Talk:Main Page
Please feel free to add your comments about our Main Page here. You might include suggestions for changing its content, reorganizing the items, etc. Of course, you are also free to be bold and just edit the Main Page Temp yourself and then see if there are objections.
Comments[edit]
good site!
I started to love the wiki principle a few weeks ago and so i started my own WIKI - http://www.differenzialdiagnose.de -for differentialdiagnosis in internal medicine, in the German language. I just called it "DD-Wiki" and it is based only on php, pmwiki, using flat-text-files, without mysql. It is relally cool and funny and i think, this will be the future in my profession! We´ll see! Greetings from germany , gerhard
- Welcome! That is wonderful to hear the development of wiki sites dedicated to medicine. Hopefully, a vast amount of well-organized, free information will develop soon. And hopefully we will have an official [world auxiliary language] to allow people from any country to easily benefit from it. How did you come across our site, may I ask? --Brett Zamir
Will I be blocked for editing this wiki?[edit]
bahaipedia.org has proven itself to be an intolerant website:
https://www.reddit.com/r/FreeSpeechBahai/comments/duzusb/permanently_blocked_from_bahaipediaorg/
I think my block had more to do with content I posted on reddit than my edits on bahaipedia. I say this because my only recent edits on bahaipedia were creating a page that was a compilation of quotes from Abdul Baha on Free Speech, and adding a link to the r/FreeSpeechBahai subreddit on the bahaipedia's "Reddit" page.
Does bahai9.com also block users for holding views outside of the wiki that the admins disagree with?
Trident765 (talk) 22:21, 11 November 2019 (UTC)
- Hello and welcome. There are a few topics of concern I see here, so let me try to respond to each separately.
Regarding users' views held outside of the wiki, although normally the focus of this wiki is on whether the contents posted are from the Writings, or closely derived therefrom (with links back to the Writings), with attempts to present a balanced and not selective sampling, as well as attempting to avoid imposing our own biases of whatever nature, as the administrator responsible for its content at this time, I do reserve for myself the right to take into account a user's pattern of insisting on their own opinions elsewhere, particularly if asserting them as the Faith's, when they are contrary to the explicit Writings--whether the bias may arise out of a "liberal", "conservative" or other view point is irrelevant. This would be done to prevent maintenance headaches whereby someone may first post something innocent, but then start slanting things over time and distorting what the Faith actually teaches (as I have seen done on other forums). That being said:
- There are very few people who I would consider falling into this category, fewer still those who are so subtle as to attempt to do so on a wiki, where the focus is not centered around personalities and opinion, and fewer still those who know the policy of this wiki of needing to support assertions with the Writings. To date at least, I have not had to ban, whether preemptively or reactively, anyone here besides spammers (as far as I can recall).
- While I have a couple of concerns with certain aspects of https://www.reddit.com/r/FreeSpeechBahai/ which I intend to mention below (in the intended interest of consultation and true unity), I don't see anything that merits you yourself being blocked here.
While I can see you are mostly using Bahaipedia as just an example, I do ask that we refrain from speaking negatively of other sites or individuals here (besides warning of say drawing from a Covenant-breaker source or such). While freedom in expressing views is indeed championed in our Writings (and FWIW, I happen to agree with some of your concerns about bias in the general Bahá'í community), such freedom is also to be tempered with avoiding public criticisms that may increase divisions or the appearance thereof. We are to use the institutions to air such concerns, and we have the Bahá'í Internet Agency or local/national institutions with which one may communicate concerns about perceived injustices or misadministration, but as individuals in relation to other individuals, our normal role is to be one of concealing others' (perceived) faults (and also avoiding thereby magnifying our own).
(In the interests of full disclosure, I should mention that besides being friends, I have a strong online working relationship with David of Bahaipedia, and he is graciously hosting the server for Bahai9 currently in the interests of our being able to benefit from shared Mediawiki extensions and ease for installation. However, I am the sole admin/moderator of Bahai9 at this time and I intend to moderate based on my conscience and understanding of the Writings, so I mention this only for disclosure. I wish to see our refraining from negative references to *any* site which is not attacking the Covenant, even if they could potentially be (or may not) in the wrong about a particular policy/enforcement call.)
Similarly, do I ask that we avoid use of negative labels of persons, even if not targeting specific individuals, such as your reference on the Reddit page to "liberal degenerates" While our Writings may speak of moral degeneracy, and speak of the dangers and consequences of moral laxity, and on occasion use negative nouns for descriptive purposes, they tend to reserve any strong categorizations to only the harshest or most hypocritical (and even there, we might call to mind that Bahá'u'lláh in stigmatizing a murderer of Bahá'ís as "The Wolf", did not even exclude his possible redemption by the fact that He appealed to him to change his ways).
This concern is twofold; besides avoiding causing others of a conservative mindset to become whipped up further into the negative partisanship and harsh intolerance of wider society--something which ought to be of concern to all Bahá'ís even among those who see the negative impact of excessive liberality--it also gives us a greater chance of actually winning over those with excessively liberal mindsets. 'Abdu'l-Bahá, while encouraging frankness, upheld courtesy in all His actions. I recommend reading this article, for example: https://centenary.bahai.us/news/abdul-baha-talks-kate-carew-things-spiritual-and-mundane to see how genuinely loving our Exemplar spoke to a secular cynic of the time, while not refraining from stating His perspective on morality.
That all being said, I do, as mentioned, feel there is indeed cause for some concern about Bahá'ís adopting and sometimes enforcing notions of liberalism from wider society and mistakenly applying it to the teachings of the Faith, a concern I have myself raised in other online fora. Well-supported quotations are most welcome on this wiki (including those which may correct certain biases prevalent in some circles; the current generation of the average Bahá'í is not infallible as per the quotes at Maturity of believers to increase over generations).
However, again, I add the important caution that we have a duty to ensure that if we don't have time/energy to find all counter-balancing quotations on a topic, then that we at least indicate it as a "to-do" of the page so visitors to the page do not come away with an overly slanted perspective. For example, on the page at https://bahai9.com/wiki/Equality_of_women_and_men , I mention that we need more representative quotations, a warning I felt was necessary since I took the time to add a quote which counter-balanced what I perceived to be an excessive liberalism on the topic, but I also feel the page deserved to also include the many other occasions of encouragement toward women either that our Writings give, and I don't feel we have adequately added those to date.
I hope this reply has not been too long and may respond adequately to your concerns. Best wishes.
WikiSysop (talk) 00:21, 12 November 2019 (UTC)
One more addition; I also agree that a full discussion of any subject is important, and that sometimes in the supposed interests of "unity", some free expression which 'Abdu'l-Bahá even says is necessary for unity--can be regrettably curtailed. We as Bahá'ís should be fearless in upholding the truths which may go against certain trends in parts of society; however, we also don't want to unduly draw opposition by creating an equally negative climate in response. This document may be of interest: https://bahai-library.com/uhj_individual_rights_freedoms
WikiSysop (talk) 00:36, 12 November 2019 (UTC)
- Thanks for the response. I understand the purpose of this wiki is to be informative and that it is important for the pages to be objective and unbiased, and that things should not be made more negative than they have to be. I also understand that a wiki is a publisher rather than a platform, so I do not feel entitled to free speech with respect to editing articles. I find your comments to be very reasonable. --Trident765 (talk) 02:13, 12 November 2019 (UTC)
