Written by
Dorina Anton
, Marketing Specialist
The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland (HLS) is the only online encyclopedia dedicated to Swiss history, offering detailed historical research and multimedia resources across the country’s 4 official languages: German, French, Italian, and partially Romansh. With approximately 1.74 million unique visitors annually and 5,000 to 8,000 daily visits, HLS serves both the academic community and the general public, aiming to present history in a comprehensive and appealing manner.
However, with its legacy platform struggling to meet the demands of modern digital publishing, HLS needed a scalable modern wiki in 2017 for future growth and user engagement. Let's have a look at how XWiki managed to meet HLS's complex needs. 👇
- Why organizations like HLS choose XWiki
- From legacy systems to a future-ready multilingual, online encyclopedia
- XWiki supports HLS with a scalable and customizable modern wiki for multilingual publishing
- Enhancing content discovery and user engagement
- Empowering Swiss history for the digital age
Why organizations like HLS choose XWiki
#1: For organizations that manage online encyclopedias, dictionaries, and other large-scale publishing platforms with a big number of editors and roles, XWiki offers several advantages over traditional CMS tools. Its open-source nature allows for extensive customization, enabling organizations to tailor the platform to their unique content structures, branding, and workflow requirements.
#2: Organizations with large editorial teams benefit from XWiki’s fine-grained rights management, ensuring that specific user roles, revision history, and rollback capabilities support their publishing processes, collaboration needs, and visibility of certain sections to only a few dedicated users. The platform’s ability to evolve with changing content structures makes it an ideal solution for dynamic websites that require long-term adaptability.
#3: Finally, XWiki’s flexibility in structuring and managing content enables seamless collaboration among editors, while its customizable look and feel ensure that public-facing platforms maintain a consistent and engaging visual identity. For organizations with a strong focus on community engagement, features such as content annotation, feedback forms, and content export capabilities provide valuable tools to foster interaction and collaboration.
From legacy systems to a future-ready multilingual, online encyclopedia
As HLS grew and the Internet evolved, the challenges inherent in managing a multilingual online encyclopedia became more pressing for both frontend and backend. Content accessibility across different languages, editorial workflows, media integration for articles, a user-friendly interface, and the need for a scalable infrastructure were at the forefront of the modernization project. The platform’s legacy PHP system, which had been in use since 1998, could no longer support the evolving demands of performance, collaboration, and information discovery.
To overcome these hurdles, HLS required a solution that would not only address these challenges but also ensure that users could quickly discover content in their preferred language. Additionally, the editorial team had requirements related to a more efficient and transparent collaboration within a structured workflow.
“Launching the new production platform in 2018 and the website in 2019 with XWiki was a huge step for our everyday routine and the visibility of our work in public. Since then, we have been constantly improving the backend and the frontend and count on XWiki as a reliable partner that helps us to realise our visions for the HLS." – Stephanie Summermatter, former editor and now head of Digital Services at HLS
XWiki supports HLS with a scalable and customizable modern wiki for multilingual publishing
HLS’s search for a solution led them to XWiki, a modern wiki platform known for its scalable and flexible architecture. XWiki offered the right balance of multilingual support, workflow management through the JIRA integration, and well-structured data approach that included articles, text, media, and references needed for HLS to evolve its online encyclopedia.
With XWiki’s granular access control and role-based management features, HLS could better organize its editorial workflows. Integrating JIRA workflows further improved content tracking and approval processes, making it easier to transition drafts into published articles while maintaining access to previous versions and ensuring a clear overview of ongoing and future work. Additionally, the platform enhances editorial efficiency by allowing HLS editors to create JIRA issues directly from XWiki with prefilled article details, reducing errors and streamlining their workflow. Through advanced versioning, HLS maintains historical articles in date-specific spaces, ensuring easy access to the latest content while optimizing SEO indexing.
These upgrades were essential for ensuring editorial efficiency and transparency in an open-source multilingual wiki environment, where each language version of an article requires careful coordination.
Today, the platform hosts over 36,500 articles in German, French, Italian, and Romansh and editors can compose articles and integrate text and media within a single document, enhancing efficiency during the review process. HLS’s new infrastructure supports ongoing system enhancements, from responsive design improvements to better integration with multimedia elements, ensuring that both users and editors benefit from a smoother experience. The system’s scalability means that HLS can easily accommodate future content expansion, as well as adapt to evolving user expectations.
Enhancing content discovery and user engagement
For HLS, content discovery was paramount. The new wiki platform needed to enhance the visibility and searchability of content across languages, making it easier for users to find relevant articles. By leveraging Solr-based search and custom media integration, visitors can find articles easily by category (Theme, Places, People, and Families) and multimedia elements by type, date, location, or alphabet, regardless of language-specific or general metadata. These improvements have resulted in higher user engagement and retention rates, as visitors are now able to explore HLS in a more intuitive and visually appealing way.
Finally, the XWiki team also developed a Feedback Form Application in which users can provide feedback within the public website. This extension is particularly useful for HLS, providing users with a direct channel of communication towards the editorial team. Also, this application fosters a sense of ownership and community around the online encyclopedia, much like the open-source model that XWiki adheres to.
Empowering Swiss history for the digital age
HLS’s transition to XWiki marked a major improvement in their collaboration, content management, and editorial processes. By choosing XWiki, HLS modernized their platform, benefiting from greater flexibility, scalability, sophisticated content management capabilities, and a great UX. The new system not only supports efficient workflows for the editorial team but also delivers a high-performance, user-friendly public multilingual website that meets HLS's complex content and search needs.
Through this transformation, HLS demonstrates the power of adopting modern digital solutions in the publishing industry — showing that a scalable, flexible, modern wiki can overcome the complex demands of a multilingual, academic publishing platform.
If you'd like to discuss your online platform's needs and see how XWiki can support your collaboration and publishing processes, don't hesitate to contact us.
