Posted by Brett Zamir (12.248.92.43) on October 11, 2003 at 01:55:39:
Hello friends,
One challenge in the development of the wiki site, particularly on wiki pages dealing with the Writings is how to appropriately and consistently name the Tablets (actually how to name the wiki pages named after the Tablets).
We have the choice of whether to use diacritical marks and punctuation in the names.
We also have the choice to use the English or Persian/Arabic names, and the choice of whether to use underscore marks ("_"), spaces between words, or wiki (joined together) words. (e.g., Bahai_Faith vs. Baha'i Faith vs. BahaiFaith -- all with or without diacritics, apostrophes, etc.)
The advantage of not using the marks and using spaces instead of underscores is both that it is easier for people to produce on their keyboards (including for searches they may do), and it is also less complicated when reflected in the URL (the website address).
The disadvantage is that it may be somewhat disrespectful, ambiguous, unpleasing in appearance, etc.
Although we can "have it all" if we make redirect pages from all of the possible choices, this is a lot of work, and we should have a standard means of forming page names anyhow, so I'd like for us to establish a site-wide standard, if possible.
I have currently set it up (in most cases) for page names to use underscores (since these are not, in my opinion, as unsightly as joining words together, yet it avoids at least one additional confusing symbol in the URL) for spaces, but to otherwise use the diacritics and punctuation. I have also tended to use the Arabic/Persian names for the Tablets (as named at http://bahai-library.org/resources/leiden.list/leiden.list.html , with the exception that I had a hyphen after the joining -i- as is common in the published Writings), unless there were a more familiar English name in use.
A disadvantage of using the Persian/Arabic names is also that those of us unfamiliar with these languages, may not know their diacritic marks if there are none. For example, if we decide to use Persian/Arabic, we would need someone to tell us the appropriate marks for those items at the Leiden list so that we could name the individual pages appropriately.
Any suggestions or volunteers to help with the latter?
Brett
this topic is closed - post at bahai-library.com/forum