Wiktenauer:Blog

Current

From our sister site HROARR:

Rules for nomination and other information can be found here.

As we all know HEMA has many different aspects that are all equally important in our shared effort in recreating these forgotten martial arts.

However, all of our success rests on the hard work of researchers, transcribers, translators and interpreters, hard work, a work that often receives little recognition or actual reward in the way that tournament fighting does, not least since much work is done silently and generously published online for free.

With this in mind, and acting as a neutral party within the HEMA community, in 2013 HROARR introduced annual awards for Best efforts in HEMA research, with all aspects it includes. The idea was to create a highly prestigious award, our very own Oscar or Nobel Prize, if you will.

Each year 5 winners are awarded. Nominations are up to the community to send in, and decisions are based on actual achievements during the preceding year, not through community voting. At this time, all published work has to have been written in English, except for transcriptions, of course.

Decisions will be made by a quite small panel consisting of last year’s awardees and if needed new elected jury members. As the awards become more and more established, these awards will also be more and more independently managed by the new juries and the growing list of awardees and less so by HROARR.

All winners will be presented on a special awards page, where the winners for each year are listed with their achievements.

I sincerely hope this will serve as both an inspiration and an encouragement for all the hard working people in our community!

Thank you and have a great day, everyone!

Roger Norling
Responsible publisher and Chief Editor
HROARR.com

3 February 2014

Our fundraising drive ended on Friday, and I've clean run out of synonyms for "incredible" to use in these posts. After PayPal fees, we took in $3,611.93, over seven times our initial goal. This generous outpouring from our users has vastly exceeded any plans we've made for projects, so at the moment the bulk of it will sit in an account while we investigate new digital scan acquisitions over the next several months. (I've already put in a few inquiries and settled one agreement that was pending before the fundraiser, but until this point I've been reaching out to institutions one at a time as I get ready to work on the associated index page.)

All told, we received 85 separate donations, including nineteen at the sponsor level. In particular I'd like to highlight our top five sponsors: MARS Swordfighting, Purpleheart Armoury, Esfinges, the Bramble Schoole of Defence, and Iron Gate Exhibition. Together, these five organizations--schools from Europe and the US, a leading HEMA supplier, an international network for female fencers, and a major HEMA event, illustrate in some small way the breadth of our community. I'll be getting in touch with them and all of the other donors to find out if you'd like your name listed in the donor list or would prefer to remain anonymous. If you know that you donated $100 or more, please decide if you'd like your organization represented in the sponsor list, and if so, prepare some sort of logo for me to potentially use.

To return to my initial refrain, the outcome of this year's fundraiser was beyond anything we ever expected. I thank all of you, and I'm sure the HEMA Alliance general council does as well (since this removes a big item from their annual budget ;)). Here's to another year of exciting manual research!

Michael Chidester ^(Contact)
Wiktenauer Director
HEMA Alliance, WMAC
21:11, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

P.S. If you missed the window for the fundraiser, fear not! The donate button at the bottom of the sidebar will remain where it's always been, and donations are welcome at any time. If you donate over $100 in the next week or so while I'm still figuring out the while sponsor thing, I'll even include you in the list.

23 August 2013

We've begun a major overhaul of the way the wiki stores information which should make article updates easier and possibly allow us to do some interesting stuff programmatically in the future. All transcriptions will be moved off of the master pages (or manual pages, in a few places) and shunted into their own dedicated pages from which they will be transcluded back into their previous locations. Which is a complicated way of saying that we'll be creating a single page for each transcription and then displaying pieces of that page wherever we need them. This is what we should have done in the first place, but I didn't this was possible back then (for all I know, it might not have been—that was four versions of Mediawiki ago) and we didn't have the right extensions installed even if I did.

The ultimate goal is to arrive at a point where the only content on a page is the English-language material (we'll visit the idea of moving translations onto their own pages at a later date), which will not only serve to make the code easier to read and edit, but will also make the translation engine more useful since it won't have to grapple with the transcription text when marking up a page. (Hopefully my long-suffering Spanish translators haven't lost interest after all this time that I've spent trying to get the wiki to a state where it can work for them.)

For a detailed explanation of how this system works, see the Wiktenauer:Tutorial. Since Goliath and Fiore dei Liberi are our exemplar pages for their respective categories, they get the treatment first and I've been using them to test out and tweak the model. After them, we'll be rolling through on a treatise-by-treatise basis, creating transcription pages and then updating master pages when all the content is in place.

Here's where you come in. This is a huge undertaking and will essentially usher Wiktenauer into its third major incarnation. Doing it by myself (yes, I've been using the royal plural throughout this note since it's just me working on it), this will take several months and won't be completed on any deadline. Gone are the days when I could put in 50, 60, 70 hours a week working on this. If it's going to happen soon, I'll need volunteers. This isn't difficult or technical work for the most part—I can walk someone through the process in just a few minutes—but it will consist of a lot of copypasta and repetition. (I usually watch movies while doing it to stay focused.)

(Alternatively, if you're good at that sort of thing and can develop an automated scenario for extracting and reformatting this content, I'd be very interested to hear about it. At the moment, the only automation I'm planning on is converting HTML to Wiki Markup Language for the transcriptions where I can get the source code.)

People often ask me how I learned so much about treatises, but there's no mysterious answer; this is how, looking at manuscripts for hours and hours (in my case, I'd guess I've spent somewhere above 6,000 hours) and seeing all the ways they fit together. Here's your chance to do a little of the same. Contact me here or elsewhere if you can help, and we'll talk about setting you up with a master or treatise that interests you (it's all got to get done, so why not start with something you like?).

~ Michael Chidester ^(Contact) 01:43, 23 August 2013 (UTC)