Informal learning activities/Bckgrnd

Background
Names are of two general kinds: specific names, such as Balaclava and Churchill, that normally begin with a capital letter, and generic names, such as cat and mouse, that don't usually even start with a capital letter.

Introduction
The present plan for name trees is to set up two trees for specific names and two for generic names.

The two generic name trees, which are inherently simpler than the specific ones, are on the one hand for names of inanimate things or parts thereof, on the other for names of animate things or aspects thereof. Generic items, and they are not limited to nouns, are particularly useful for anyone wanting to expand their vocabulary for activities such as doing crossword puzzles.

The two specific name trees will be for names of individual people or peoples on the one hand, and for names of places or their content on the other. Specific items are intended for people wishing to extend their appreciation of history and geography.

The items of all four of these name trees are simply samples, ideally of unfamiliar names, chosen with the aim of providing a relaxed informal experience for general users, and so the trees should not get very large. When these are set up, interested Wikiversity contributors should feel free to either set up other name trees for general users, or name trees for more specific users, for example, for children or young people, or for particular classes of people, for example gardeners or bird watchers.

The description below is intended to help anyone wishing to contribute to this learning facility to simplify the coding.

Layout of Name Trees
Name trees files are divided according to their initial letter, and hold very brief text for each name. Each name itself provides a link to its primary Wikipedia or, for generic items, a Wiktionary site.&nbp;

Because most of the alphabet is grouped in file holding three initial letters, the heading to each provides direct links to other parts of the name tree, together with a link to the same part of the other (generic or specific) name tree.

Within each specific name tree file the links are in alphabetic sequence of their names, with the first link for each second letter, which is called a leader, starting a new line of the display and with a leadimg • to distinguish a line of display starting with a leader from a line simply continuing display items with the same two initial letters, which are called trailers.

Templates
The various name trees in essence provide a front end to enable wandering around Wikipedia, and, in some cases, around Wiktionary as well. Wikipedia links typically provide much richer wandering than Wiktionary links. That's why Wikipedia is linked to much more frequently than is Wiktionary.

Some of the following templates are intended to help with coding for starting such wandering at a particular link. Others provide similar coding for some formatting.

There are two types of templates for both Wikipedia and Wiktionary links. These types provide for a link coupled to a hint, the hint being given to suggest the kind of wandering to casual users, or to reinforce the memory of users wanting to extend their memory.

ST/St/sT Links to Wikipedia
The templates in the tables below are not ideally named because they were added to as the need became evident. However, the table shows the effect of each, in particular the new line caused by the  generated by the templates in the first column of the table. The grouping should help locate a needed template.

Note also STnx which is used to join short lines. There are examples in most pages, especially in the Vz ones.

Templates called and were also set up to be just like  and except that the leading is left off in case they are to follow a heading enclosed in, say, which typically provides a blank line following. These can be ignored.

ST Links to Wiktionary
As for templates coding links to Wikipedia, both leader and trailer templates are provided for coding links to Wiktionary, but because linking to the beginning of a Wiktionary site wastes display space, especially in the case of the table of contents, the linking in their templates is more complicated.

The leader templates are and while the trailer templates are and The following table shows the effect of each, in particular the new line caused by the  generated by the templates in the first column of the table.

and have two arguments or fields. The first template is encoded as which will produce as code and the second is encoded as which will produce as code  and both give the required display of where clicking on the brings up the required Wiktionary site just past the table of contents.

Countries
PB items include a link to the country or area that holds or held the item of the link. The following table lists the templates for these countries or areas, and a table beyond listing combined links.