History of Bahá'í wiki websites

Note: This content is now hosted at https://bahaipedia.org/Wiki where it is recommended to keep the information up to date. However, I am keeping a copy of the info below just as a kind of mirror in case that page's contents end up changing.

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The first known collaborative web article on the Bahá'í Faith was started at http://everything2.com/title/Bah%25E1%2527%25ED on November 13, 1999 by user "under_score" (Mishkin Berteig, according to his user page, who is apparently a Bahá'í) at what is now http://everything2.com . Data was transferred from an earlier incarnation of the site (which started as early as March 1998), so it is not known exactly when the article began [1]. This was not a wiki proper, but allowed users to start informative pages on a given topic to which others could add.

At Wikipedia, the history log for the "Bahá'í Faith" page (see here for the revision, apparently based on an earlier file in the FTP site for the newsgroup soc.religion.bahai), shows user "Fragrant" as the earliest editor of that page (November 15, 2001). This is the earliest known wiki page on the Bahá'í Faith (or mention of it), though further research might turn up more information. The English version of this page became a "featured article" after a nomination in December 2004. Other language versions of the page also (later?) received this distinction.

On March 7, 2003, the services of http://netunify.com were employed to set up the first known dedicated Bahá'í wiki website (at http://bahai.netunify.com ). Brett Zamir set up and was the first to use this site. The original page, was at http://bahai.netunify.com/1.versions.2 , though is no longer accessible.

On November 5, 2003, Jonah Winters (from https://bahai-library.com/ ) (formerly at https://bahai-library.com/wiki ) installed the first Bahá'í-hosted wiki website with Brett Zamir editing the first page at the site and overseeing its contents. (See one 2004 version of the Home Page.)

On August 17 (or 19th? see oldest pages), 2004, Jonah Winters again assisted in the installation of a Bahá'í-hosted wiki website (again at his server), this time accessible from its own dedicated domain name, at bahai9.com. Brett Zamir added the first page and is overseeing its contents to date (first mostly migrating pages from the previous web site). The original page (merely a test) is at http://bahai9.com/index.php?title=Main_Page&oldid=2413 . Some time later, the site was disabled to editing for some time, but remained open to viewing until it was eventually reopened to editing.

On September 4, 2004, Brett Zamir presented "Creating the Ultimate Bahá’í Wayfarer's “Guide to the Galaxy", a presentation on wikis in general and Bahá'í wikis specifically at an Association for Bahá'í Studies Conference.

In March of 2007, Bahaikipedia was formed[2] (now "Bahaipedia") by David Haslip and has since expanded to include a media commons, text archive, and news source (now defunct) as well as encyclopedic knowledge.

Around the time of the formation of Bahai(ki)pedia.org, other Bahá'í wikis in other languages were started, but these are not currently online:

• Persian
  • bahaipedia.com (archived link: 2009, with a page history going back at least to May 2007)
• Spanish
  • es.bahaipedia.com (archived link: October 2007) with a page history going back at least to May 2007)
  • wiki.bahaidream.com (archived link: July 2007, with no page history available)--apparently a mirror of es.bahaipedia.com.
  • bahaipedia-es.com (archived link: 2011, with a page history going back at least to June 2009).

This wiki at http://bahai9.com went back online to editing on April 22, 2009 and on October 12, 2015, hosting of Bahai9 was moved to David Haslip's servers in order to take advantage of his configuration allowing for ready updating of the site software and sharing of extensions.