A scientific glossary using TiddlyWiki

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#1

Hi TiddlyWiki folk,

I’ve been silent on this list for a long time but now I dare to share an application that colleagues and I have now published - a glossary of technical terms and illustrations aimed at scientists and others with a need to understand taxonomic structures useful for identification of Annelida (segmented worms - earthworms, sandworms and the like): Annelida terms.

The content won’t interest anyone on this list but you may be interested in this attempt to use TiddlyWiki to distribute information. This is a very vanilla implementation of TiddlyWiki and uses little of the power of the software - a deliberate choice for three reasons: my own TiddlyWiki skills are limited; I needed to concentrate on the content rather than code; and I hope to minimise the learning curve in case other specialists in my field want to develop the content further.

I did attempt to implement Eric Schulman’s solution to ignore the dirty state on exiting, but my implementation failed. (If anyone notices my error and can offer a fix i’ll be glad to update a new version.)

There is no explanatory context on Annelida in the glossary - we have assumed the target audience won’t need it. That won’t apply of course to this list, but the wikipedia annelid page is a good start and our own taxonomic resources page provides some wider context to the kind of resources we are trying to provide and a little on other taxonomic software too.

I’ll be interested in any comments, especially those that might result in an improved user experience in future versions.

bye, Robin

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#2

Excellent work! Thank you very much sharing this wiki. I am confident that the forum members will provide advice to enhance the work.

#3

You may also try Mehregan Edition — a personal knowledge management app to let use the bidirectional cards and lets users simply add their notes, todos, etc without editing the original cards in Annelida terms

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#4

Here’s the “ignore the dirty state” solution that I wrote previously:

The problem in your wiki is that you created a tiddler named config/SaverFilter, but it should be named $:/config/SaverFilter (note the leading $:/) so that it overrides the existing default shadow tiddler definition. If you rename the tiddler accordingly, and then save-and-reload, it should then “ignore changes” moving forward.

enjoy,
-e

#5

Hi Eric, thanks so much for this quick response. Careless error on my part. I’ll fix it tomorrow.

Thanks to you, the community, and of course especially to Jeremy for this wonderful software.

Bye Robin

#6

Mohammad thanks very much for the encouraging response and suggestion. I’ll investigate the Mehregan edition as soon as I can, bye Robin

#7

Welcome back!

This is wonderful. I know little biology, but I’m intrigued to poke around.

I do have one minor suggestion. In your start tiddler, the search should probably ignore system tiddlers. (If you enter “bra”, which was my first search, it starts with a bunch of tiddlers that will only mean something to those maintaining it. When I added the n, to search for “bran”, it felt much more normal.

This would only take a minor addition:

<$list filter="[!is[system]search:title:literal,casesensitive<searchCriteria>]"[tag[term]]>
<!--            ^^^^^^^^^^^                                                             -->

An alternative would be to sort those to the bottom, but I’d have to think a bit about how to do that. And I don’t think there is any reason to include them, anyway, with Advanced Search easily available for those who need it.

#8

I find the diagrams jarring in your dark-mode theme. On the white background, the white-backgrounded images look fine. On the yellowish background, they stick out badly. I don’t know if you can convert them to have transparent backgrounds, where this wouldn’t be an issue. But if your tools allow, it might be useful.

I was also curious to see how large the wiki would be if all the images were included directly. So I tried it, and uploaded the 51MB file to http://scott.sauyet.com//Tiddlywiki/Demo/AnnikeyGlossary/. On the reasonably quick network at GigantiCorp, where I work, this loads in three to four seconds. I’m sure it’s not worth doing, but I was curious.

#9

That’s a huge amount of work! I’m guessing you started in 2020.

I might suggest setting navigation to “open below current tiddler”. That way the “Open” dialog can become an ad-hoc bread crumb trail for anyone who follows a link for one term, but then wants to go back to the original quickly. Users who aren’t familiar with TW might be tempted to use the back arrow. People who are unfamiliar with TW might need a 3 paragraph Tiddler “How to use this index.”

Possibly you might want to filter out the .jpg images from your search results, since they make the results much longer. Or give an option to filter images.

Anyway, that’s pretty amazing. AFAIK, you are the first person to publish a TW on Annelids. That makes you the early bird that got the … well, yeah.

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#10

Another possibility is to update Control Panel > Settings > Navigation Address Bar to “Include the current tiddler” and Navigation History to “Update history”. This gives the back button its more typical website behavior.

Were you looking at my copy? That was just an experiment to see the responsiveness given the size.
The original does not include the JPGs. I think that 50MB+ wiki is probably too large for most uses

#11

Oops. I was.

I was interested to see that I could load a 50Mb file without problems. (took about 20 seconds). In the past I’ve had problems with larger files, but I recently upgraded my memory. Forgot I was on your instance.

#12

Many thanks Scott. Another oversight on my part, now fixed. In several previous versions of this filter I had excluded system tiddlers but forgot to put that back in the online version.

#13

Thanks for this feedback too. We have had a variety of responses to the theme, many positive, so I think we will leave that as is for the moment. The glossary is about to receive a lot of exposure at a workshop next week so further comments are expected soon and we will react if a strong consensus emerges.

#14

Thanks Mark for the encouragement and thoughtful comments. The “how to use” suggestion is a good one, I might have a crack at that (although it runs the risk of becoming a long document!). We did originall run this with the naviagion setting you suggest “open below current tiddler” but changed to the current setting because we thought it might be a more familiar setting to users who are used to one web page replacing another without a visible history trail. But I agree that folk who become familiar with TW find it useful to have a trail of recent tiddlers. Any user of course can access the control panel themselves but probably most won’t, and even if they do it will only remain in place for the current session. I’ll think more about an elegant solution to that, and will be interested in further opinions from the list too…

#15

Fantastic! I’m rejoicing with Earthworms in my area—and planning an attack on the Leeches.

Opinion: maybe remove all cruft and margins from the interface you don’t absolutely need. This being a visual design comment only.

Best TT

#16

Hi TT

Thanks for the thoughts and I’m glad to have revived a little interest in wormy things!

Regarding the margins and interface, suggestion noted. I’m waiting for further feedback (not here so much, rather from students and others who have begun using the glossary). So far (there was a workshop last week) the reactions have been positive and i fany kind of consensus emerges on aesthetics or usability I’ll of course improve however i can.

Thanks again for your encouragement and suggestions and I’m sorry to have been slow to acknowledge your interest

bye, Robin