Same shit, new wrapping – or? On the termwiki of The Language Council of Norway

Same shit, new wrapping – or?

On the termwiki of The Language Council of Norway – http://www.termwiki.sprakradet.no/

VII Terminology Summit – Barcelona, November 27th–28th 2014

Jan HoelNovember 28th

http://www.termwiki.sprakradet.no/

VII Terminology Summit in Barcelona – Jan Hoel, November 28th

Same shit, new wrapping – or? On the termwiki of The Language Council of Norway2

In 2010 the Terminology Service of the Language Council decided to find out whether a term base could successfully be developed on a MediaWiki platform

The work was done externally, and the first version was rather primitive

In a revamp operation two years later, new and better functionality was added using Semantic Forms

Semantic Forms are an extension to MediaWiki that allows users to add, edit and query data using forms instead of HTML encoding

So far there is not a lot of content in our termwiki, but then again, we were never all that preoccupied with getting as much content as possible

Our primary concern was to find out if traditional and sound terminology methods could be safeguarded in a MediaWiki solution



The main topic of this Summit: How does social networking affectterminology work? What exactly is ”social networking”?

Three essential characteristics:

web-based allows users to interact over the Internet allows users to share information, knowledge, ideas,

pictures, posts, activities, events, interests with others in a network



Our main concern and challenge has been: How open and ”social” do we want the termwiki to be?

QUESTION:Does our termwiki satisfy the characteristics of social networking?

ANSWER:Only to a certain extent: Everybody can conduct searches in the content, but in order to enter or edit terms one must ”apply” for a user account (user name and password).



So – is it ”Same shit, new wrapping?”

Not quite:

Freely accessible for searches on the Internet,(but entering and editing terms still requires a user account)

Web crawlers index the term entries (i.e. concepts) as ”pages”, which facilitates search hits on the Internet, also using Google

”Talk (discussion)” tab accessible – also for users without a user account ”View history” log for every term entry, showing all revisions Three types of user with user account: editor, project manager, administrator

(= the Language Council) Allows work in projects supervised over the Internet (editors and project

manager) Our own feature: from every term entry it is possible to send a pre-addressed

e-mail directly to an individual or a project manager In every term entry it is possible to explain editing carried out



STATUS:• Almost 1,300 authoritative term entries (i.e. concepts)

• Divided between four projects: ICT terms (standing ICT working group of the Language Council) Road terminology (The Norwegian Public Roads Administration) Chemical terminology in the higher education sector (the Language

Council and university academic staff) Protection of privacy terms (The Norwegian Data Protection Authority)

• There will be more projects and concepts added next year


Same shit, new wrapping – or? On the termwiki of The Language Council of Norway

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Takk for oppmerksomheten!Gràcies per la seva atenció¡Gracias por su atención!

Merci pour votre attention!Thank you for your attention!



Presentations & Public Speaking

Same shit, new wrapping – or? On the termwiki of The Language Council of Norway