From my diary

I have spent the day with the new Mithras site, to its great profit.  It is by no means complete, nor is it intended to be.  It is merely a starting point, based on the more reliable elements of the old Wikipedia site.  Much in it needs to be reverified.  Much will be worked on, ad hoc, as time and energy permit.

The most enjoyable part of the process was working with the pictures.  These days we have all sorts of photographs of Mithraic monuments and inscriptions online.  But these images are useless, because they are not tied to Vermaseren’s Corpus Inscriptionum et Monumentum Religionis Mithriacae, which assigns a number to each monument and describes it.  What I did, for several of the pictures from Wikimedia Commons, was track down the CIMRM number, and the entry, and write a page containing image and data.

Much of the imagery is inscrutable on first glance.  If I do very much of this, it will get much less inscrutable.  And I did rather enjoy doing it.  Adding data to the web (rather than opinion) is what I do, and what I want to do.

I’ve emailed someone online, and asked them to take a look.  I can see various problems with the site; but a fresh pair of eyes would be invaluable.

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