Talk:KohlmanRabbaniSimeon

Simeon 11 June 2004:

If you have any concern regarding posting sensitive information in the NSA lists (or elsewhere), maybe we should run it by an ABM or other institution. It can't hurt to cross our t's and dot our i's on this. If we need to make changes or remove something, it won't be a problem (sometimes less is more, as they say).

Do you know if there is an online version of Priceless Pearl? I haven't found one yet, but it is really a wonderful reference for information about the Guardian.

Yeah, that would be a nice one to have online. If there are any publishing trusts currently publishing it, maybe we could get ahold of a digital copy... --Brett Zamir 11 June 2004

Brett's addition 10 June 2004:

Oh yeah, thanks a lot again for your contributions....The NSA alphabetical page and categorization page was very interesting and helpful....Wonderful to see things developing here...

Brett's reply (10 June 2004):

(Comments interspersed below in your 10 June reply)

Simeon's reply (10 June 2004):

OK, I think I understand better what you mean about the links/quotes. It should be easy to pull out the quotes and put them on the main page in place of the paraphrases.

Super!

With regard to the NSA lists, there shouldn't be any problem with sensitive information. The lists are in a similar format to Graham's, only with more complete information.

Ok, as long as you're sure. There have been cases of people posting things that should not have been posted (and which had been online for a long time even).

Originally, I had set out to create a series of color-coded maps showing the status and development of National Baha'i Communities and National Assemblies chronologically in 5-year intervals. The colors would indicate formed Assemblies, Regional Assemblies' jurisdictions, countries where the faith was banned or restricted, even numbers of Baha'is within each country (where available), and so forth. In researching this, I ran into a few (4 or 5) countries where accurate information was almost impossible to locate. When I wrote to the World Centre about it, they "put the kibosh" on the project because of the sensitive conditions in the very countries about which I was asking. It was simply not wise or timely to make the information available in that format. I still have the maps, but do not plan to release them, because of this reason.

As part of the research, however, I created chronological and alphabetical lists of formation dates for NSAs/RSAs that is taken solely from sources approved by and published by the World Centre (such as Baha'i World or the Ridvan letters). These should not cause any problems. Where data is missing for a country, I have just left it as a blank or question mark, instead of pursuing further clarification. Again, there are only a few (4 or 5) countries where this is an issue.

Okay.

I've noticed that you've created a lot of pages for individual books/tablets. If we want to link to the Writings, should we link to these pages here in the wiki, or should we link directly to bahai-library.com?

Good question. Well, I've typically been doing both such as:

(Bahá'u'lláh, Kitáb-i-Aqdas, par. 15)

However, there is a little quandary I'm trying to figure out now that we have a reason to make separate wiki pages for each paragraph even (e.g., Kitáb-i-Aqdas16). It is beneficial to list individual paragraphs (or sections or pages (unfortunately necessary at present in the absence of official numbering)) because the "backlinks" feature (see the top of any wiki page) could be used from these paragraph pages to show exactly what pages reference that specific paragraph (it would then also be easier to retrieve information about that paragraph to bring over to that wiki page as well if desired). However, to write out the wiki and bahai-library specific reference in each case may be both confusing for the reader (the wiki links alone may already be distracting for some) and cumbersome for the writer. Do you have any suggestions about it? I think the bahai-library.com reference should also be there because a main point of referencing is to allow people to easily refer back to it (although the individual wiki page could have a Writings link to the specific paragraph, but that would add a step). Maybe in the future (once we may get this database I am proposing to Jonah to program) the link could be to a hybrid wiki/Writings page. I dunno.

Brett's reply (9 June 2004):

So sorry for the great delay in responding! I'll try to do better next time. (Further comments interspersed below in your 5 June reply)

Simeon reply (5 June 2004):

I've been busy this past week, but I wanted to get back and reply to you on your suggestions. I think it is a good idea to put National Spiritual Assembly as the main page (with a similar change for other administrative pages such as LSAs, ABMs, Hands, etc. The main (singular) page could have the basic one-paragraph description, with bullet points to the other information, such as history or specific writings from NSAs, etc. I'll think about a good way to reorganize that. I think it is good to have at least some minimal explanatory text on the main page for a topic (like NSAs), such as bullet points and maybe a summary paragraph. The pages look very bare and a little intimidating when there are only links after links.

Yes, I think that's true too. However, my main point was to include quotations and headings for these quotations rather than just links. But summary paragraphs with citations are ok, but I'd prefer that the quotations be included within the wiki page, linked from these summary paragraphs. A good model I think is provided by the memoranda of the Research Department of the House of Justice which either include the quotations in the body of the text or, even more helpful in many ways for finding information, with a bulleted summary list linked to extracted quotations. I basically want to make any point we add verifiable by anyone else in a quick manner, as well as being readable and mostly restricted to authoritative statements.

The key, I think, should be ease of use. The pages should contain easy-to-understand information and helpful links, and should be very easy to follow. We should use aliased links everywhere, if possible (not just a bare URL).

Very true. Again, the shortcuts should help with that, but I hadn't started from the beginning in using them, so there are older pages to convert. I've made some progress on removing the underscores from titles, but there are a bit more to go. The nice thing is that it's easy to find these titles by doing a title search for an underscore.

Also, I have a very accurate list of individual NSAs, their dates of foundation and information on their respective jurisdictional changes over time.

Great! As an aside, I thought it'd be helpful to see exactly what NSA's were added by year (or divided, etc.).

I noticed that you link to a list Graham Hassell prepared a few years ago. His list is not complete, however, and contains many inaccuracies.

Feel free to refer to them or mention its shortcomings (or borrow from it with his permission (or your own research) to remove any need for it).

Two years ago, I started with his list, sat down with the complete set of Messages from the UHJ, Ridvan Letters, and Baha'i Worlds, and made what I consider an *almost* definitive list. There are maybe one or two discrepancies which I was unable to resolve, and about which the World Centre does not wish to comment at this time (they are regarding countries where the Faith is heavily restricted and where any information released might be dangerous to the Baha'is living there). I have never attempted to publish this list in any form, but I would like to link to it from this Wiki. Because I see that Graham Hassell's list is part of the bahai-library site, I was wondering if I could have my list added to that website (since it is more complete and accurate - I mean no disrespect to Mr. Hassell, of course). What do you think would be best?

Well, as long as the information is not sensitive, please do so. If Graham's list is at the https://bahai-library.com main site (or even if not), feel free to upload your own list there too, especially if it is content that is verifiable and which doesn't really need to be changed (of course, you can still keep it here for accessibility and to update information as years go by (but you can edit your own documents uploaded to the main bahai-library site too).

Thanks for the redirect.

Sure. Be sure to add any raw redirects (leading only from a URL and not any other wiki page) to the OrphanedExtras page so that these redirects won't mistakenly show up under OrphanedPages .

I didn't know how to use a word with spaces for my login, so I just used the camel case. I though the page itself would look better with spaces, however.

Same here on both accounts.

Thanks again for all your hard work setting this site up and getting so much information linked up already. I don't know where you find the time! --SimeonKR

Thank you so much for your participation. It makes things a whole lot more fun when there is someone else to enjoy it with. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), my time is due to a disability I am suffering from (recovering lymphoma). Though my concentration and physical energy are restricted, as you can see, I can still do certain mundane tasks (much of the information being added here is either simple to do (like adding page anchors) or was based on work I had already done over the years but just needed to convert to online format). Anyhow, thanks again for joining up here! Please let me know about anything of concern at all. --Brett Zamir (also can email me at brettz9 a--t yahoo . com.

Brett again2:

Just in case you didn't see it in RecentChanges or RecentEdits : I added a page for you at SimeonKohlmanRabbani which redirects to [Kohlman Rabbani, Simeon] since you chose the former as your sign-in. Your sign-in shows up on page histories and the RecentChanges , so if someone wanted to contact you directly on your own wiki page say after reading one of your revisions, they could do so by clicking on the auto-generated link to your name (which is now forwarding to your main user page, [Kohlman Rabbani, Simeon]. For your information, the Redirect plugin feature is described at RedirectToPlugin in case you want to do redirects in the future. As explained at the latter page, the only way you could get to edit a redirect page again is by typing "?action=edit" at the end of the URL (i.e., in this case, [1]. To delete a page, by the way, just delete all of its contents and save it. Only the administrator (me) can remove pages entirely, though (i.e., to also remove the "deleted" page's history), so let me know if that needs to be done for some reason. Since pages aren't easily removed, one can still go back to check the history and revert its contents back again in case someone accidentally (or God forbid maliciously) deletes an entire page.

Brett again:

Two other things:

Regarding National Spiritual Assemblies, I've generally been trying to have singular pages refer to a concept in general, and plurals to refer to specific instances. So in this case, maybe we could move the page to National Spiritual Assembly and then reserve National Spiritual Assemblies for lists of information about or links to specific National Assemblies. How would that be?
Although I really, really, really do not want to stifle or burden you (or other contributors) in the least, least way, for the National Spiritual Assemblies article, although it is quite a good beginning for an encylopedic style article, my hope was that most of the main pages could let the Writings themselves do the talking, with bolded headings providing the quick-glance points we want to draw out of the quotations for the purposes of that particular page. (We can also use numbered and bulleted lists, summaries of guidance linked to onsite compilations, etc..) If it is at all possible to include the Writings (and to find and link to the online source in each case if at all possible--your todo was good) and set apart with bolded headings on separate lines (i.e., out of a paragraph), I feel that may be preferable in most cases (though I really wish to remain very open to any counterpoints you may have). The reasons I think for this include the following:
1. It allows for more immediate confirmation of the accuracy of any given interpretation/categorization we may give.
2. I think people are more interested (at least as a Bahá'í I know I am) in hearing the authoritative accounting/position straight from the Source, and having the quotations out there (but set apart and categorized for quick reference as in Lights of Guidance).
3. Although the paragraph essay structure is familiar for scholarship, I think it can also be more tedious to read as it is not as quickly digestible. However, I do believe, for some people, particularly for introductory articles for non-Bahá'ís, the more elaborative paragraph structure is more familiar (and less quote intensive), so it has its place for sure. Would it be too burdensome for us to shuffle off pages written in such a style to pages with say an "Encyclopedia:" prefix or to quickly transition them into a more bulleted/headed/quotations-set-off format? If that would be too much of a deterrent to you for contributing (or if you think it is too burdensome for viewers who may prefer to view and edit in such a more familiar style), I don't want to inhibit such innovation, so please be frank with what you think. If we enforce what I am suggesting, do you think it would be helpful in creating a helpful standard, imposing on future contributors the necessity to similarly create quickly digestible articles, or is it too burdensome in your view? In any case, I do want to hold an exception for linked summaries since there may be no Writings which actually do the job of drawing together two or more points in one bird's-eye glance. See [Writings Buddhist authenticity] for what I think is a fair example of this which necessitated such an approach, at least for part of the document (the first paragraph). --BrettZamir

Reply from Simeon:

Yes, this transclusion is a very nice ability to have. I might be able to use that to bring in photos of the Hands of the Cause, for example. I will have to play with it a bit to see how it functions - I don't have the time at the moment.

Sure. One concern with it is transcluding pages which are copyrighted. Although a reference is given, there still may be an issue with it. Also, although we do not currently have an uploading system here, Jonah said I could upload pictures to Bahá'í Library for people (after checking them) and then I could tell you (or others) the web address in order for them to be transcluded. The one disadvantage of transclusion here (as opposed to iframes in HTML) is that no text apparently can be added to the right or left of the page. As with other wiki code, you can mostly pretty easily inductively figure out how to do it yourself by viewing the code for the page in question to see how it was done (e.g., at ['Abdu'l-Bahá]) and/or use the find box in the top middle/left of each window (then go to full text search) to find instructions (e.g., search for "transclude"). --BrettZamir

A couple of questions: why does the site error the first time it is opened (does anyone else report this problem)? I have noticed it when logging on from 3 different machines. The error is that the XML couldn't be read. When I push refresh, it opens fine. Possibly, it is a browser config. issue...I don't know.

Yes, that does happen with PC's for some reason, though not for macs I've used on Safari. Yes, and it is a serious issue since it might deter a whole lot of people from visiting, even though it is not that big of an inconvenience relativley speaking if one knows this will happen. I'd like to figure it out, but I don't know how. --BrettZamir

Also, because wiki is a completely open system, where anyone can enter data, do you have any thoughts on safe-guarding the site if someone tries to input a lot of spurious/false information? Not that it would necessarily happen, but it is always a possibility.

Yes, well there are a number of safeguards. One, people can download the contents of the site as a backup (I do myself from time to time) at PhpWikiAdministration . Two, we can ban IP addresses if necessary. Three, I've been monitoring all the RecentChanges (actually even RecentEdits ) and using "diffs" to verify what's been added from version to version. Four, the more Bahá'ís here helping self-police, the better (Wikipedia gets on pretty well that way, I think). Five, we can easily revert back to a prior version (click "page history" at the bottom of any page and then click "edit" on the version one desires to revert to, then click "save" to have it revert to that older version.) --Brett Zamir

Lastly, I think that the home page needs a bit of work to make it more intuitive. It seems that some of the categories might be a little wierd to the casual observer (such as "by protagonist"). I'll try to think of some ways to reorganize it and post suggestions on Talk:Main Page - unfortunately, that won't be right away, as I am busy with a lot of other work. - SimeonKR

Sure, thanks! I very much agree with you. I particularly think that the Human--Intellectual-Arts-Social-Professional-Administrative page (from under subject also needs to be fixed/consolidated/etc.). There are two things I am concerned about in doing so, though:

I originally got involved in all of this because I wanted to have a planning template for allowing people to specifically attend to directives in the Writings for incorporating into our lives (e.g., as the Patterns of Activity - Daily page aims to do). So, I wanted it to be fairly comprehensive in terms of allowing for adding goals (I hope in the future, people can conveniently add notes corresponding to (and attached to) wiki pages on their own local hard-drive for personal use such that one could list goals say linked with the Nutrition or Teaching pages, etc. etc., and then view all of one's goals, etc. This would need special client-side software I think, but I hope it can be done in the future. So, even though there may be no Bahá'í Writings for say making a goal to learn good clean jokes, I want there to be a place for it.

I don't want to lose any intellectual consistency or power to find things in newly categorized (yet not too redundant) ways. But if you can come up with an easier (yet sufficently descriptive and accurate) term to replace protagonist or the like, by all means. But, in this case, the word was used by the House of Justice (in referring to individuals, institutions, and communities), and also it allows a useful categorization for a number of items that might not be as readily found through [subject] browsing. I think some of the [By condition-characteristic], etc. pages could also perhaps be better named, but again, I don't want to be too redundant in categorization or lose intellectual consistency--e.g., like how Mírzá Abu'l-Fadl's categorization of Tablets mixes in its scheme the topics of Tablets (e.g., Tablets on history, etc.) with the tone of Tablets, etc. (e.g., Tablets in the tone of authority)). --Brett Zamir

Newer comments:

Hey, I just discovered two things really great. One, we can transclude other HTML pages inside of our wiki pages. Useful for images and such. Check out the page of ['Abdu'l-Bahá] as an example.

Two, and this is really wonderful, I've discovered iframe in HTML which allows HTML pages to be encapsulated into other HTML pages (same as this transclusion I just mentioned but for HTML instead of wiki). Check out https://bahai-library.com/zamir/kawiki.html . The left column is the Kitáb-i-Aqdas by paragraph, the middle column is a corresponding editable wiki page dedicated to that paragraph (can also be viewed independently), and the right column is fairly arbitrarily chosen as the Writings page for the wiki site; the latter is linked to be changed (in this case into the Kitáb-i-Aqdas notes) as soon as a link (to these notes) is clicked in the far-left column. This is so awesome... (By the way, feel free to add your responses here if you like since I'm monitoring all the contributions at this site anyways. --Brett Zamir

Addition:

Nice job on adding the references, by the way. Thanks! One thing which you might like to know... If you visit the InterWikiMap , you will see a bunch of shortcuts on the left. You can use these to make a link to a specific page or paragraph. For example, [[kap:45]] would make a link to paragraph 45 of the Aqdas, while {{ka|45}} would link to page 45 of the Aqdas. You can add aliases for these too just as if they were URL's such as [[kap:45|par. 45]]] (we should generally do this to make things more attractive, but it should still be shorter and easier than having to retrieve the exact URL's all the time; the abbreviations are hopefully easy to remember/predictable enough too) . The result of the above code will give you kap:45, 45, and par. 45, respectively. One more trick is to use a pipe with nothing following it to get rid of the often ugly prefix. So, just type in [[kap:45|]] and it will just show up as 45, like 45 linking to your page (it changes the code to [[kap:45|45]] so that it is more clear what is happening for the next person who reads the code)

Brett's response:

Yes, Bahá'í World is not yet online. A print reference is better than none until such time as someon may get it online. Yeah, don't worry about the extra diacritics. Just the vowels I think is enough for our purposes here. Jonah says he may in the future be able to do an auto-replace in the future. As far as the underscores, I wasn't chiding you by the way. I was just realizing that with others climbing on board here, I should start trying to correct my own inconsistencies and avoid them becoming worse. Don't worry about moving old pages, as I hope to do that gradually. Check the "RecentChanges" to see all changes at the site in order to notice if I happen to change a page you had been frequenting before (in case I changed its name to be spaces instead of underscores, etc.). By the way, if you do decide to move a page ever, check the "backlinks button" and visit all the connecting pages to change the links to the old page there to the new page, go back to the old page, cut out all of the contents of the old page, indicate that you are moving the page in the "summary" in th edit window, save the old page (it will then be "deleted" even though the page's history will show previous edits and older versions can be reverted to if necessary), then paste the new contents at the new page and save it. Voila! Everything should be done... --BrettZamir

Simeon said:

Brett, thanks for the feedback! I'm planning on putting more references for the data into the pages when I can get a little more time. As far as I know, Bahá'í World is not online, though, so some of it might be difficult (it contains the best biographical info on the Hands of the Cause, for example.) I try to put diacritics in wherever I can - the biggest problem with this is that there is no way to display the underdotted d, t, h, z, and s. At least, I haven't found a way to do it that looks good. Underlines, accents, and the "ayn" are less of a problem.

I would also prefer using spaces to using underscores for page titles. I didn't want to go back and recreate an entire page at this point, however. With new pages, I plan to use spaces.

Brett said:

Hey, congratulations on getting the hang of things here!

Some nice contributions, thanks!

Just a quick FYI...Some of the pages (including the Hands of the Cause page) need to include more exhaustive references as to where the data has been gathered from--preferably if possible from authoritative sources such as Bahá'í World, etc. (e.g., even for the listing of the Hands of the Cause themselves, we should have an (authoritative) primary source (preferably online) where people can check the information for themselves. Information gleaned from non-authoritative sources can be included, but should be set apart (perhaps on a different page) so that things here don't degenerate into speculation, etc., mixed in with the primary aim of the site which is to show the official Bahá'í position on various topics.

Also, when adding new pages, go ahead and use spaces instead of underscores (_). I have to go back and change all of the underscores since I think the spaces are a better standard to stick by. Also, I'd like diacritics to be used as much as possible, including in the page titles themselves.

--Brett Zamir