Extension:Lingo

Lingo is a glossary extension to MediaWiki, that lets you define abbreviations and their definitions on a wiki page. It displays these definitions whenever an abbreviation is hovered over in an article.

The Terminology page
By default Lingo will mark up any page with the terms and definitions defined on the Terminology page of your wiki (or the respective page in the language of your wiki; see the Special:Version page of your wiki for the actual Terminology page name). Just create that page and insert some entries using the following syntax:
 * FTP:File Transfer Protocol
 * AAAAA:American Association Against Acronym Abuse
 * ACK:Acknowledge
 * AFAIK:As Far As I Know
 * AWGTHTGTATA:Are We Going To Have To Go Through All This Again
 * HTTP:HyperText Transfer Protocol

You can use any characters in a term (including punctuation, spaces, all UTF-8 characters, but excluding the colon of course), you are not limited to only letters.

To give some structure to the Terminology page you are also allowed to have Terms and Definitions on separate lines. Any lines not starting with a ; or a : are ignored, so go ahead and insert empty lines, headlines, explanatory text.

Using this format you may assign one definition to multiple terms, e.g. to cover grammatical variants (see the U.S.A. example below) and multiple definitions to one term, e.g. to cover different meanings (see the ACK example). You may even combine this, i.e. have multiple definitions for a set of multiple terms. Finally you may also use transclusion, e.g. to have different glossaries for different topics and pull them all together on the Terminology page.

;FTP
 * File Transfer Protocol


 * AAAAA
 * American Association Against Acronym Abuse


 * ACK
 * Acknowledge
 * Acklington railway station


 * U.S.A.
 * USA
 * United States of America

Pull in more terminology from elsewhere:

Excluding text from markup
You can exclude an article from markup by including the magic word  anywhere in that article's text.

In some cases it may be necessary to exclude only portions of a page, e.g. because Lingo interferes with some JavaScript. This can be achieved by wrapping that part in an HTML element (e.g. a span or a div) and specifying. As a shorthand for  you can just use the   tag.

ApprovedRevs
Lingo supports the ApprovedRevs extension for the Terminology page. See Customization below.

Internationalization
The extension is pretty well internationalized by now, thanks to the efforts of the volunteers on http://www.translatewiki.net. (If your language is not supported yet, get an account there and help yourself. It's easy!) To find out the name of the Terminology page and of the  magic word in your wiki's language, have a look at the   and   files.

Composer
From MediaWiki version 1.22 onwards Lingo should be installed using Composer. The package name is. For instructions on how to install Composer see Composer.

Once you have Composer properly installed, all you need to do is go to your MediaWiki installation directory and run:
 * for the latest stable version or
 * for the latest development version

Any future update is then just a call to  and you can always be sure that all dependencies are met.

Continue with the Common steps below.

Beware: If you have installed an earlier version of Lingo you need to remove its code from the MediaWiki extension directory and delete the call to  from the   file before starting the re-installation with Composer.

Using packaged downloads
If this is not an option, you may also install it like this:


 * 1) Download the last released version or the current development version
 * Alternatively you can clone Lingo using git
 * 1) Extract the files to the   directory
 * 2) If necessary rename the newly created directory to Lingo
 * 3) Add to the end of LocalSettings.php:
 * 4) Continue with the Common steps below.

Common steps

 * 1) Do some customization if necessary (see below)
 * 2) Go to the Special:Version page of your wiki and verify that an entry for Lingo exists
 * 3) From Lingo's entry on the Special:Version page follow the link to the Terminology page of your wiki and insert some entries

Customization
The following settings may be used:
 * to specify a different name for the terminology page; Example:
 * to specify that each term should be annotated only once per page; Example:
 * to specify what namespaces should or should not be used; Example:
 * to set default cache type (null = use main cache); Example:
 * to use ApprovedRevs extension on the Terminology page; Example:

If you want to use these settings, just include them in LocalSettings.php. If you did not use Composer for the installation, they must come after the

Lingo also provides an interface to plug in alternative dictionaries (backends). If you are interested in that, see Semantic Glossary for an example. You can also drop me a mail.

Finally you can provide your own styling. For the classes used by Lingo for the various HTML elements, please have a look at the style file.

Showcases

 * NORA online - Dutch Government Reference Architecture website

Add your wiki here!

You can find other examples on the usage and version matrix

Version history

 * See here for the version history

Credits
Lingo is a rewrite of extension Terminology, written by BarkerJr with modifications by Benjamin Kahn. Lingo was originally written by Barry Coughlan and is currently maintained by Stephan Gambke.

Lingo makes use of the jQuery qTip2 library.

Reporting bugs
Bugs and feature requests should preferably be reported on the Wikimedia bug tracker.

Comments, questions and suggestions should be sent or posted to:
 * the Lingo discussion page
 * the maintainer