This is just a quick roundup of changes to the wiki since the last post in August.

• there are now pages for every regiment of the New Model Army in the First Civil War.
• there are pages for every meeting of the Short Parliament, linked to the location where it was held, and proceedings at British History Online:
  • House of Commons
  • House of Lords
• you can now search events by date again. It should work properly now, and there’s an option to limit it to specific types of event.
• search suggestions in the main search box (at the top of every page) now have accent folding as well as case folding, so if you type a character without an accent, such as e, it will also match accented versions of that character, such as é. This makes Gaelic and Welsh names easier to find. For example, if you type ‘sir fon’ it will match ‘Sir Fôn’. To do this I had to hack the TitleKey extension myself, but it was easier than installing ElasticSearch.
• some more properties have been removed to simplify the data structures:
  • ‘Addressed from’ because there are many documents it doesn’t apply to, the way I tried to use it was too inconsistent, and ‘Mentions’ is good enough for record linkage.
  • ‘Received on date’ as it’s only known in a minority of cases.
  • ‘Has ARCHON ID’ because Wikidata ID and a link to an archive’s own website do everything that is needed.
• there are pages for a couple of particularly useful books. If you drill down from work level there are links to scans at the Internet Archive:
  • Sprigg, Anglia Rediviva: more or less the official history of the New Model Army.
  • Cokayne, The Complete Peerage: a very important reference book that I’ll be using a lot. Also links to pages representing the peerages of England, Scotland and Ireland.

The next thing I want to do is test manuscript texts on a bigger scale. I have some data from my PhD research for warrants paying for horses and saddles for the New Model Army, but I found some anomalies in the data that will need checking against the originals next time I’m at Kew (probably next week). Once I’ve done that, I should be satisfied enough with the data structures that I can start really big imports. I’m already working on data for about 1,000 authors and 1,600 peers and MPs. The method that I used for meetings of the Short Parliament will scale up to the Long Parliament and Protectorate Parliaments quite easily, so I may as well get that done as soon as I can. In practice I might not be able to start these big imports until the end of the year because I’m likely to be busy with paid work, but the wiki should move up to another level and become much more useful next year.