I have closed comments for individual languages. I am in the process of integrating a Pligg CMS with Ethnolinks to handle user submissions.

See: http://ethnolinks.com/forum/

I had a Eureka moment yesterday. I realized that Digg-style CMS provides a lot of the functionality that I’ve been trying to achieve in the comments on each language. Originally I considered just tying EthnoLinks into Digg but I found the content there to be too trashy. So instead I installed a local version of Pligg at http://ethnolinks.com/forum. I’m not totally happy with calling it “forum” but I will keep thinking about that.

Please visit http://ethnolinks.com/forum and play around there.

Open questions are:

1. How to skin Pligg so it looks like EthnoLinks?
2. How to tie Pligg articles to a post on EthnoLinks and vice versa?
3. How can those who have already submitted comments to EthnoLinks get them transferred over to Pligg with the least amount of trouble?

I was able to trade some emails with Paul Lewis, general editor of Ethnologue concerning EthnoLinks. He was aware of EthnoLinks and sounds eager to support it.

Once we’ve had a chance to bang around some ideas regarding long-term plans for EthnoLinks we should be able to put together a strategic plan for the next phase of our experiment!

After a lot of fumbling around I finally got Kevin the codes he needed to be able to remotely link to the Ethnolinks db. Now he should be able to make site-wide changes without losing the comments made by people so far (Thanks, especially to Oliver!)

Stay tuned for a few tweaks:

I think there are just three things we should do at this point: All examples from http://www.ethnolinks.com/mbugu-mhd

1. Change +OR+ to +AND+ in the Flickr image link (i.e. http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=all&q=Mbugu+OR+Tanzania&m=tags)
2. Remove the Click here… (i.e. Click here for discussion and resources on Mbugu)
3. Add alternate names to the Tags (i.e. Kibwyo, Ma’a, Mbougou, Wa Maathi, Wama’a instead of Tanzania) see http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=mhd for the Mbugu alternate names.

This should clean up some glaring problems, improve searching accuracy and also give us a chance to see what happens to comments when we edit this many posts.

Although there are a few lots of quirks, I’ve decided to start inviting people to play with EthnoLinks. I think there’s a pretty good system for handling comments with tinyMCE, editing, reporting and star ratings. For the sake of simplicity, comments seem to be the obvious choice for handling user input that is tied to posts.

If you’d like to try out contributing, feel free to register and add a comment to a language entry. Just beware: things are going to be pretty unstable for the next little while so your hard work may disappar.

See the Nyungwe entry for examples of entries added by users: http://www.ethnolinks.com/nyungwe-nyu

EthnoLinks has got to the stage where I would like to start telling people about it and asking for their input and participation.

I’ve got a list of about 20 people both inside and outside of SIL from around the world representing linguists, media experts, techie people and more who I’ll open up the site to and get some feedback.