Extremely exciting development

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brettz9
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Extremely exciting development

Postby brettz9 » Thu May 27, 2004 12:25 am

Dear all,

I wanted to share with you all an exciting development here in the works at Baha'i Library Online (as a wiki project).

This is not only a ground-breaking opportunity for the Baha'i scholarship community, but, to my knowledge (correct me if someone can tell me otherwise), this is also pioneering a new use for the technology of wiki websites.

As you may know, Jonah has graciously allowed the hosting of a collaborative set of websites. The main page of this set of sites is at http://bahai9.com/ . In order to gather data not only according to subject, protagonist, and time, I also thought people would like to collect information according to a given work of the Baha'i Writings.

So, for example, if people wanted to collect cross-reference information about what other passages in the Writings had to say about a given verse of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas, they could go to one page (at http://bahai9.com/wiki/Kit%E1b-i-Aqdas ) and find this information collected there. We also added links from the corresponding Writings pages (e.g., at http://bahai-library.com/writings_bahaullah_aqdas ) (see the top-right hand box) so that when reading the Writings one could easily get to the corresponding collaborative page.

The only problem with this until now had been that if a person wanted to compare the collaboratively-gathered information with the corresponding verse, the person would have to scroll down to the appropriate place in both pages.

Now, as you can see at this temporary page at http://bahai-library.com/zamir/kawiki.html , you can see the Writings (in this case the Aqdas) with their corresponding wiki page (many have not been created yet; see paragraphs 4, 5, 13, 16, 17 for ones that have, a few of which were based on the Leiden list).

(The far right column (it is not as important now--you can ignore this paragraph (and the far-right column) if you like; it is a wiki page linking to all the Writings (view by itself at http://bahai9.com/wiki/Writings ); these pages will change to the Kitab-i-Aqdas notes if you click on the corresponding highlighted text in the left-most window.)

Anyhow, I hope in the future, we may be able to get all of the Writings (including the Qur'an and Bible) into this format, so that one can conveniently view and edit notes for the Writings along with the Writings themselves. I also hope to have someone program this kind of data be customizably retrieved from a database program such that one in the future would be able to choose exactly what verses they wanted to view, how they wanted to view them, etc.; any donors for this project would be welcome...)

In any case, I'd be most grateful for any feedback if you could just take a minute to view http://bahai-library.com/zamir/kawiki.html .

It may take a while to load, especially if you have small bandwidth on your modem. If it loads with an error, please try refreshing the page once and see if that solves it.

I really appreciate your help in taking just a moment to look this over and give your feedback. Thanks!

Brett

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