[OLPC library] automating lists of events, jams, etc.
S Page
info at skierpage.com
Sat Aug 23 02:05:14 EDT 2008
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.
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