Biographies

[alex lockton]

I've just posted a short biography of WP Hamilton on the Wiki. Would appreciate advice on whether I've done it correctly. I think this has enormous potential.
How do we add new collectors to the list?
Alex

[Tom Humphrey]

Hi Alex,

thanks for adding the W P Hamilton entry, it's exactly to the type of thing I was hoping for, and format-wise it's fine. Eventually, it be would good to cross-link the page to the other collectors mentioned, but none of those pages exist yet.

I'm hopeful that the wiki will become useful once more is added to it. I liked the idea of having an open-ended mechanism to add content to the site. Hopefully it may also broaden the appeal of the project.

For collectors already in the herb@home database (which incorporates the Kent&Allen list as well as whatever names users have encountered on sheets) the easiest way to add wiki entries is to search for the collector then follow the link to create a wiki entry from the collector page (which is presumably the route you followed for Hamilton). For names not already in the database, there isn't currently a straightforward process - this something I need to address. In general you can create new pages in the wiki by entering a url of the form http://herbariaunited.org/wiki/some_new_page
but pages created by that route will not have the collector template details included automatically.

I still need to do quite a lot of work on the wiki to better integrate it into the rest of the site and to make adding entries more straightforward (e.g. the amount of gubbins that the gets automatically added to new collector pages is excessive and needs to be simplified to make editing the page less daunting).

Hopefully it will ultimately be possible to add wiki entries for most of the major collectors that are likely to be encountered, but there are not many collector entries so far and most just contain links to external sites (I've yet to add any biographical entries myself, the only ones currently online are for Hamilton and a detailed entry for Charles Bailey by Chris Liffen.

Eventually I'd also like to move much of the textual pages on the herb@home site (e.g. the various tutorial and help pages etc.) to the wiki.

regards,

Tom.

[Chris Liffen]

The number of mini-biographies is growing !
Chris