We built our wiki interface to the historical encyclopedia using the MediaWiki framework (see http://www.
mediawiki.org), which is perhaps
best known for its use within Wikipedia. After scanning and digitizing
the original publication (we describe
the details of this process elsewhere
1
),
we converted the encyclopedia into
wiki pages on the basis of their structure: Each wiki page comprises a section (within a chapter) of the original.
We generated additional pages for each
chapter, linking the contained sections
and containing content that sometimes
appears before the first section heading in the printed original. To provide
further structure to the wiki pages, we
used the margin notes contained in the
printed original as subsection headings.