemed necessary.

Other project-specific pages are listed in the Category:RICH-2K/Project pages.

Categories of the Illustrated Companion

Categories are of special importance to collections of information like encyclopaedias.

Overview

The categories used in this project can be broadly divided into two types:

• Project categories: These categories help to "manage" the project.
• Subject categories: These categories assign articles to groups based on their content, e.g. all articles about sword belong to the category Category:Classed Index/Swords.

Here only project categories are discussed, for subject categories see Categories of the Classed Index.

Project categories

Note: Some of the categories have the attribute HIDDENCAT. This attribute hides the category from the users, unless they have actively opted to display hidden categories.

Wikiversity-category	Purpose
Category:Illustrated Companion to the Latin Dictionary	Top-level category of this project.
Category:RICH-2K/Project pages	Category containing the project's administrative and technical pages, i.e. pages which themselves provide no article content but serve merely to describe the project or provide an overview of articles of the project.
Category:RICH-2K/Articles	Mark page as an article-page (HIDDENCAT). This category includes most of the project's articles, whether those from the original stock (RICH-1849) or new ones. Excluded from this category are those articles, which merely point to another article and contain no content of their own, even if it is only a single citation. This category makes it easier to implement a useful Random article-feature, because the user is not being bothered by mere redirect-articles (see next category). Note: True REDIRECT-pages have no category at all.
Category:RICH-2K/Link-only articles	Mark page as a link-only-article-page (HIDDENCAT). Used for articles, which merely point to another article and contain no content of their own, even if it is only a single citation. This category makes it easier to implement a useful Random article-feature (see above). Note: Articles of this type, which link to multiple articles, are considered a type of disambiguation-article and belong to the [[Category:RICH-2K/Articles]].
Category:RICH-2K/RICH-1849	Page with content from RICH-1849 (HIDDENCAT). This category includes only the original articles (RICH-1849).
Category:RICH-2K/References missing or incomplete	Articles, in which references have not yet been (completely) resolved (= external links to online editions, ideally to the exact place referred to) (HIDDENCAT).
Category:RICH-2K/Classed Index-category missing	Article has no Classed Index-category (HIDDENCAT).
Category:RICH-2K/Dead-end-pages	Article contains no link to other articles in the project namespace (HIDDENCAT).
Category:RICH-2K/Orphaned articles	Article with no links from other pages in the project namespace (HIDDENCAT).
Category:RICH-2K/Articles without images	Article without images (HIDDENCAT).
Category:RICH-2K/Comparison with 1890-edition outstanding	1849-text of the article has not yet been compared to the 1890-version of the same (HIDDENCAT).

Categories of the Classed Index

For these, see the project page Categories of the Classed Index.

Templates of the Illustrated Companion

Although the Illustrated Companion to the Latin Dictionary is rather big, as far as the number of pages is concerned, only few project-specific templates are used. These are:

Template-page	Purpose
Template:Illustrated Companion to the Latin Dictionary/Navbox	Navigation-box used by all pages (administrative and technical pages, articles) of the project.
Template:Illustrated Companion to the Latin Dictionary/Boilerplate for Classed Index 1849-Categories	Boilerplate text for use in the category-pages of the project's Classed Index. This specific template is used only for categories already present in the original Classed Index of the 1849-edition of the book by Anthony Rich. The level of the category (either 1 or 2) is given as parameter level: e.g. {{Template:Illustrated Companion to the Latin Dictionary/Boilerplate for Classed Index 1849-Categories|level=2}}
Template:Illustrated Companion to the Latin Dictionary/Inscription	This template takes text as a parameter and returns reformatted, e. g. {{Template:Illustrated Companion to the Latin Dictionary/Inscription|text=VENATIO . ATHLETAE . SPARSIONES . VELA ERUNT}}. This facilitates later changes to the specific formatting of these inscriptions (also used for letters indicating parts of maps) without having to change all the articles.
Template:Illustrated Companion to the Latin Dictionary/Image Location	This template formats sections of text differently in order to make portions of the article visible, to which specific images belong to. Use: {{Template:Illustrated Companion to the Latin Dictionary/Image Location |text=this image |link=IMAGE_NAME |caption=Abolla/1.1}}. This allows to later change the specific formatting of these "image anchors" without having to change all the articles. Default: display anchor text in green and add (in round brackets) a standardized image caption, e.g. (Image: Abolla/2.1). Warning: If the "text"-parameter has a closing cursive-tag '', then the zero-width space ​ has to be added after those.

Various design decisions

Names of pages, categories, and templates

• Articles reside directly within the project's namespace Illustrated Companion to the Latin Dictionary, which leads to page names like Illustrated Companion to the Latin Dictionary/Delphin.
• Project pages reside in the namespace Illustrated Companion to the Latin Dictionary/RICH-2K, which leads to page names like Illustrated Companion to the Latin Dictionary/RICH-2K/Project description.

This additional level "RICH-2K" was introduced to clearly separate non-article pages from article-pages. Use of it creates a clear distinction between these types of pages, however, at the price of even longer page names for project pages. Theoretically, categories should be enough. Main driver behind this decision was a lack of knowledge about how to implement a Random article-feature. It turned out, in the end, that the RandomInCategory-page can do this without requiring this additional layer, but by that time pages using that layer had already been created.

Should a majority of users involved in managing this project decide that this decision was wrong, then it should be fairly easy to remove this layer, since fairly few pages and links are involved.

• Project-categories, i.d. categories not forming part of the Classed Index, reside in the namespace RICH-2K, which leads to category names like RICH-2K/Articles.
• Categories of the "Classed Index" reside in the namespace Classed Index, which leads to category names like Classed Index/The Racecourse and Races.

Article layout

• The layout of the article-pages sticks (reasonably) to the layout-section in the Manual of Style of Wikipedia.
• The article-section Illustrated Companion to the Latin Dictionary, and Greek Lexicon (Rich, 1849) arises from the project's original purpose, i.e. to create a faithful copy of the content of 1849-edition of Anthony Rich's book Illustrated Companion to the Latin Dictionary, and Greek Lexicon.

Perhaps it would have been better to do without this section and instead use a template like Wikipedia's w:Template:EB1911, which marks articles as incorporating text from the 11th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. However, the initial version does include this section.

Should a majority of users decide that this decision was wrong, then the situation can be rectified by simply removing the line == Illustrated Companion to the Latin Dictionary, and Greek Lexicon (Rich, 1849) == from the article's source code. Since, however, this involves about 3,200 pages, a bot is needed to do so. The task itself, however, is fairly straightforward.

Project rules

• The rule forbidding editing (except for typos, adding links, etc.) the content of the article-section Illustrated Companion to the Latin Dictionary, and Greek Lexicon (Rich, 1849) also arises from the project's original purpose (see Article layout above). If this section is removed later on, then this rule is, of course, obsolete, as well.