Crystal Pool:About

From Crystal Pool

This site is an attempt to organize the structured data related to Warriors series with MediaWiki and Wikibase. The site is still constructing in progress. If you want to help to contribute, please request for an account.

Currently, this site provides unified language link information and structured character (or cat) information for Chinese Warriors Wiki, with the help of WikibaseClientLite. In the future, perhaps Wikis of other languages or other non-Wiki sites can also use Crystal Pool as a source of information.

If you have any problems using the site, please leave a message on User:CXuesong's talk page.

Background

Maintaining a Wiki site for Warriors series takes great efforts. When a new book comes out, contributors need to update the information for the new book, looking for editions in different languages, and make updates on different pages on Wiki. That's not the end of the story. They also need to update the current status, relations (kinship, apprenticeship, leadership), etc. for the characters (i.e. cats) in the series. Depending on the relationship a cat owns, contributors may need to update a number of pages. Note that there are around 4 new books come out in every year, so the bustle will come and go in almost every season. While it's fine for Wikis with a lot of active users, such update may become a burden for the rest.

With the hope of reducing the marginal cost for maintaining a Wiki, CXuesong started up Crystal Pool, a wiki dedicated to persisting the structured data, a database about Warriors series that everyone can edit.

How can I contribute?

Read Crystal Pool:Getting started first, and make sure you have an account for making contributions.

This diagram of a Wikidata item shows you the most important terms in Wikidata.

You can search for an existing item (e.g. a book/cat) in the search box. You can either search by entity name or the entity ID (something like Q621). On the item page, you can see the item's label (aka. name) and description in your native language, if available. Then a list of statements will be shown, describing the properties or relations this item owns.

You may contribute to this database by editing those labels and descriptions, or by improving the statements. For an accurate reference on which properties to use, see the project pages related to your item of interest. For example, see Crystal Pool:Books for guidance on how to improve book and edition items.

You may refer to the pages under Category:Concepts and conventions for general conventions used on this site.

For character entities, you can use Firestar (Q621) or Graystripe (Q714) as examples to immitate.

The plan

Query service

Main article:Crystal Pool:SPARQL query service

As soon as the database is complete (to some extent), an RDF dump can be exported, and based on the dump, you can actually perform any query of your interest, in SPARQL query language. Imagine that you can find out who belongs to or used to belong to ThunderClan (Q627) by executing the following SPARQL query expression:

SELECT ?cat ?name ?gender WHERE {
  ?cat    wdt:P3      wd:Q622;       # should be fictional cat character
          wdt:P76     wd:Q627.       # should belong to ThunderClan
  OPTIONAL {
    ?cat    rdfs:label  ?name.
    FILTER(lang(?name) = "en")
  }
  OPTIONAL {
    ?cat    wdt:P78     ?gender.
  }
}

You may click on the "Open in SPARQL Query Service" button above to try out this query. The results might be like the follows:

cat name gender
Firestar (Q621) Firestar male organism (Q678)
Lionheart (Q711) Lionheart male organism (Q678)
Tigerstar (Q712) Tigerstar male organism (Q678)
Bluestar (Q713) Bluestar female organism (Q679)
Graystripe (Q714) Graystripe male organism (Q678)
Whitestorm (Q715) Whitestorm male organism (Q678)

You can also find out a cat's relation of any degree, while we only have to keep track of all the cats' father and mother on this wiki and that's all.

Based on the SPARQL query results, we can either use bots to update the Warriors Wiki pages automatically, or generate some LUA modules that allows you to pull all the information of a book or relations of a cat.

Database download

Main article:Crystal Pool:Database download

To make the structured data accessible to every Warriors reader, Crystal Pool provides periodically updated database dump. See the main article for more information.

Family tree web app

Main article:Crystal Pool:Warriors Family Tree

This is an attempt to synthesize the information on this site and show something cool to the general Warriors reader.

Proposals

If you have any other ideas or proposals on doing something awesome based on the structured data, please feel free to post them on the talk page, so others can join the discussion!

Relation with Warriors Wikis

This site is hosted on a personal server and maintained by an individual that has no affiliation with Wikia, FANDOM, or any other Wiki farms. This site is created with the hope of being useful to Warriors:zh: and Warriors Wikis of other languages, but without any warranty. Most notably, this site may not necessarily use the same interpretation as any Warriors Wikis when there is obscurity or conflict. Yet you can discuss about the interpretations to use on the talk page or via Discord channel shown below. See Crystal Pool:Fundamental concepts for more information.

Relation with Wikidata

This site uses the same MediaWiki extension, Wikibase, as on Wikidata, and some entities are imported from there, marked with statement of Wikidata item ID (P2). Aside from this, Crystal Pool site has no other relation with Wikidata, nor their entities should be related.

See Crystal Pool:Fundamental concepts for the basic concepts and conventions used on this site.

Contact

See also