Aceh Wiki History

Aceh Wiki History is an encyclopedia of Acehnese history — sultans, religious scholars, war heroes, literary hikayat characters, sacred places, and historical events — built as a permanent digital archive on the internet.

🔗 Live site: https://kbpro8.github.io/acehwiki/

What's inside

• people pages — sultans and rulers, ulamas and mystics, Aceh War fighters, hikayat literary figures, prophets and religious legends, and the Western scholars (Hurgronje, van der Tuuk, and others) who documented them
• Historical places — Acheh, Pidie, Kutaraja, Mecca, Medina, and other sites central to the history
• Historical events — the Aceh War, the Hok Canton Incident, the great hikayat epics (Malem Dagang, Pochut Muhamat, Prang Gompeuni), and more
• A year-linked timeline — every article links its dates to a dedicated year page, so you can browse history chronologically and see everything tied to a given year

Content is compiled and adapted from various book about Aceh history. — every article cites sources from books and other historical materials.

Running locally

npm ci
npx quartz build --serve

This builds the site and serves it at http://localhost:8080.

AcehWiki conventions — annotated reference

Detailed rationale and edge cases behind the AcehWiki house style. Read this when a formatting decision is unclear. Examples below are drawn from real entries in the corpus (content/events/, content/…) and from the example-entry.md in this folder.

Table of contents

1. Frontmatter details
2. Wikilink syntax in depth
3. Date linking — full rules
4. Lead paragraph anatomy
5. Section patterns
6. Quotation handling
7. Cross-article consistency (titles must match)
8. Multiple sources
9. Common mistakes to avoid

---

1. Frontmatter details

---
title: Sultan of Deli's letter to Penang
aliases: [Deli letter 27 August 1824, Sultan of Deli to Fullerton 27 August 1824, Appendix 6]
tags: [event, correspondence, diplomacy, malay, colonial]
---

• title is the link target for the whole wiki. Other articles will write [[Sultan of Deli's letter to Penang]]. Choose it once, carefully, in the most recognizable scholarly form, and reuse it verbatim everywhere.
• aliases should be generous. Aceh history sources spell names many ways across Dutch, Malay, Acehnese, Arabic and English. Capture transliteration variants (Alauddin Mahmud Shah Djohan / Alaoe'd-din Mahmoed Shah Djohan), short forms, and document labels (Appendix 6, Bijlage I). Aliases let future links and searches resolve.
• tags: first = entity type (person, event, place, organization, document, concept); the remainder are filterable descriptors (era, theme, nationality, sub-type).

2. Wikilink syntax in depth

Quartz/Obsidian double-bracket links:

Form	Renders as	Use when
[[Acheh]]	link reading "Acheh"	display text equals page title
[[Robert Fullerton|Fullerton]]	link reading "Fullerton" → Robert Fullerton page	you need shorter/different display text
[[Said Akil's Deli adventure (1824-1828)|Deli affair]]	link reading "Deli affair"	natural phrasing differs from a long page title

Rules of thumb:

• Link the first mention of every proper entity, and re-link later mentions when the link aids navigation (long articles re-link key actors in each major section).
• Pipe only when display text must differ from the title. [[Fullerton|Fullerton]] is redundant — write [[Fullerton]] or, better, [[Robert Fullerton|Fullerton]] if the canonical page is the full name.
• A page that does not exist yet is fine — create the link anyway (a "red"/stub link). The wiki grows by leaving links for articles not yet written. This is expected and encouraged.

3. Date linking — full rules

The single most distinctive AcehWiki convention.

• Year alone → [[1786]]
• Range of years → link both ends: [[1826]]–[[1828]], c. [[1824]]–[[1828]] (use an en-dash – between them)
• Full calendar date → split into day-month and year, each its own link: [[7 November]] [[1786]], [[27 August]] [[1824]]
• Month + year, no day → [[August]] [[1824]] or "March [[1825]]" as the phrasing reads
• Decades / centuries → plain text: "the early 1820s", "the late eighteenth century", "the mid-1780s"

Rationale: years and named dates each get their own timeline node in the wiki, so the chronology pages (kronologi-sejarah-aceh) can assemble events by date.

4. Lead paragraph anatomy

The opening paragraph does heavy lifting. Pattern observed across the corpus:

1. Bold restatement of the subject (matching the title) as the grammatical subject.
2. A defining clause — who/what it was — with an em-dash aside that names the source or author frame ("— printed by P. H. [[P. H. van der Kemp|Van der Kemp]] as Appendix 6 —").
3. A dense run of linked entities: the principal people, places, the key date, and the immediate event, all wikilinked, often in a single long sentence.
4. A second sentence stating why the document/person/event matters and pointing to the larger story it belongs to.

Example opening (abridged):

Sultan of Deli's letter to Penang of [[27 August]] [[1824]] — printed by P. H. [[P. H. van der Kemp|Van der Kemp]] as Appendix 6 … — is the despatch by which the [[Sultan of Deli]] introduced himself to the newly appointed Governor of [[Penang]], [[Robert Fullerton]], …

5. Section patterns

Use ## (H2) for every section. Common, reusable section names:

• Context / Background — the situation before the subject.
• A narrative/identity section named for the subject — e.g. Identification with Alauddin Mahmud Shah Djohan, The Padri movement, The Sultan of Deli's report (August 1824), Adoption of Said Akil.
• Connection with … — ties to adjacent events/topics.
• Significance — nearly always the closing body section: what the subject establishes, undercuts, foreshadows, or proves in the larger argument and in Aceh's history.

Then the two fixed tail sections every article ends with:

• See Also — bulleted [[wikilinks]].
• Source — italicized citation(s).

Use ### (H3) only for genuine sub-points inside a long section; most articles stay at H2.

6. Quotation handling

• Quote the source where the exact words matter (a sultan's complaint, a treaty clause, an author's careful hedge). Keep quotations short and embed them in paraphrase that supplies context: who said it, to whom, when, why.
• Preserve original/archaic spelling inside the quotation and gloss it: classy explained as "a matelot"; "Pulo Puchee" glossed "(i.e. [[Sumatra]])".
• Attribute interpretive claims to their author: "Van der Kemp draws on Veth … to suggest that…", "Van der Kemp himself admits the equation only tentatively".
• Paraphrase everything that doesn't need the original wording. The entry is a synthesis, not a transcription.

7. Cross-article consistency (titles must match)

A link only resolves if it matches a real page title (or one of its aliases). So:

• Decide the canonical title of every entity once and link to it consistently.
• When you mention an entity that deserves its own page, link it with the title you would give that page. Keep a mental (or written) list of the titles you've coined so siblings stay consistent — e.g. always [[Anglo-Dutch Treaty of London (1824)]], never sometimes [[Treaty of London 1824]].
• Parenthetical disambiguators in titles are common and good: [[Said Akil's Deli adventure (1824-1828)]], [[Fullerton's minute on Acheh (21 March 1825)]].

8. Multiple sources

One entry may synthesize several sources. List each under ## Source, one per line (or as sub-bullets), each with the work title in italics plus full publication and locating details. When a specific claim rests on a specific source, attribute it in the body ("Veth gives the dates 1781 … and 1795") so a reader can tell the sources apart.

9. Common mistakes to avoid

• Empty links: never [[|Padries]]. Point at a real title or drop the brackets.
• Thin entries: an AcehWiki article is comprehensive. If the source has ten facts about the subject, the entry has ten facts. Don't compress to a paragraph when the material supports four sections.
• Unlinked proper nouns: a name or place left as plain text is a broken connection.
• Inventing detail: if it isn't in a source, it isn't in the entry. Mark genuine uncertainty as uncertainty.
• First-person / promotional tone: keep the neutral encyclopedic register.
• Forgetting the tail: every article ends with ## See Also and ## Source.

Built with

This wiki runs on Quartz v5, a static site generator for publishing digital gardens and notes.