The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland (HLS) is the largest encyclopedia focused on the history of Switzerland, and it aims to take into account the results of modern historical research in a manner accessible to a broader audience. It is published by a foundation under the patronage of the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences (SAGW/ASSH) and the Swiss Historical Society (SGG-SHH) and is financed by national research grants. All 36,500 articles, written by scientists and peer-reviewed by experts, are curated by an editorial team of about 20 staff members. The encyclopedia is being edited simultaneously in the 4 national languages of Switzerland: German, French, Italian, and partly in Romansh.

Based on the needs identified, we developed 3 different workflows that allow editors to create articles, multimedia elements, translations, references, to review articles, to approve and publish them. To cover all these steps efficiently, Jira was integrated to keep track of the workflow, on top of which XWiki and its macros master the composition of the documents. Moreover, the content of those macros has been enhanced to be editable inline in the WYSIWYG editor, allowing the redactor to edit multiple documents at once, and in the final layout context.

Visitors can now search articles based on category (Theme, Places, People, and Families), date, location, and lexicography by using the filters, or they can directly type inputs in the search bars that will return the most relevant results. Moreover, one can filter using the facets on the right and then search directly in the filtered list. The same type of search functionalities can be used to search multimedia elements, based on type, date, and location. Alphabetical? We covered that as well.

To allow the usage of both language-dependent metadata and language-independent metadata in search, we have leveraged the power of our far-famed SOLR search, by implementing a custom indexer. This method has proved to be efficient and a clean way to handle such structured language information. In plain English, this means that no matter how complex the data structure in place, or the number of languages it needs to cover, XWiki has the indexing capabilities.