Signposts - a blog about Te Ara the Encyclopedia of New Zealand

‘Te harinui’ (great joy) versus ‘Te haranui’ (big mistake)

The first NZ Christmas service

Carl’s Christmas blog from last year, Don’t be a turkey, has been pulling people in recently due to a comment by Jennie: ‘why do we not hear the nz christmas carol/song te haranui over the christmas period?’. The song is ‘Te harinui’ meaning great joy, rather than ‘Te haranui’, which actually means big mistake, or great sin.

Anyway, I suspect a few of you are hunting for the words to ‘Te harinui’, which, along with other Kiwi carols, can be found at this great folk song site. ‘Te harinui’ was written by Willow Macky about the first New Zealand Christmas service, held by Samuel Marsden in 1814. The chorus refers to Marsden’s service, which included a verse from the bible referring to ‘great joy’ (te harinui).

‘A pūkeko in a ponga tree’

Another great Kiwi carol is the adaptation of ‘The twelve days of Christmas‘ by Sir Kīngi Īhaka into ‘A pūkeko in a ponga tree’. His words, along with Dick Frizzell’s illustrations, were published as a book.  These kiwi lyrics beat the heck out of turtle doves and leaping lords:

On the twelfth day of Christmas
My true love gave to me
Twelve piupius swinging
Eleven haka lessons
Ten juicy fish heads
Nine sacks of pipis
Eight plants of puha
Seven eels a swimming
Six pois a twirling
Five – big – fat – pigs!
Four huhu grubs
Three flax kits
Two kumara
And a pūkeko in a ponga tree!

Musical fence

‘Good King Wenceslas’ the Kiwi way

What about ‘Good King Wenceslas’ played on a No. 8 wire fence in true Kiwi style?

‘We three kings’

The line-up wouldn’t be complete without this classic from Fred Dagg:

We three Kings of Orient are
One on a tractor, One on a car,
One on a scooter, tooting his hooter,
Following yonder star.

Oh, star a wonder, star a bright
Star a bewdy, she’ll be right,
Star a glory, that’s the story,
Following yonder star

Our summer quiz is all about a good ol’ kiwi summer – swimming, camping, being with family and eating too much. Here’s to it!

To view the quiz you need to have the latest version of Adobe Flash Player

Part five of our series of posts about how Te Ara comes into being.

Being a designer for Te Ara involves two main jobs: optimising and designing.

Optimising

The resourcers, as Mel mentioned in her post, find all the artwork, cartoons, documents, ephemera, maps, photos, sound and video. It’s this raw media that designers clean and optimise for the site. We touch-up, colour-correct, and generally fix images, as well as cut and edit video and sound clips. For each resource we take particular pride in creating unique and interesting thumbnails.

Optimising also includes converting images for zoomify and pageflow. Zoomify is an image viewer allowing zoom-and-pan of large images created by Zoomify Inc. Pageflow was created by us to allow navigation amongst multiple pages of a document, but it is also a great way to view Footrot flats cartoon strips.

Ultimately optimising is about compressing large files, so they’re quick to download, but still look good.

Designing

The resourcers also draft maps, graphs, diagrams and interactives, essentially providing us with a design brief. Attached to a yellow sign-off sheet, these ‘dreaded yellow sheets’ plague our desks and our dreams.

We tackle these briefs by doing some research and looking into various solutions. But more than anything we try to figure out the most effective way to communicate the information. Here are some examples:

Before

After

Working out the magnitude of an earthquake is complex, but by breaking the information into smaller sections, the concept is easier to understand and more visually appealing.

Before

After

Originally conceived as a single map showing the break-up of Hutt County, it was impossible to clearly illustrate all the information in one image. By showing each step separately the break-up process becomes clear.

Before

After

Sometimes, however, we just make something that is plain or dull look more interesting.

After our designs are complete, they are returned to be checked by the writers and editors. Finally, when the yellow sheets are signed off, our work is loaded onto the site.

Here are some of our favourite designs.

Lamb cuts

Parasites of sheep

Places named for politicians

The whakapapa of apples

Planting effective shelter

Mushroom production

Rotary dairy shed

Catalogue in pageflow

Fertiliser imports

Barrington’s journey

Faults and earthquakes

Wairarapa earthquake

Layers of the atmosphere

Main commercial ski fields

Shipwreck sites, Auckland Islands

What are your favourites?

Top 10 searches on google.co.nz in 2008

Google has announced its top searches for New Zealand in 2008.

1. games
2. bebo
3. youtube
4. Trade Me
5. lyrics
6. google
7. map
8. hotmail
9. tv
10. weather

Google, at number 6, is the strangest one. Why would you search in Google for Google? And how many people doing that, when they get their result, think, ‘I was just here’, and do the same search again?

We can comfort ourselves with the thought that it was also the Aussies’ sixth highest search term. It certainly disproves the urban legend that if you type Google into Google you can break the internet.

Google’s top 10 hit parade made me wonder what the top 10 keywords that took searchers to Te Ara were this year.

Top 10 Te Ara searches for 2008

1. Te Ara
2. Matariki
3. Hone Heke
4. Blobfish
5. Apirana Ngata
6. Pounamu (Greenstone 11th top search)
7. Koru
8. Kupe
9. Largest ocean
10. Cabbage tree

Blobfish, aka Mr Blobby

Matariki, the Māori New Year, moved from 3rd in 2007 to 2nd in 2008. That’s not bad considering that over 70% of that traffic came in May and June. The Blobfish, or Mr Blobby as he is affectionaly known in-house, was the big mover. He went from 10th in 2007 to 4th this year.

Hone Heke and Sir Apirana Ngata were the top historical individuals once again. Deep sea frill shark was number 2 in 2007, but disappeared completely in 2008.

And, of course, Te Ara is still number 1.

Top 10 keywords last month

Āraiteuru, a taniwha

Over the past month the top 10 keywords have been the usual suspects with the exception of Holmglen, Erebus crash, and taniwha.

The Holmglen was a ship wrecked off the coast of Timaru in November 1959.  People were obviously trying to find out about the Holmglen after the tragic case of a diver who died in early November while diving to the wreck. The anniversary of another tragedy, the crash of an Air New Zealand DC10 on Mt Erebus, Antarctica, on 28 November 1979, saw an influx into the air crashes entry.

A large number of the taniwha searches are actually image searches, so a lot of you are wondering just what a taniwha looks like.

Tinkering with XML

Part four of our series of posts about how Te Ara comes into being.

In some ways we editors have the perfect job – while editing a text we get to learn about all sorts of subjects without having to do any research. Through working on The Settled Landscape I have learned many fascinating facts about such things as Exotic farm animals, Land ownership, Zoos and aquariums and Rural language.

I have to confess that occasionally some of the subject matter in entries for The Settled Landscape does fall into the ‘I didn’t think I wanted to know about it and now I’m trying to forget’ category – one offender being Diseases of sheep, cattle and deer. Though really the pictures were the main problem rather than the text.

Editing

Once the entry text has been researched, written and checked, and after the resourcers have found a bunch of pictures and other media to go with the entry, and once the writer has written captions for those resources, it’s time for editors to have their turn.

The role of an editor is really to get the text into the best possible shape for publication on Te Ara. We:

• spot and fix typos, spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, punctuation errors
• make sure the text is consistent and follows our house style for things like capitalisation and references
• tighten up the text by removing repetition and waffle
• query with the writer anything that seems wrong or confusing
• check that caption text matches the resource it relates to
• make sure the text is in plain language and easy to read for people with little or no previous knowledge of the subject – without dumbing it down. To do this we change jargon words to ones that are more familiar and meaningful, make sure sentences are ‘active‘ rather than ‘passive’, make sure the subject of a sentence is at the beginning of a sentence rather than buried at the end, and so forth. Te Ara has been very successful in making even complicated text understandable, and was rewarded with the 2008 WriteMark New Zealand Plain English Award for best plain English website.

Our 2008 WriteMark New Zealand Plain English Award

We are very fortunate to work with writers who are expert and professional, which makes our job much easier. Sometimes there can be a little tension with writers, who may feel we’re messing up their gorgeous prose. In (humorous) speeches at farewell morning teas, in which the Te Ara team were compared to animals, editors have been both possums in the forest (I guess because we prune), and predators (but surely only because it rhymes with editors). But our relationship with writers is really very symbiotic, and we aim to treat their text with the respect it deserves.

Production

Editors at Te Ara don’t just edit, but we’re also the people who get the words and images onto the web – we call it ‘production’.

First we have to style the documents in Microsoft Word, so we can transform them into XML (eXtensible Markup Language), from which our web pages are created using stylesheets. We load this XML up to our staging server to test it, make any corrections in the XML and then load it up again. When a theme or entry is ready to be released to the world, we load it up to the live server.

Other stuff

We editors like to think of ourselves as an adaptable lot, and we are involved in other things as they come to hand, such as running this blog, editing and checking proofs for books Te Ara has published in association with David Bateman and other project work.