Skip to main content

Minor updates to the Wikipedia OED page

In the course of preparing a draft model citation for the OED on Wikipedia I have, of course, run into a few minor edits that could be attended to while I worked on the task at hand.

The first thing that caught my eye was an unlinked name in the sentence,

That turned out not to be so, Philip Gell of the OUP forced the promotion of Murray's assistant Henry Bradley (hired by Murray in 1884), who worked independently in the British Museum in London beginning in 1888.

A quick search revealed a Wiki page for Philip Lyttelton Gell, so I added a Wikilink to that sentence as follows,

turned out not to be so, and [[Philip Lyttelton Gell|Philip Gell]] of the OUP forced

The edit shows some more of the Wiki mark-up language, double square brackets ([[…]]) denoting a Wikilink and the use of a piped link ([[wiki page title|text displayed]]) to display the link with a different text to the title of the linked page.

In the same sentence, I noted that the abbreviation OUP had not been defined earlier in the text. In common usage abbreviations are defined after the first full text instance so 'Oxford University Press' becomes 'Oxford University Press (OUP)' and, so defined, the abbreviation 'OUP' can be used in place of the full name at later points in the text. While I was at it I also expunged a couple of unnecessary repetitions of the definition of the abbreviation OED.

The final edit came from noticing that the 1933 issue of the first edition of the dictionary had been reprinted in 1961 and 1970. Reprint information is not easily obtainable for any particular book and is scattered across the internet (goodreads.com is a good source). For a work of this significance I think a sentence adding the reprint information is worthwhile. Others may disagree.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Grocy and its Home Assistant Add-on

The next layer of the Virtual Bean Counter software stack is the meat in the sandwich, Grocy (see Grocy system install ). As with the Home Assistant (HA) Operating System that was reviewed previously the aim of this article is to consider the support and backup options for the Grocy system as installed onto our HA virtual machine . But first a little history. Whither Grocy ? It sprang from the desire of a software developer, Bernd Bestel , to progress beyond using Excel (as we know a great spreadsheet and data analysis tool but with a limited UI) to something more fully featured by exploiting his experience with commercial inventory management. The first version of Grocy was released in 2017 and after seven years is now on its fourth full point release . However, unlike HA, it is essentially a one-man band with a single developer responsible for pretty much the entirety of the content all without stable funding (currently). That said the package is quite mature and " does wha...

Further adventures in household paper products

As the toilet rolls are up and running I couldn't resist adding the rest of the loft stocks into the mix. The next two items are kitchen roll and facial tissues . Following the same process described for toilet rolls; kitchen roll comes in a multipack, but this time a case has four packs of three rolls and we already have the storage location, shop and quantity units set up. Again, I think we'll have to set up a generic item (Parent product) as well as a specific one for the Kirkland brand rolls (Child product). So I gave it a name, Kitchen roll and a description; default storage location and shop, Loft / Costco ; a min stock amount, 3 rolls ; all the quantity units are Roll . Job done. Now for the specific product, as previously, pulling images and descriptions off the Costco website, setting up case and pack barcodes and quantity conversions between them, buying in Cases and using in Packs . But hang on, do we really want to track in packs of three? We only need a sin...

Man Down! - HA-Grocy goes off the rails

Problems, problems. As part of an HA-Grocy update to v0.24.0, released on the 16 th Feb 2025, a point version upgrade of Grocy was included from v4.3.0 to v4.4.1. Unfortunately it was found that the update had dismasted parts of the HA-Grocy app (see 1 / 2 ), preventing users from opening pop-up windows in the Grocy iframe ; for instance, when clicking the " Add " button in tasks no action is taken. The root cause was a bug in the Grocy version released on the 31 st January (v4.4.1). Although to be fair, Grocy is not specifically aimed at supporting Home Assistant (HA) and as a standalone installation the Grocy program continued to function normally. Happily, the bug was patched by Bernd in v4.4.2, released on 28 th Feb. Unhappily, the HA-Grocy Add-on is still missing the patch as of the 20 th June. So if you are installing from the Add-on Store in Home Assistant it simply won't be fully functional (this is tested and confirmed). If you've already install...