White's Wycliffe Ministry

Ethnologue Application Administrator

Chad's work with the Ethnologue started in 2012 and is multifaceted. He is the webmaster for ethnologue.com, database admin, database software interface admininistrator, wiki administrator and typesetter for the printed versions of the Ethnologue.

Read below for the longer explanation of each of these jobs or skip to the bottom to read about our historical timeline with Wycliffe.

Webmaster

Chad was part of the team that developed the current Ethnologue website. Now that the development team has dispersed, he remains as overseer of the site in the position of Ethnologue webmaster. This involves a number of responsibilities.

As the webmaster he monitors email address and answers questions people have about the site. Many of the questions he answers relate to account creation, helping someone download a product they have purchased or helping them use some other feature of the site. When people write in with helpful suggestions or corrections to the site, in consultation with the editors, Chad addresses these concerns or logs them for future work.

Chad maintains the website. Keeping spam users and their comments cleaned out of the site. Website speed is a big area of concern. Chad monitors the site and if it gets sluggish he investigates a cause and seeks a solution. There are many possible causes to performance issues and it can be time consuming to find them. Often it is an aggressive web crawler that loads many pages at a time which badly slows the website processes down.

When a new edition of the Ethnologue is to be released, Chad is responsible to import the new data. All the country and language information has to be loaded into a development site and then tested to make sure it imported properly. If he and the editors are satisfied with how the data looks, then he will import the data into the live site. New data is released on an annual basis so although new data is collected regularly this part of his job happens once per year. It typically takes about a month to do all the testing and final importing.

Adding new features to the site is important. Requests for new or enhanced features come down the "pipe" from the editors or the marketing team. Chad tries to add these features (once they are approved) as quickly as possible when other tasks are not more pressing.

DB Admin and Editorial Interface Admin

OSCAR (our affectionate name for the editorial interface) was developed in 2015 to give the editors an updated interface to edit the data directly in the database. Chad did much of the work developing that application and continues to add new pages to the system and fix problems when they are discovered. Often this means he works directly in the database to add new tables or functions and then use them to import or manipulate the data. This is a critical part of his job responsibilities.

Typesetter

Chad is also involved in typesetting the Ethnologue hard copy products. The datum for each language is stored in a relational database. To get that information into a printable format, for the products available for purchase, requires a number of steps. The chart below shows those steps from the database into xml files and into tex files. Once the tex files are created Chad copies them from the server in Dallas and does the typesetting. This involves the following steps.

1. Run the program over the source files, which outputs a pdf file
2. Open the pdf checking for typos, alignment issues, table lines, widows and orphans, etc.
3. Implement a correction to noted problems in the source files
4. Repeat steps 1 to 3 until the pdf is correctly formatted
5. Pass the pdf file to the Ethnologue editors and the publishing services team for proofing
6. Correct any errors or changes using steps 1 to 3 again.

The main Ethnologue book was previously published as one 1200 page book. In the 17th edition it was split into three volumes of about 500 pages each. In the 21st edition the page count is over 1500 and remains a three volume book. The whole production process takes more than a month to complete. It is a long, complex process and it is rewarding in the end when the books finally get to print and into the hands of those who use the Ethnologue.

History of our SIL Work

Chad & Becky have been with Wycliffe for almost 20 years (1999 to present). The graphic below gives an overview of the highlights of that time. Most of the projects spanned several months and many of them lasted from six months to two years. Chad's involvement with Ethnologue since 2012 is the longest time he has been involved in any one project.