Unlikely Glossary Project
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Welcome to the new home of the Unlikely Glossary Project
h3. What is the UGP?
A wiki bringing together some of the cultural literacy of me (Nick) and some of my acquaintances. In other words, a large assortment of references, in-jokes, lists of things, etc.
UGP is primarily a personal wiki, in the sense that I maintain it, do most of the things associated with it, and am usually the person behind any first person construction. However, I have suckered others into participating on occasion. This is a Wiki, so feel free to make helpful edits or add comments and/or content, but obviously spamming and/or being an (unhelpful) asshole is frowned upon.
Questions, complaints, and invective can be directed here
h3. Why is the UGP?
The origins of the UGP are shrouded in mystery, by which I mean, I don’t quite remember where the idea came from. I believe it had something to do, though, with the not-infrequent complaint that I ought to come with some such reference work, so that people would have a better chance of understanding what I’m talking about.
It was also probably inspired at least in part by Quine’s Quiddities, an “intermittently philosophical dictionary”, on the grounds that “things that are almost but not quite dictionaries are cool.”
h3. What do you call a person who works on a glossary?
A glossator. Examples include Nick, Chris, and Andrew.
h3. New site
Previously, UGP was a Zwiki (either directly in Zope or in Plone) on either FreeZope or Objectis.net; while Zwiki is cool, and in some ways quite powerful, it was very fond of breaking, and structured text was somewhat problematic. (AARGH! Too much indentation!)
This site is a pimki (a variant of Instiki.) It uses textile markup, of which I’m very fond; there are some basic tips next to the editing window, and some more substantive advice at the “advanced” link. Headings are relatively straightforward (“h2.” or whatever), italics and bold are as one would expect, and lists work as in MediaWiki and MoinMoin. Footnotes and tables are a little more complicated, but manageable. (As long as you don’t need to renumber your notes.)
It’s hosted by Textdrive, I haven’t gotten around to too much image-related stuff, but I’ll probably end up using flickr for some things, if not many things.
h3. Other
I’m throwing out a lot of unnecessary baggage (templates and so forth) from the Zwiki version, because (a) nobody used them properly, (b) they were fairly stupid, and© they made more sense in Zope’s more powerful but less wiki-optimized environment.
As to rules, the only things I’m running across are consistent capitalization (which I haven’t demonstrated myself yet) and categorization, the rule there being that it’s better to categorize things than not. I would like for the tags to be a good, direct, comprehensive way to browse the site. Generally, categories should be in the singular (i.e., more like tags than categories) rather than the plural.
h3. License
We’re CC-licensed, per below (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike); if any contributers would like to be listed on the entry at CommonContent let me know.
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