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

It's your turn to add to Te Ara

We’ve just opened up an easy way for our community of users to interact with our Te Ara website.

There's a box to add your contributions at the bottom of every media page

On almost every media page – pages with images, sound files, videos, interactives, maps and graphs – you’ll now find a box where you can write a contribution (or comment) on the topic and post it to the website. The box is found at the foot of each media page. You’ll need to enter your name and email address before posting your contribution. (We won’t publish your email address or use it for any other purpose. It just helps us to ensure that there is a real person making the contribution, and not a robot or spam artist.)

It’s taken us a little while to get our heads around the best way to fit what you, our users, have to say into the context of the carefully researched and authoritative information our writers provide. So it’s been important to us to make it easy to distinguish what YOU’ve written from what WE’ve written.

Te Ara’s point of difference from publicly contributed sites such as the invaluable Wikipedia is exactly this transparency and the level of editorial control required to safeguard its status.

But we’re also trying to make the most of the extra riches that you, our community, are already adding to Te Ara by sending us your stories through the Your Story link that’s on every page.

We’ve had a lot of valuable, lively and fascinating little nuggets of information and colourful anecdotes submitted this way, but a lot of them don’t fit comfortably into the mould we’ve been using when we’ve published longer pieces on topics such as immigration experiences, bush yarns, disasters you’ve witnessed, or, most recently, stories about going to a country school. (You’ll find a complete list of them under ‘Your stories’ in the Te Ara browser.) We’ll now be able to publish these juicy morsels as comments.

This it isn’t our first foray into social media – Te Ara already tweets, blogs and flickrs – but it’s a bit more immediate than anything we’ve done before on the Te Ara site.

What we’re hoping for are contributions that will add value for other users of Te Ara. We’d welcome additional information and different points of view. We may edit some contributions, and we won’t necessarily publish them all. If you have a longer story to tell, or want to contribute images or other files, please use the Your Story link, or add images to our flickr pool.

Paul Reynolds

A month ago I spent a stimulating lunch fantasising with Paul Reynolds about the future of Te Ara.  This morning I hear with a brutal shock that Paul has died. Paul, I cannot believe that, living as you did in the  digital world of instant messaging,  you are not still listening. So here’s my tribute to you.

You were the great prophet of the digital world.  On the lecture podium, on radio, in your blog, on Twitter, above all in your ever-enthusiastic presence, you gave us all a vision of the next turn in this digital journey.  When we first conceptualised Te Ara, XML was your passion. Then came social media and the need to let audiences engage, talk to each other and answer back. Most recently when we talked, your enthusiasm was on a jointed up web and the need to make seamless links between a site like Te Ara and the other sites in the cultural/heritage space.

We did not always listen to you or follow your ideas, and no doubt we were the losers for it, but that never offended you. It did not stop your constant support or halt the flow of ideas. However antediluvian our site, you always believed in Te Ara, always looked for ways to improve it – always warm and generous in your plaudits for what we did, gentle and intelligent in pointing out where we should move. I look back at the blog you wrote after the launch of ‘Economy and the City’ on a wet night in Auckland in March, and there it is: a statement of admiration for the project, and then deft suggestions for a personalisation folder, for links, for more of a relationship with Wikipedia, for more use of creative commons.  All good ideas beautifully put.

So we will miss you bad, Paul: that soft Scots lilt, those alert eyes, and that excitement for where the web was moving. We are all in your debt.

Ross Somerville writes:
It’s hard to believe that the exuberant and encouraging Scots voice is now silent: Paul Reynolds, who must without doubt have been able to claim to being New Zealand’s first internet guru, died suddenly at the weekend.

While Te Ara was still nothing more than an idea, Paul would hold court at an outside table at Wellington’s Astoria cafe, during his frequent visits to the capital. There in the early 2000s at a table covered in coffee cups and overflowing ashtrays, he would bail up librarians, IT geeks, CIOs and others to spread the word about the latest internet developments that had excited him, and to stress the benefits of his favourite topic, collaboration.

Paul was tireless in his quest to persuade collecting institutions and content providers to digitise their material, and work together to share standards and make it widely available.

Some of his visions were achieved; some are still ideas whose time has not yet come in an environment he must have found frustratingly slow-moving. But he did not cease encouraging us, and prodding us to go that step further.

His enthusiasm and encouragement will be very much missed.

Yesterday the Te Ara site moved to the open-source Drupal content management platform and made a number of relatively minor changes to the site navigation.

Of course quite a few things went wrong yesterday morning, but the site is now (mostly) performing better than it used to and it offers us so many possibilities that, though a tad exhausted at this point, we’re looking happily towards the future. Kudos to HeadFirst, our developers, who not only migrated the entire 30,000 pages but also gave us a new authoring system and some Easter Eggs too. Hallelujah! And to have a search engine that actually returns relevant results in a logical order is almost a religious experience for some, including the General Editor. It’s faster and more accurate than our old one. (For them as wants to know, the engine is Sphinx, also open-source.)

The site is mostly as it was (if it ain’t broke …) but here are some of the differences that you might notice:

URLs to pages have been simplified and now appear in the form

http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/story-name (or /mi/ for the Māori interface)

A comprehensive redirection is in place and any bookmarks shouldn’t break, but please update them. Links deeper than a story (entry) page may not be resolved correctly but our error page gives a number of helpful suggestions.

Other changes include:

• You can now browse Te Ara’s contents (groupled (ha ha) in a variety of ways) on any page by clicking on the ‘Browse Te Ara’ command at the very top every page.
• The Short Story icon and link has been consistently positioned on all pages, to the right of the title.
• The Short Story has a new ‘lightbox‘ treatment.
• Biography links (to the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography website) appear at the foot of the story pages, and the Biographies Gallery has been removed.
• To move to the text from an image or other media item, click the ‘Back to story’ button.
• Images or media which are grouped together have improved internal navigation (thumbnails appear above the main image).
• Further Sources pages have been placed within the story navigation.
• Related Stories are now managed through an automated process based on key words on the page. This is still subject to refinement, and we’ve signalled the lack of human intervention in the process by labelling the feature ‘You may be interested in…’ No guarantees, but there may be a serendipity…

If any of the navigation is unclear, try reading through our ‘How to use Te Ara’ page.

There have also been a number of small cosmetic changes to improve the look of the site. We’d be pleased to have your reactions to the changes. Leave a comment below.

Jackson Bay – no relation

Yes, it’s true. The talented artist sometimes disparagingly referred to as Wacko Jacko has heard the last trump, and he never got mentioned in Te Ara. It could still happen, of course, but it won’t do him much good now. Passed over by New Zealand’s national online encyclopedia, and now he’s passed over Jordan himself, it’s the final insult really.

And we tried. Search Te Ara for Jackson and you’ll get plenty of hits (just like Michael) but they’re mainly about Jackson Bay in South Westland. Not that it isn’t interesting – it was the site of a government special settlement in 1884. This was a complete fiasco. They shipped in Germans, Poles and Italians to work in farming and forestry, but the combination of extremely wet weather  (Jackson Bay has one of the highest rainfalls on the already wet West Coast), the rugged bush-clad landscape and the fact that they couldn’t understand each other’s languages, meant they soon shipped out.

One of the sodden survivors was Joseph Wladislas Edmond Potocki de Montalk, born in France of Polish heritage (and his mother was said to be the illegitmate daughter of King George IV of England) and notable as the grandfather of the card-carrying barking right-wing poet ‘Count’ Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk (pretender to the Polish throne and briefly imprisioned in the UK for obscenity in the 1930s).

But I digress. Edmond de Montalk (as far as we know, no relation to Michael Jackson) had been teaching at the University of Otago in Dunedin until he spat the dummy in desperation and headed for the West Coast ‘to do the best I can for my family, as I could do nothing for them in the Scottish, cantish Dunedin, where it is useless to teach anything unless your mother has had the wisdom to give you birth north of the Tweed.’

What’s that got to do with Michael Jackson? Well, nothing, by the looks of it, but everyone else is blogging and twittering about him so let’s get on the bandwagon and see if our blog gets a few more hits this week.

Lord Bledisloe, a former governor general, or was that governor-general?

The following is (more or less) verbatim from a recent email exchange at our offices on a freezing cold June day when the heating wasn’t working too well.

Writer (who shall remain nameless):

A small matter. When going through some proofs I corrected ‘governor general’ to ‘governor-general’. I now see that the Te Ara style guide specifies ‘governor general’. I’ve always used ‘governor-general’ because that’s how it appears in the letters patent defining the office [PDF 157KB], in general usage and on sites such as the GG, DPMC. Perhaps the style guide should be changed before we hit the governance theme?

Equally nameless editor (self-righteously):

This style was inherited from the DNZB, which eschewed hyphens in such compounds as governor general and also lieutenant governor, or lieutenant general, or sergeant major and others too numerous to mention.

Also the Concise Oxford English Dictionary (10th ed, revised), which we use as our authority for hyphenation at Te Ara, leaves out the hyphen in governor general.

The DNZB applied house style across the board in titles and proper names, as actual usage varied and would be seen as inconsistent. It also meant that editors did not have to research every instance of a name like this, but could confidently apply the consistent style.

I am not in favour of making an exception because 19th-century letters patent used a certain style. I do not believe that legislation and editorial decisions make good bedfellows! It’s not a question of an incorrect fact, merely a stylistic preference. Most arguments along these lines reflect an individual’s familiarity with or personal preference for a particular style of usage.

As it is not an error, and there is a substantial body of pre-existing content, I do not support any change here.

(Personally I also think it’s old fashioned, pretentious and pompous in a way that is not appropriate in egalitarian NZ in the 21st century. Like a blind insistence on capitalisation, it’s a legacy of empire and too much reading of the King James Version!)

Writer (patiently):

Far from being C19th legislation, it’s the 1983 letters patent, the one that ‘indigenised’ the office, so it’s about as antiquated as the DNZB. Curious that we slavishly follow that creaking old relic of empire, the OED.

Ed (sheepishly):

Touché! That’ll teach me for not even looking at the reference!

But I don’t care anyway. And the later revisions of the OED are remarkably forward-looking (given its heritage). Always seemed a pretty conservative and safe choice as arbiter (obviating innumerable arguments and mind-numbing ‘scholarly’ discussions).

The main argument for not changing the style is the implication for the many similar compounds. And the retrospective work.

As someone once said: ‘If you think too long about hyphens, you will surely go mad.’ QED. I rest my case, m’lud.

[Scholarly aside for pedants: 'If you take hyphens seriously, you will surely go mad.' This dire warning was issued by John Benbow in his book Manuscript & proof: the preparation of manuscript for the printer and the handling of the proofs, published by Oxford University Press in New York in 1937.]

General Editor (judiciously):

Yep, consistency and extra work are pretty powerful arguments to me, but its probably worth a blog!

Writer (provocatively):

Probably better (and more enjoyably) done over drinks. I don’t read institutional blogs and from the response rates to them, don’t think many non-institutional people do. With a second glass of the grape, I may even let fly at macrons (the typographical equivalent of skidmarks on underpants, a friend said recently), grocers’ apostrophes, the current journalistic fad of replacing ‘will’ and ‘shall’ with ‘is set to’ and … Gawd, this could go on forever!

Ed (cowering):

No, not forever, please, make it stop!

Writer (graciously):

OK, I’ll hang up my pith helmet.

Postscript for the insane:

Those sad souls like me who find this kind of thing fascinating may be reassured to know that we are not alone: it hit world headlines when the sixth edtion of the Shorter Oxford Dictionary knocked the hyphens out of 16,000 compounds. Mind you, those with an excessive fascination with what is ‘good’ style do run the risk of being labelled ‘grammar fascists’ (see Wikipedia). Like  Lynne Truss, whose rather smug little book has been accused of laying down the law as if there is some moral superiority involved in speaking and writing ‘proper’. Though her worst crime is that she bowdlerised the classic definition of the Kiwi bird (or the male) in her book’s title. We all have our hobby horses, sigh.