Talk:Bahá'í literature

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[edit] Wikipedia article links

I've put the Baha'i texts template in to provide wikipedia links to specific articles on specific texts. Seemed streamlined that way. MARussellPESE 21:04, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Inclusion

Out of pure personal judgement, I've only added texts used as sources on more than one article. I'm not sure we need something like God Loves Laughter, but Thief in the Night would be a good addition. There's probably some central book(s) I've missed. If it's really useful, like an external link to the Ruhi books, please track it down and add it.

I think we should not put links to the Distribution Service, GR, Kalimat, etc. MARussellPESE 21:04, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Comments

Great resource. A couple of points/questions:

  • "Universal House of Justice and its angencies" - do you mean agencies?
  • Is this article concentrating on printed literature only? ie the Bab's "Qayyúmu'l-Asmá (The Resurrection of Names, a.k.a. Commentary on the Súrih of Joseph)" has never been published in full, at least not in English.
  • What about polemic accounts, or even accounts that aren't acknowledged by the Baha'i World Centre (Amanat has one of the best and most neutral resources I know about the 1844-1850 period, but he's not Baha'i)

Just thoughts without leaning toward any answers in particular -- Tomhab 21:18, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the observations.
  • Typo. Fixed.
  • Personally, I'd focus on the published texts. But a section on "Online texts" or "Unpublished texts" could be opened up. That could be the place to point at H-baha'i?
  • Polemic books. Hmmm. I wonder what similar religions' sites look like. This is "Bahá'í literature" not "literature about Bahá'í". The W.M. Miller and Maulana texts are present in appropriate articles. Don't think they belong here.
MARussellPESE 21:39, 15 February 2006 (UTC)
There are authors with multiple works in the bibliography, such as Balyuzi and Taherzadeh, who aren't mentioned in the main article. Also, there are works that are significant in that Baha'is are familiar with them and they come up in discussions, particularly the sort that come up on Wikipedia, that aren't in the article at all. This may become a difficulty later. -LambaJan 01:43, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Dates

I've been trying to use the date when the original document was written, or if it's a compilation, the earliest publication date. (The exception is Esselmont, which has undergone significant revision over time.) If we are going to use the pub. date of the particular ISBN then we'll confuse it, I think, as these have been reprinted in various editions over the years. (I used Smith's Concise Encyclopedia for dates.)

This is why Harvard referencing won't work on these pages too. Can we settle on a consensus? MARussellPESE 13:42, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

I think if we attach a particular ISBN to a book then the rest of the reference should go along with it. So dates, publishing location, hardcover, etc. Is there any standard for this? I'm sure it's come up before.
For Esselmont you can just put the edition number on it and the publishing date of that edition. Cuñado - Talk 17:11, 16 February 2006 (UTC)
The answer's here: Wikipedia:Cite sources#Complete citations in a .22References.22 section. MARussellPESE 18:15, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

Good, here's what it says:

  • Many times editors use an edition of a book that was published long after the original publication. In such cases, they must provide the date of the edition they are using or else the ISBN, and preferably both. This is important because different editions may be paginated differently.
  • When editors use an edition of a book that was published long after the original publication, they may put the original date of publication in square brackets followed by the date of publication of the edition used by the author who is making the citation. For example, an in-line citation might be
(Marx [1867] 1967)
and the complete reference would be:
Marx, Karl [1867] 1967 Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Vol. I. Edited by Frederick Engels. New York: International Publishers.

Sounds good, we can use this formatting for the page. Cuñado - Talk 22:12, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

It sure doesn't look good. Maybe someone can think of a better presentation for the original and publishing dates? Cuñado - Talk 22:19, 16 February 2006 (UTC)
It does look ugly. Maybe we could just have the date of publication as before, and at the end of the reference write "Originally published 1910." -- Jeff3000 03:50, 17 February 2006 (UTC)
Thought it would look like this. The "Year" field automatically drops parentheses around it. Looking over the full template, there doesn't seem to be another way of doing it that way. There have been so many printings of these over time, though, "Baha'u'llah (1982)" is meaningless. Maybe we need to ask for an update to the template to allow for bracketed original publication. I opened up a topic here. MARussellPESE 14:41, 17 February 2006 (UTC)
Maybe the discussion should be brought to Template talk:Cite book which the new version of the depracated Template:Book reference reference. -- Jeff3000 03:17, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps this formatting will work:

Any thoughts? Cuñado - Talk 20:32, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

Ooo. Much better. Consistency is most important I think. MARussellPESE 20:38, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Kudos

Kudos to Jeff3000 and Cuñado for tightening up these citations' data and formatting. Very nice. Tedious work. Mille grazie. MARussellPESE 18:27, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] multiple authors

umm... check the "others" section in the bibliography. I'm not sure how to format multiple authors with first and last names, especially two authors with the same last name. It results in a string of names, and it might be hard to tell which are first, and which are last names. Cuñado - Talk 20:34, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

How about the change I just made. -- Jeff3000 20:40, 21 February 2006 (UTC)
I found an example on this guideline page. With multiple authors they give the last name and first initial, like this: Lincoln, A., Washington, G. & Adams, J. (2007).....
I'll try and update the page now. Cuñado - Talk 21:31, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Periodicals

I'm moving the Baha'i World and periodicals to the bottom of the bibliography. These don't fit into a particular form and are probably of limited interest to people who aren't Bahá'ís. Mostly news and the original appearance of a letter or provisional translation. There's almost nothing in these that isn't available in one of the books already cited. I really wonder that we need them at all. MARussellPESE 18:11, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Authorized and loanwords

Sorry for the revert, but I think this version is problematic on several points:

1. Authorized is redundant.

Authorized translations use the characteristic Bahá'í orthography to render Arabic and Persian names and loanwords, introduced by Shoghi Effendi, who translated numerous writings into English. His service was not just that of a translator, as he was also the designated and authoritative interpreter of the writings.

Most Baha'i translations use Shoghi Effendi's preferred orthography, so stating "authoritative translations" do is not entirely correct. We could drop the first "authorized" or the second sentence altogether. My preference is for the former. We shouldn't over-emphasize the Shoghi Effendi's "authority", as this article discusses "authoritative text" at some length, and Shoghi Effendi's bio article is pretty clear too. It's easy to overdo this point.

2. The first sentence reads like this to me: "Authorized translations use Baha'i orthography and Shoghi Effendi introduced Arabic and Persian names and loanwords" (?)

3. Bahá'í orthography is clear that Shoghi Effendi did not introduce this form — it's one he modified from the existing standard. Saying that he "introduced" seems incorrect. "Developed" seems better.

4. Per my understanding of "loanword" we don't have many, if any, in the Baha'i writings, because words like Sadrat'l-Muntaha, Taraz, etc. are not widely recognized outside the Baha'i community, and sometimes in it, without a glossary offering translation. As such these are basically foreign words and have not been naturalized. I don't think we can refer to these correctly as "loanwords".

MARussellPESE (talk) 00:29, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the corrections! hajhouse (talk) 02:53, 21 December 2007 (UTC)