Bahai9:Requested pages

Special:Wantedpages generates an automatic list of links which have not yet been created. However, this can show many items.

Please add any articles here you would like to especially see added to the Bahá'í9 wiki (name a topic):

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• Articles in progress

requested page

Hi, I don't know where is the best place to put this,

Hello and welcome. I personally don't mind taking questions wherever they are, but for the sake of future maintainability and organization, I probably should enforce a little self-discipline. :) In the future, if you want to request a link for (or otherwise change) the main page, you can add the code as you'd like the main page to look to Main Page Temp (see that page for the details).

but can I request you add a reference desk, like the wikipedia one, and add a prominent link to it on the main page?

Great idea. I've changed the name of our questions page to Bahai9:Reference Desk and it's on the main page with that name. Note that our approach is I think more flexible than Wikipedia's in that we allow questions on the article pages as well. However, since this is not a forum, and we're only just starting, I'm not sure whether to put the Reference Desk link so prominently as to become distracted with too many reference questions at this point, since other discussion forums exist for that. I'd prefer to get people editing the pages, even leaving questions on the article pages (see the Bahai9:Reference Desk on how to do this) so that we can build a more useful reference. But feel free to propose a specific redesign... Also see below for more...

This has always been one of the chief features of wikipedia - articles are sometimes unreliable,

Since this wiki relies almost exclusively on quotations, articles here (unless someone temporarily posts some garbage) should be quite reliable. The site policy also encourages linking back to static copies of the Writings to facilitate verification of any quotation (if a quotation is not yet online somewhere, we can add it to https://bahai-library.com to have a static copy which is part of a structured and non-publicly-editable collection). Admittedly, however, even with our wiki policies in place, an article might not have a sufficient number of quotations to give a good picture of the subject, the quotation summaries may be inadequate or even accidentally misleading, and quotations might need more context, etc., but by adding your questions on such pages, you'll be helping to ensure that others with the same question can find the answer easily, as opposed to adding it only to a reference desk page where no one interested in the topic who comes to the site at some later date may know that your question exists (e.g., if you have a question that no one can answer now).

If you do actually want an encyclopedia-style wiki (which may be more easy for beginners to read, but which may also be more prone to interpretation since the official Baha'i Writings are not used for each point as they are to be here) see http://bahaikipedia.org or http://en.wikipedia.org .

and not always interesting anyway,

Hope we can make that different here!, with the article pages being the main resource, and questions/discussions being oriented to build, refine, and refer to the article pages. It take a little creativity to add good quotation headings and/or make bulleted lists which succinctly draw out the main points while linking to the quotations, but I've found it is not impossible to get used to doing. I might need to "translate" a little if I am using a wiki article at a discussion forum post, or vice versa, but the main difference, I think, is just that a wiki is more organized and less conversational.

but the ref desk often sparks interesting discussion, and helps form online friendships, and even communities. Thanks, Fred1 22:18, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

Yes, that's cool, and I hope we can stimulate that too. We also have https://bahai-library.com/forum (not sure if you're coming here from there) which ensures that legitimate posts will not be overwritten by others (though people should not randomly delete others' stuff here either, of course). At that forum, we can also add a question-focused forum and we already have topic-centered ones (I wish the forum software would allow users to be able to add their own subforums--e.g., to themselves add new books to our topic-centered forums without needing an administrator to do so, to allow ongoing discussions on a particular book or subject, but right now you have to request it).

Alternatively, as I suggest on the main page, you can add an "InformalTalk:" prefix to any article title and start talking about that article there (linking to it from the article page--if there's enough interest, I can maybe modify the wiki software to automatically create such links on each page). What may I ask is your draw to using a wiki to do this over a discussion forum? While I may stubbornly resist some changes at least at first, please don't be deterred from defending your points and making further counterpoints!--I do hope to accommodate and find a place for reasonable needs and creative ideas, or at least point to another site which fits that approach. Some also depends on having a regular and reliable volunteer to oversee their pages of interest. Hope that helps... All the best, WikiSysop 01:40, 25 April 2009 (UTC)