New Ground: Introducing the Anthologica Universe Atlas

[Rhetorica]

Site: http://anthologi.ca
Registration: http://anthologi.ca/registration.star

Conlangers and conworlders face a difficult task when digitizing and sharing their work. While there are a number of online communities devoted to the exchange and promotion of constuff, none provide a very good platform for cataloguing dictionaries or organizing materials; instead a handful of scattered tools and completely unstructured wikis must generally suffice. Some authors even throw up their hands at the technical challenge of setting up and using such services, and simply resort to static websites.

For many authors, this state of affairs may appear to be sufficient, but it has limitations and hence consequences: wikis are often time-consuming to navigate and structure, and may waste storage by allocating a whole page (with history) for each dictionary entry; static websites are difficult to update and keep consistent; and both may disappear from the web if hosting lapses or the author loses interest.

Last autumn, when I first came to the ZBB, it was readily apparent to me that a lot of contributors here had no personal place where they kept their work online—C&C is rich in threads where people have posted summaries, but rarely is there room for a complete dictionary, and critical details like grammar and phonology must be crammed into a number of broken-up posts. This is, simply, terrible, and it was something I immediately wanted to fix.

To that end I started working on Anthologica, which I'm proud to unveil today. It provides a structured format for representing conworlds and conlangs, putting the whole world into a tree like a book while retaining wiki-like online editing, BBcode-like markup (although you can use HTML for longer pages), access control for collaboration, flash cards for studying your conlang, and an importer to load words in bulk from a spreadsheet.

My greatest hope is that Anthologica will provide a single, central point for conlangers and conworlders to host their material when they want to share it with other people. I don't mean to discourage or compete with people's existing solutions and sites, though there are some features in development that may make you consider switching or loading data into Anthologica anyway, such as detailed timeline management with custom calendars, automatic conjugation, and an integrated sound changer that will add new words to daughter languages whenever the parent language is updated. (These features are nowhere near complete, but are expected to be delivered over the summer as my time frees up.)

In response to desires expressed by members of the community, I have implemented forums at Anthologica as well, in a format which is a little more streamlined than phpBB, but similarly featureful. They are meant to sustain interaction and provide a meeting place for conlangers in much the same way the ZBB has. For the time being, the moderation staff will consist solely of myself, but I will entertain solicitations for additional moderators as necessity dictates. My main goal is to ensure that Anthologica stays as accessible and friendly as possible for everyone, and I would like to emphasise that the site is open to everyone; no past history of conflicts on the ZBB will be taken into consideration. (And, honestly, I don't know about them anyway.)

With this project I'm not seeking a power trip—I enjoy programming much as anyone here enjoys conlanging, and the thought of running a community and earning approval through my code is very appealing. I will do my best to meet the technical needs and requests of any user, within reason.

For the past few months I've been approaching various ZBBers to play with the site, and the response has been generally very positive; Travis B. and Nessari have both uploaded highly fleshed-out languages with medium-sized dictionaries, and a number of other users have begun documenting their efforts, including the beginnings of some Akana material posted by Radius. The possibilities for the first dedicated, integrated conlanging community are exciting, and it is my deep wish that everyone will take part and be able to enjoy themselves.

Thanks!

[KathTheDragon]

Looks great, Rhetorica! I'll have to play around with it sometime.

[Aili Meilani]

Color me skeptical, I fail to see how it's any better than a

completely unstructured wiki

It looks very much like one, except the "wiki" part.

[KathTheDragon]

detailed timeline management with custom calendars, automatic conjugation, and an integrated sound changer that will add new words to daughter languages whenever the parent language is updated. (These features are nowhere near complete, but are expected to be delivered over the summer as my time frees up.)

That grabbed my attention.

[Vardelm]

detailed timeline management with custom calendars, automatic conjugation, and an integrated sound changer that will add new words to daughter languages whenever the parent language is updated. (These features are nowhere near complete, but are expected to be delivered over the summer as my time frees up.)

That grabbed my attention.

Seconded.

[Rhetorica]

Color me skeptical, I fail to see how it's any better than a

completely unstructured wiki

It looks very much like one, except the "wiki" part.

A MediaWiki installation doesn't even get you dictionary management; at best you can make a category page that lists all of the words in the language by page title—and if you have more than one language in the same wiki, all of the words will probably have an annoying prefix. Ever noticed how people talk about printing out Wikipedia, but not Wiktionary? That's because Wiktionary has no suitable abbreviated format; your only options are (a) the title, and (b) the full article.

At its heart, Anthologica is a wiki-like platform, but a lot of features have been added (and will continue to be added) to tailor it towards conlanging and project collaboration. It provides structure where a normal wiki only provides an empty box and a set of agreed-upon conventions—discussion pages consist of comments (like on a blog) rather than simply being a list of remarks that anyone can manipulate, users can grant or revoke permissions to collaborate on a project as they choose, and every conworld project is structured around a presentable and customizable tree structure (not just Special:AllPages...) so that no content gets lost. Wikis are great for conlanging and conworlding in theory, but they have a lot of rough edges that conlangers have been perpetually fighting quite unnecessarily.

(Also, the soundchanger will have full metathesis support. Say goodbye to the weird hacks that SCA² uses!)

[Rhetorica]

(Aino: I saw your post, and you had some very reasonable concerns and suggestions, even if the phrasing was a bit blunt. I assume you're re-editing it; I really do value your feedback.)

[Aili Meilani]

I assume you're re-editing it

I'm not. I deleted it because I don't think it's worth arguing about.

[Rhetorica]

Alright, that's understandable. However, I'd like to allay some of the concerns from your post anyway; I hope it won't cause too much dismay.

- Implementation on the SCA and calendar system have been started, and really are expected to be done this summer. The auto-inflection stuff depends entirely on the SCA and cannot be done until the SCA is finished.

- The site does support a slightly nicer URL format (anthologi.ca/?page, or just /?page inside the site) but that only works reliably if the page title is unique. I've been planning for ages to add a more structured URL format, but I've only recently gotten a good enough grasp of how Apache's mod_rewrite works to actually implement it.

- Deployability is a long-term goal, but for now the emphasis is on building a shared space in order to promote collaboration and minimize the setup work required. (As an example of what a deployment might look like, I've been using the same codebase for years at Celestial Mechanics.

- A little bit of community fragmentation is unfortunately unavoidable when building a new solution; even if Anthologica somehow magically replaced one of the existing conlanging communities, some people would prefer the old ways. I think it's important, though, that it does offer a new experience rather than just being another phpBB or another MediaWiki.

- Other long-term features under consideration (but not yet development or even planning) include a typesetting engine for bitmap conscripts, more extensive theme customization for each universe, timeline visualization, a WYSIWYG rich text editor, and perhaps eventually zoomable, searchable maps.

- Here is the formatting guide; tables are near the bottom. I avoided typical wiki markup because these can be problematic or confusing for conlanging, e.g. with X-SAMPA input. I kept the wiki-style hyperlinks for brevity. The rationale for choosing a BBcode-like system was that it would maximize user familiarity, since almost all conlangers have used a BBcode-based forum.

- And as for the double negative on the registration page--that was actually a typo; thanks for spotting it! I've updated the page to be clearer.

[Bristel]

The typography and setup of the site looks cool, but it's almost a bit too bright on the front page, imo. I think some more color blocking with darker neutral colors might help that out… Unless you want the more clean spartan look.

[Rhetorica]

The primary design goal was to provide a minimalist experience, but the front page in particular is somewhat rough; more the result of wanting to squeeze in certain features than a top-down design. If you have particular ideas for a page layout, I'll certainly entertain them. In terms of the overall colour scheme, font choice, and stylization, however, I was really focused on trying to avoid a theme that might predispose the site against any particular genre of conworld.

[Ketumak]

I've already got hosting myself thanks, so I'll probably not be using this, but it does look good and has some nice functionality. A valuable addition to the conlang scene.

One thing I'm not clear on: does the wiki-ness extend to anyone being able to edit anything? I hope not, because then you'd not have full control of your own pages.

[Rhetorica]

It's my hope that I'll eventually still be able to provide value to people with their own hosting solutions because of the dictionary diachronics and conjugation stuff; the idea is that you import, derive, and then re-export. But we'll see; a deployable platform is an eventual target too.

As for editability—the site has a comprehensive unix-like permissions system. By default everything is locked down. There's an interface specifically for managing user groups, though, and every new universe gets a group associated with it, so it's easy to add people to your project with different permissions levels.

[Sevly]

Would you consider open sourcing this and allowing contributions through something like git? There are plenty of programmers on this board, and I for one would love to help out by contributing to projects like this. As individuals we've made various conlanging software tools over the years between dictionaries, sound change appliers, and whatnot, and ConWorkShop is at least one other attempt at an integrated conlanging environment, but I think that we could get even more done with collaborative efforts. Though most of my experience is with PHP and Java, I'm ultimately pretty agnostic about the development framework and willing to adapt to whatever base has already been built.

[Ketumak]

OK, that sounds good. A couple more points occur, these may already have been suggested in the "Missing features" thread over on Anthologica (I don't want to go through all nine pages) but how about an "About" page for stuff on who and what's behind the site inc. eg funding model and its chances of staying up long term, plus an FAQ (these usually repeat main points from other pages in my experience, but it's still good to have them all together).

Also are you ready for people to start plugging Anthologica on other boards and sites?

[Rhetorica]

Would you consider open sourcing this and allowing contributions through something like git? There are plenty of programmers on this board, and I for one would love to help out by contributing to projects like this. As individuals we've made various conlanging software tools over the years between dictionaries, sound change appliers, and whatnot, and ConWorkShop is at least one other attempt at an integrated conlanging environment, but I think that we could get even more done with collaborative efforts. Though most of my experience is with PHP and Java, I'm ultimately pretty agnostic about the development framework and willing to adapt to whatever base has already been built.

Not a bad idea! It's been my intention to open-source the underlying platform, Cadre, for a long time. (This is normally the point where I'd link the project page, but that site is down for a few days because of server room renovations. Here's the link anyway.) Cadre is a PHP framework that provides transparent database access and user account control; it implements a scripting language, Octavia, specialized for webpage text output that includes these features. It avoids being a bad case of inner-platform effect by abstracting away as many obstacles as possible; for example, templates and scripts are stored directly in the database as standard pages. So, for example, the Flash Cards page is implemented entirely in Octavia and resides within a MariaDB/MySQL table (with a primary key `id` of 281). Template pages are equivalent to classes in object-oriented programming, so inheritance is represented by parenting their pages, e.g. the News List template overrides the create mode (method) of the Abstract List template. (Caveat: Octavia has a few idiosyncracies and bugs that still need ironing out, e.g. you can't break from a loop if the break statement is inside a nested { } block. (fixed that))

The nested scripting language + database storage architecture makes rapid development very practical for large site projects (hence why the style in most of the code is uncommented and generally ad hoc), and in the past I've been able to roll out tailored structured wikis and even a real-time chat environment (with a bit of shoeshine and a helper PHP page to provide AJAX) in a matter of months, but it does pose some challenges for repo management: stuff in a database doesn't really check in/out well! This has also proved to be a barrier to deployment, since updates would require reconciling database entries. I have a script that permits syncing of individual templates and scripts with a single click, but it's a far cry from a package manager.

OK, that sounds good. A couple more points occur, these may already have been suggested in the "Missing features" thread over on Anthologica (I don't want to go through all nine pages) but how about an "About" page for stuff on who and what's behind the site inc. eg funding model and its chances of staying up long term, plus an FAQ (these usually repeat main points from other pages in my experience, but it's still good to have them all together).

Also are you ready for people to start plugging Anthologica on other boards and sites?

Yes to all of the above; consider this the ZBB plug!

Regarding the FAQ, just FYI: Anthologica is funded out-of-pocket on a colocated server shared with larger projects (although it's hosted in a VM, isolating it from any intrusions.) The conlanging community is sufficiently small that even at my most optimistic I don't foresee it outgrowing its current britches. In the unlikely event that I'm unable to continue supporting and developing it, I'll make every effort to pass on the responsibility to a like-minded, competent individual or, failing that, ensure that (sanitized) database dumps are publicly available. I am confident it will be around for years to come.

[KathTheDragon]

Is the site down for anyone, or is it just me?

[Rhetorica]

Sorry about that; there were some security concerns. It'll be back up in a few hours.

EDIT: All better!

[communistplot]

This is actually really cool. Hopefully it's easier to use than a wiki (on the internet for over a decade and I still don't know how they work). Definitely something I might use.

[Rhetorica]

Glad to hear it! The standard formatting for most pages on the site is called WF Markup, which is almost a superset of BBcode, so you can use familiar tags from forums in everything, including encyclopedia articles and dictionary definitions. (The big advantage is that it's less likely to be confused with linguistic notation.)

For anyone holding out because you want wiki-style markup, the latest batch of site updates included a wikitext markup option for longer articles (elsewhere you have to use WF Markup.) The MediaWiki parser is extremely cumbersome and complex, so for now we only have support for markup from another wiki engine, called Wikka. (You can see a guide here.) It has some considerable differences vs. MediaWiki, though, so it's still an eventual goal to add proper support.

[Pogostick Man]

This atlas is awesome! Thank you for opening and maintaining it.

[Ser]

I can only full-heartedly recommend anthologi.ca's universe+conlang repository. The dictionary can be exported; the articles can be made quite neatly. Thank you for your gigantic contribution to conlanging, Rhetorica.

[KathTheDragon]

Is anyone else having problems accessing the site?

[Rhetorica]

Thanks for bringing that to my attention and getting me out of bed—there was a minor hiccup with the database server. All better!

[KathTheDragon]

Site's down again.