FAQ
• How should you handle a footnote like the one in The Bible:1 Timothy 1
Question from uke.
Good question, everything on a Scripture page that is not part of the original text should have an annotation tag around it:
Bart D. Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, 3rd ed. (2004), chap.23
Make sure you copy any external links or other relevant data. You can read more in the Style Guide.
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• I found some typos in the Scripture, should we go ahead and fix these?
Question from Eggman
You should correct any obvious problems with formatting and numbering, be careful about spelling, as many modern spell checkers do not include some of the antiquated language in the scripture. In general, however, if you see a problem, fix it!
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• How do we make external links from within the page?
Question from uke.
You can use the URL tag in PMCode. You can read about it here. This is the code to create that link:
[url="http://expressionengine.com/docs/general/pmcode.html"]link[/url]
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• How do we want to deal with links to images like The Brick Testament?
Question from unknown.
We will not be converting image annotations from the SAB to the Scripture Project. You may delete them if you find them in the Wiki pages, and you don’t have to move them if you see them on the SAB source page.
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• Why is the text of the Qur’an different in the Scripture Project wiki then on the SAB?
Question from achievist.
The SAB uses a translation of the Qur’an Created by Marmaduke Pickthall. Because of copyright considerations, we decided that we would use a translation by Yusuf Ali on The Scripture Project.
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• On many of the SAB pages i see a line of scripture at the top of the page, before the title of the that page. Is this important? Should i try to put it into the page?
Question made up by Matt Gardner.
That line is randomly generated from passages in that book, if you reload the page that phrase will change. We should not duplicate it. Each page of a scriptural work should include only text from that book in the established chronological order.
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• I can’t get a question mark character to display inside the double square brackets in an annotation. For example, in The Bible:1 Chronicles 1 “Was Enoch the sixth or seventh from Adam?” Many of these links are questions. Is there an escape character to force it to display a question mark? Are there other characters that need special treatment in this markup?
Question from wrfostersmith.
You can use the format The Bible:When was the universe created|When was the universe created? surrounded with double brackets to create a link where you control the text. Everything that appears after the “|” will be shown as the link. The actual names of pages cannot include question marks. The code should look like this:
[[The Bible:When was the universe created|When was the universe created?]]
You can read more about creating a link with alternate display text here.
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•Are we supposed to be creating the articles for these annotation links based on the corresponding content from SAB? Many of these are formatted as html tables on SAB. Is there a recommended way to format the same info in the wiki?
Question from wrfostersmith.
Great question! You can read About the Annotation links for an overview of the annotation links problem. You can find out more about styling them at the Style Guide.
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• The original for the Skeptics Annotated Book of Mormon uses a ‘plagiarism’ style tag from time to time, which was not converted automatically… What should we use instead? ‘Good Stuff’?
question from Rob
Good catch Rob! We have created a new icon and you can mark plagiarism annotations up as follows:
An annotation about plagiarized content in this scripture.
Scripture can be marked as usual with the style “plagiarism”.
this is how to mark [style=plagiarism]plagiarized scripture[/style].
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• Does content have to exist in all pages that are linked to from annotations, before the “To Be Reviewed” category can be removed? That is, if any annotation links lead to blank pages, is it OK to remove the “To Be Reviewed” category? Are there any other standards for removing a page from the “To Be Reviewed” category?
If the annotation links are not present then you will need to add the content. you can read About the Annotation links here and learn about styling them in the Style Guide
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• When we are satisfied that the “To Be Reviewed” category can be removed from a page, should we also remove the note at the top saying “This page was recently converted (original here) and is awaiting review.?”
Yes! but make sure the pages include all external links and annotation links.
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• Formatting questions: Is there a way to indent a line in pMcode? Leading spaces are automatically removed. Is there a way to double-space between lines? Multiple carriage returns are removed.
Great question! If you style a section with the “doublespace” style, the entire section will be doublespaced. If you style a section with the “indent” style, the entire section will be indented. And if you put this on its own line, it’ll create a bigger-than-normal space before the next block of text:
[style=doublespace] [/style]
See “Apply CSS Classes” in the PMCode guide for more info.
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• Why are there no spaces after colons in the wiki links? An example of this is “The Bible:What the Bible says about the end of the world”.
question from wrfostersmith.
This is a somewhat complex question and has to do with how pMcode reads links. The first part of that link refers to the NameSpace, in this case “The Bible” the name space is separated by a colon and pMcode reads everything after that as the link. A space would be read as part of the address, thus creating a page that is preceded by a space. E.G. ” What the Bible says about the end of the world”. This would be a problem for consistency and organization, so we have eliminated the space.
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• Is there a list of standard CSS styles somewhere (hidden, doublespace, indent, etc)?
We have put it up a list of the the styles on the Style Guide.
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• Category:Annotations::Contradiction or Category:Annotations::Contradictions (plural)?
We are using Category:Annotations::Contradiction as the standard code for the contradiction subcategory. The singular. If you are confused by this question, check the Style Guide.
wrfostersmith 7/10/08: I went in and updated all the pages that had “Contradictions” to “Contradiction,” and deleted the “Contradictions” category after it was empty.
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• What is the procedure for renaming a page? It’s easy enough to add a new page and delete the old one, but how do you track down all the broken links?
You can use the Rename option at the bottom of the Edit screen. However, this does not update links to that page. We don’t recommend renaming pages unless you have no other choice. There is not a good way of tracking down loose links. One way to deal with this is to add a note to the Notes option at the bottom of the Edit screen, letting people know the former name of the page, and fix any links you find.
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• Many bible chapters at SAB have links at the bottom of the page to relevant content. Should we be porting these links over for each chapter as well?
Question from aatish
Yes! Make sure they have an annotation tag around them if they are on a scripture page.
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• What the “notes”, “redirect”, and “rename” fields at the bottom of the editing screen do?
Question uri
Notes is a place to put revision-specific notes. For example, “Genesis was misspelled. Corrected 7/7/2008 by uri”. There are no specific guidelines at this time about whether or how to use the notes field, but as the content matures it will be more and more useful.
Redirect sends requests for one wiki page to another. If you redirected Genesis 1 to Revelations, folks would be very confused! Not recommended.
Rename is how you give a page a new title (and, incidentally, how you could move a page into a different namespace).
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• How should we create links to annotation links, and have them appear in the correct annotation category?
Question from dmk:
Links should be created in the Wiki this way:
[[Are the laws of the Old Testament still binding|Are the laws of the Old Testament still binding?]]
You can read more About the Annotation links to learn about how to categorize the pages and add icons. You can also check in the Style Guide.
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• What are some of the larger goals of this project? After SAB is converted, are there plans to include top-level articles on skeptical exegesis or such things?
Question from Err for Reason
The Reason Project is a large and ongoing project, Sam Harris has many ideas and plans for developing it in the future. The Scripture Project will certainly be included in those plans.
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• Do we really need the contradiction gif in the pages that compare what the bible says about various things? I mean, by definition those pages address contradictions. It seems to me that the gif is redundant and just adds noise to the page.
Question from uke
Please use the Contradiction icon on annotation link pages that refer to contradictions in the text. beyond that, you don’t need to mark every comparative page with the icon.
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• What do we do about outdated external links? Do we simply delete them?
Question from Dave Loewenstern
Sadly I think this is best bet. Unless you feel the link in important enough to track down, or you know the content it links to exists somewhere else, simply remove broken links.
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I’m unclear how to handle many of the annotation pages for the Quran. Some depend on the translation (e.g., Doom in the Quran—this translator never uses the word “doom”), and almost all require a great deal of effort hunting down the alternative translations.—Dave L.
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How do we handle duplicate annotation pages (e.g., The Bible:Does God want animal sacrifices, The Bible:Does God desire animal sacrifices). Replace one with a redirection? Track down all links and fix? Leave both?
—Dave L.
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The Book of Joshua copies huge chunks from pages in Tektonics that no longer appear to exist. (e.g., http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/jos/6.html) Do we copy them in? Drop them because the link is broken? Set up a footnote page?
—Dave L.
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What do we do when the SAB duplicates an entry:
http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/interp/slavery.html
http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/slavery.html
Should we combine them, i.e., create one page that is both contradiction and interpretation?—Dave L.
