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

NZ at Frankfurt logo

Say ‘frankfurt’ to a Kiwi and they will probably envision a sausage. Or the more culturally informed may hark back to Dr Frank N. Furter and a former prime minister’s association with that pinnacle of the dramatist’s art, The Rocky horror show.

But perhaps that will all change now that New Zealand is guest of honour at the world-renowned Frankfut Book Fair in 2012. Writers, publishers and other cultural emissaries are representing our printed output and other cultural achievements over there this October.

Te Ara, New Zealand’s online encyclopedia, also celebrates the country’s links with the German-speaking world through its coverage of German immigration to New Zealand and its influence in many spheres.

Te Ara’s biographical section includes some 37 individuals (see the list at the foot of these search results) from the nations that were Austria, Bohemia and Germany, as well as some from other parts of German-speaking Europe. Only one of them was a native Frankfurter: a little-known figure in New Zealand today, but one of a family of prominent musicians of the time, the family of Aloys Schmitt, who is still remembered in musicological circles. Carl Gustav Schmitt emigrated to Auckland in 1859, where he founded the local choral society and taught music at the university.

His sister was the first wife of prominent geologist and explorer Julius von Haast, one of the German-speaking men who gave some of the South Island’s mountain peaks German names.

Some, like Schmitt and Haast, stayed; some, like Ferdinand Hochstetter, Karl Popper and Ernst Plischke, didn’t. Some were happy, some were not. Some are remembered, some forgotten. Perhaps New Zealand’s prominence at Frankfurt this year, and the events surrounding this, will prompt an increased interest  in the connections. There are some fascinating stories.

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.