Bahaimedia:Participate

Welcome to Bahai.media. This page will describe ongoing projects and how you can get involved. There are primarily two types of work on bahai.media, the uploading of new images and the organizing and categorizing of existing images. There are also a few maintenance categories that list specific problems that need to be resolved that will be described below.

Community archives

If you have an archive of documents or media that are related to your local community and would like them to be preserved online and accessible to researchers you can upload your collection here, and we can create a page to organize and present that material. Please email to get in touch about this.

Uploading new images

The primary source of new images for Bahai.media right now are periodicals where we have been granted permission to crop, categorize and upload the images contained in those publications. The images in these periodicals are valuable to have available because the content of the publications are frequently referenced in places like Bahaipedia.org, and having a collection of images allows editors to include them in those articles. They also stand alone and provide an interesting window into the history of the Faith, but for that picture to become clear images with related subjects that were scattered throughout many different volumes or publications need to be collected and organized together.

There is an ongoing project now to upload all of the images contained in the periodical Bahá’í News. Issues 450-518 have been completed, some of the very early issues contained few or no images, so it would probably be easiest to begin from issue 519 and work forward, or 449 and work backward. Here are the instructions for how to participate in this project:

Steps:

1. Navigate to the category page for the issue you want to work on, for example: Category:Baha'i News No 519
2. Download the issue
3. Save each page of the PDF as an image. For example using Adobe Acrobat Pro:

   File > Save as other > Image > PNG (do not use JPEG)

4. Use you preferred photo editing software to crop the images contained on the pages

   Use the image caption or context to give the image a descriptive file name.

5. Navigate to Special:Upload (account required) and select "Choose file" to locate the file on your computer you want to upload

   The field "Destination filename" should be populated based on the file name you chose, you can verify it is correct here.

   If the filename is already taken, you can modify it by editing the text in the "Destination filename" box.

6. Paste this into the "Summary" box:

== File info ==
{{cs
|caption = 
|source = {{bns|519|12}}
}}

== File license ==
{{Bn-excerpt}}

[[Category:Baha'i News No 519]]

In the example above 519 is the issue number. {{bns|519|12}} is a template which means the image is located in Issue 519 on page 12. You will need to adjust the page number, and fill in the caption. After that you can press "Upload file" at the very bottom of the page.

If you have any problems please email so we can help you resolve them. If you find yourself doing a lot of this work there are several ways the process can be sped up, you can also email so we can help you with that.

Organizing existing images

The project described above involves uploading images from the periodical Bahá’í News. The images are only initially categorized in to the category for that issue, for example: Category:Baha'i News No 450. The images need further categorization, and this guide will describe how to do that.

1. Log in to your account
2. Navigate to the category you want to work on (Images in categories 450-518 need to be worked on).
3. Open an image (as an example, this is the first image in category 450)

   Navigate to the very bottom of the page, and you will see Categories (++): Baha'i News No 450 (−) (±) (↓) (↑)People of Nicaragua (−) (±) (↓) (↑) | (+).

   If you wanted to add a new category you would press the (+) on the far right. Then you can type and the system will auto-populate with the available categories.

   If you made any changes you will need to press the "Save" button which appears in that section after you make an edit.

   If you have any problems please email to get in touch.

Fixing specific problems

As the project has evolved over the years, different methods and processes were used when adding and uploading files, some of which are outdated and would benefit from being corrected. Examples of this would be images that are uploaded without a descriptive title or images that have descriptions that are confusing because the information is not well organized.

Making image titles descriptive

Images in Category:Images to be renamed were uploaded without a descriptive title.

1. Navigate to the category you want to work on, then navigate to an image in that category
2. If you are logged in, along the top of the page you will see buttons labelled "Read | Edit | View | More".

   Hover over "More" and then select "Move". (Email if your account does not have this permission so we can fix that)

3. Under "New title:" you can type a new description which better matches the content of the image or the image caption.

   Make sure you do not delete the file extension, for example .png

4. When you are done, press "Move page".

Fix legacy file description pages

This work involves identifying images that were uploaded using outdated practices in presentation or template usage. Compare the description page (text below the image) of the first image in this category with the rest of the images in that category for an example of the new and old methods. If you would like assist with this type of work please email so we can help direct you to the categories and images that need to be worked on. See also image descriptions in Category:BW Volume 4. Note, by typing {{bws|4|35}} you can link directly to a page in The Bahá’í World (Volume 4, page 35 in this example).