After long delays because I’ve been too busy, I’ve finally found a week to get back to this project. This hasn’t led to much new content, but I’ve made some changes behind the scenes which will make things easier in future.

• the biggest change is that the licence is now Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA). This will stop big companies from reusing my data in paywalled resources (not that they had been, and I doubt that they would think of it, but I want to be sure) and will increase the range of sources that I can import data from. The main disadvantage is that it will stop some other projects from reusing my data because their licences aren’t compatible.
• new property for historical people: Spelt own name. This records how they signed their names. Now page names have less need to reflect the original spelling, which is more flexible. Could also be useful to people studying literacy.
• new properties for serial publications: Contents last updated and New issues expected in. These will make it easier to keep track of whether journal contents are up to date.
• Collections can now have different values for Instance of. This makes it easier to include or exclude series of pay warrants when querying for sources, and will provide a way of indexing indemnity cases in SP 24 in future.
• forms and templates have been overhauled. Some of this will make the pages better structured, but a lot of it is behind the scenes and won’t make an obvious difference to reading pages or querying the data.
• removed spurious precision from WGS84 coordinates. They should now only have 5 decimal places, which is accurate to 1 metre.
• maps have been moved out of the main namespace. Pages that used to show a map now usually show a link that you can follow to view the map. This will make pages less cluttered and should save some resources on both the server and client sides. It’s also a possible workaround for a bug that stopped maps from displaying properly if the Litespeed cache was enabled, although the server load is so low at the moment that I don’t need a cache.
• the hierarchy of subject headings has been rearranged.
• units that never move can have a permanent location set instead of a repeatable template.
• Churches and cathedrals are now types in their own right. I’m still not planning to add any more specific types for buildings because defining a house or a castle or a fortification is so difficult.
• ID properties for Early Modern Letters Online and Six Degrees of Francis Bacon have been removed because Wikidata is already a spine for these and there’s no need to duplicate them.
• fixed some broken links.
• the Github repository has moved. This is partly because of the new licence, and partly to make it easier to share other data that isn’t wiki dumps but is still related to the project.