automating lists of events, jams, etc.

[S Page]

Seth Woodworth wrote:
> I've migrated as many of the dates from the [[Events]] Page to the [[Xo 
> roadshow]] wiki page.  ...

People should annotate wiki pages for events, jams, meetings, etc. with
   [[start date::2008-08-22]].

Pages can query this instead of users manually updating lists every few 
weeks. For example, see 
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Events#Upcoming_events_on_wiki.laptop.org

This already found a jam missing from 
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Jams#Upcoming_Jams

It's fairly straightforward, for example replace
   The Physics Game Jam will be held
   August 29th-31st  2008
with
   The Physics Game Jam will be held
   [[Start date::August 29, 2008]]-[[End date::August 31, 2008]]

--
=S Page  user:skierpage

"Nifty, but does it put a laptop in a child's hands?" ;-)

=== More details... ===

Every event page is different, so I didn't create Form:Event and 
Template:Event; instead you annotate the existing date on the page.

An annotation is much like a page link, so you can provide alternate 
text or hide it, e.g.
   [[Start date::2008-08-29 | around the end of August]]
   [[End date::2008-08-31| ]]  (nothing shows)

Date properties recognize most date formats in English, and you can 
include a time and maybe a time zone.  Note the *only* world-wide 
language-independent unambiguous date format is ISO8601:
   2008-08-29 21:30

I doubt it's worth annotating events in the past with this info.

MediaWiki caches the queries, which helps performance but means changed 
pages don't immediately appear in the results display.

You can also display query results as a timeline (like 
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Deployments), or as rss, vCard, etc.  See 
http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Inline_queries#Result_formats

This can only show info from pages in the wiki.  But many events are on 
external web pages.  You could create a wiki page for each external 
event and give it start_date and end_date to make it show up in queries. 
   I did this for http://wiki.laptop.org/go/BookSprint_August_2008.  You 
could go nuts adding the extra local info on the Events page like 
has_attendees, piques_interest_of, 
requests_OLPC_support_in_the_form_of, etc. and query for this to make an 
Event planner table.  But it's probably more work than maintaining one 
Events page.