Site:Vienna History Wiki



The Vienna History Wiki ("Wien Geschichte Wiki") is a wiki about the History of Vienna, Austria.

History of the wiki
It was built up by the Municipal and Provincial Archives of Vienna (MA8) and the Vienna City Library (MA 9). It was opened to the public in 2014. It is a geo-referenced, historical knowledge platform of the City of Vienna aiming at combining knowledge from the city administration with those of external experts.

Cornerstone of the wiki are more than 27,000 articles (31,000 entries) oft the six-volume encyclopedia „Historisches Lexikon Wien“ edited by Felix Czeike. The latest edition (2004) of the print version has been digitised (OCR). As the result could not be transferred automatically, students were hired to fill in content in the structure of the wiki.

Content of the wiki
The main content of the wiki are persons, buildings, topographical objects (streets, parks, waters, districts...), organisations, events and other items (such as special German expressions used in Vienna).

Used components
The following components were used:
 * Semantic MediaWiki and Semantic Bundle in order to make data from the entries usable within the wiki and exportable.
 * Semantic Forms is used for each of the main content types.
 * Semantic Result Formats, especially the slideshow format for the main page.
 * Semantic Internal Objects for storing n-ary relations, e. g. function of persons: function name, year from, year to.
 * Approved Revs to let the editorial team of the city of Vienna mark a certain revision of a page as "approved".
 * Widgets in order to display buildings and topographical objects on a map from the city of Vienna.
 * A slightly modified version of the Vector skin was used.

All of the used software components were security checked by the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) department of the City (MA 14).

Special characteristics
The following characteristics make the Vienna History Wiki a special project:
 * A printed encyclopedia was brought online with a real wiki approach: everybody interested in the history of Vienna is invited to join.
 * Further available resources are integrated to the wiki, e. g. the typed manuscript "Wien, seine Häuser, Geschichte und Kultur" by Paul Harrer from 1951 about all buildings in the first district of Vienna.
 * Different departments of the Vienna city administration and several institutions outside of the city administration cooperate on this project and form an editorial team.
 * It is not only an online encyclopedia for the public to enjoy, but the historcal platform for the vienna city administration: administrative services will be delivered differently in the future (see "commemoration days")
 * The IT department of the city of Vienna is already hosting 20-30 internal MediaWiki installations, but this is the first one to be available externally and using Semantic MediaWiki.

Commemoration days
The Vienna City Library (department of the city administration) used to print a "commemoration index" which held a list of historical persons and their commemoration days (i. e. persons, who's day of birth/death was 100, 150, 200... years ago in 2015). Different departments of the city administration have recieved this printed documents as a service from the Vienna City Library. In future, they will not recieve a printed publication any longer, but they will be pointed to a query form on the wiki: https://www.wien.gv.at/wiki/index.php/Spezial:Abfrage_ausf%C3%BChren/Abfrage_Jahrestag%28Person%29

The wiki was implemented by KDZ - Centre for Public Administration Research.