Posted by Brett Zamir (12.248.92.43) on October 11, 2003 at 01:22:58:
I would imagine Jonah may have his own wishes for volunteer help, so I hope he won't mind me asking to see if anyone would be interested in a tremendously useful project I feel could be done to help our wiki site as well as the general site here...
I think the online temptation has been to avoid entering in indexes (indices for the Latin fanatics out there) since it was thought that search engines could do the trick.
However, there is a tremendous advantage to searching the Writings by subject (not strictly by word as in concordances--though even an online concordance could have its uses), such as compilations like Lights of Guidance demonstrate.
I have begun a humble categorization system at https://bahai-library.com/wiki/index.php/subject (which I obviously need to edit and rework a bit), but it is my hope that it can serve as a template for people adding links to quotations, summaries of guidance, or tidbits of essential information (just not a lot of speculation or personal pages--that can go on peoples' personal pages or sites), etc.
However, to do this effectively and comprehensively, I thought it would be best to begin:
1) first by getting all of the indexes of the published Writings online, add page links to them, and mix them together alphabetically. This itself should be of use for online visitors.
2) Second, the individual index entries could then be arranged within a strict subject hierarchy (i.e., not at all alphabetical, but by subject within subjects). This also could itself be a useful tool as sometimes when you are looking for something by topic as in an index, you do not want to be forced to think of the exact word or phrase you are looking for.
3) Lastly, we could use this hierarchical subject index to add the pages to our own hierarchical wiki index (which is designed to easily incorporate any other gems from the Writings (by subject) not captured by the original index makers).
Even if you don't follow everything I'm saying (though I'd be happy to try to explain it better), are there any volunteers to help split up the work of entering in these index pages? I'd be happy to add the links to the pages as I may be able, if you can help type them up.
Brett
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