The facility with which the residents of Paradise can consult this vast store of knowledge is solely due to the voluntary and wise efforts of the custodians of knowledge. UB 27:5.5
The previous quote is inspiring and contains the motivation that we want to promote Urantiapedia. Urantiapedia wants to be a great store of knowledge about The Urantia Book. The objective is to create a vast online library that allows the dissemination of knowledge about The Urantia Book, and that is based on principles like globalization, collaboration, selflessness and completeness.
¶ Why Urantiapedia
Today there are many Wikis, Wiki meaning any set of web pages created collaboratively by a community of users. When a collection of books, movies or video games quickly gain in popularity, inmediately a community of fans organizes to create a Wiki where they gather all the knowledge on that particular topic.
For example, here is a Wiki about the Game of Thrones series of books, TV shows and games: https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Main_Page
Interestingly, to this date the idea of a Wiki of The Urantia Book has not been proposed, and Urantiapedia is the answer to this idea. It is a Wiki where you can collaborate by adding and improving its contents, a website where everyone can contribute to the dissemination of knowledge about The Urantia Book.
I am sure you have used Wikipedia or pages like Google Maps many times to find information about a topic or a place. If you wish to find something about a topic you search Wikipedia. If you wish to find info about a place you go to Google Maps.
These pages are very helpful. Pages of Urantia Associations around the world do a similar service. There you have study aids and articles created by readers to make it easier understanding The Urantia Book. If you wish to find an article or a study about The Urantia Book you visit an association website.
But what about having all in one place?
There are many web pages about The Urantia Book with very interesting contents. Some examples of these sites are:
- Urantia Foundation website: www.urantia.org
- Fellowship website: urantiabook.org
- Urantia Association Internacional: urantia-association.org
- Local Associations:
- Spain Urantia Association: aue.urantia-association.org
- Australia and New Zealand Urantia Association: anzura.urantia-association.org
- Canada Urantia Association: canada.urantia-association.org
- Argentina Urantia Association: argentina.urantia-association.org
- United States Urantia Association: uaus.urantia-association.org
- Other websites about The Urantia Book, as:
The problem that a new reader finds when he goes to the Internet is that there are many websites about The Urantia Book. In fact, there are a lot. First question that arises when you want to find some information about The Urantia Book is: Where I go? Where I find some info about this topic?
In existing web pages the information is scattered on these websites, often only in English, and with a content that is not linked together. In addition, that content do not change very much, do not change fast and frequently, because to publish on them you need to contact with the admin user of the page or the Association.
This is what Urantiapedia aims to change. In the same way as Wikis work, in Urantiapedia any reader can sign up and contribute content as long as he or she passes some validation steps.
The content can cover anything related to The Urantia Book, not just some parts of it or some type of content. Languages we are supporting are all the languages with a translation of The Urantia Book. Everything is linked because each content is a page with a unique address. The content change quickly and frequently because you can edit anything directly from the web. You can even upload massive amounts of pages within minutes. And of course, all users of the page, whether registered or not, can browse any content and use the links to go from one page to another.
¶ Goals
Our mission is to help in the dissemination of the Urantia revelations and allow for a better understanding of its teachings.
For this we have set these goals:
- Create a collective and collaborative project, not the individual work of a single person or a few persons working isolated.
- Become the reference website for queries about The Urantia Book, just as Wikipedia is for querying topics or Google Maps for querying places.
- Offer content that grow unlimitedly over time and never stop improving.
- Offer multi-language capabilities out of the box so that all content can be in any of the supported languages. When we say all we mean not only translations of The Urantia Book but any article, book, study aid, map, schema, etc. available in the site.
- Support for online access from any device. Urantiapedia is a responsive website so you can use it from any smartphone, PC, or tablet. So anywhere.
¶ Principles
Urantiapedia is not another Urantia Book related website. It is governed by several essential principles that make it radically different from any other existing website. No other website about The Urantia Book is trying to do this as far as we know:
- Globalization and Multi-language: There are many associations’ or reader project’s sites. Although The Urantia Book exists today translated to a good number of languages (24 today and growing), almost all website’s content about the book is only in one language. Mostly in English, and some in Spanish. In other languages there is almost nothing.
- Multi-collaborative: There are many websites about Urantia, and there is no one that is a Wiki with the capacity to be updated without risk by dozens of users at the same time.
- Selflesness, done by inspired people, not by money: Urantiapedia is not a business, is not going to have advertisement or merchandising to fund-raising. We want inspired people that wants to do a selfless job and serve the community. In our opinion, this type of people brings the best work. If you recap the quote about the store of knowledge in Paradise, it works thanks to voluntary service.
- Completeness, related to all The Urantia Book, not parts of it. There are a good number of websites that focuses only in part IV of The Urantia Book and makes Jesus the center of Urantia message. Urantiapedia goal is to help in the understanding of all the content in the book, and to help in the creation of a single store for linking and gathering all the available knowledge.
Let’s see this principles in more detail.
¶ Principle I. Multi-language
We want all knowledge about The Urantia Book to be available in all possible languages so that these difficult revelations can be natively understood by the largest possible population.
Urantia Foundation and associations has done a great job in translations of The Urantia Book, but we need to go beyond that.
Consider this facts about translations:
- It has been needed 40 years for first official translation to Spanish (Spanish is the second language with first-language speakers in the world, above English in this respect).
- It has taken 70 years to have an official translation to Mandarin Chinese and still it is in progress (Mandarin Chinese is first language in first-language speakers in the world).
- 4 of 10 of the 10 languages with most first-speakers in the world still has no translation at all (Hindi, Bengali, Western Punjabi, Yue Chinese). These languages still wait for a translation and total more than a third of world first-speakers.
- Less than 1% of secondary works have a translation in other languages, and 99% are only in English.
Translations of Urantia Book has not follow a “most spoken first-language” strategy, which is reasonable. First translations were done by enthusiastic readers, and that inspiration came first in some developed countries before any other.
But this strategy needs to be updated. Two-thirds of world inhabitants cannot read Urantia Book in their first language. The main population in the world that is benefiting from Urantia Book is mostly located in western developed countries. Isn’t this following the same error that first apostles commited when spreading the gospel to Rome and not to China?
. . . it was regrettable that there was no one like Peter to go into China, or like Paul to enter India . . . UB 130:2.3
If we do the same math for Secondary Works the situation is even worst. There is very little concern about the translation of Secondary Works. They are mainly in English, with some small production in Spanish or French. But there is no interchange of ideas between communities with different languages through translations, and a big part of Urantia movement knows nothing about Secondary Works because they are only in English.
Consider this quote from The Urantia Book:
. . . There must occur an exchange of national and racial literature. . . . UB 52:6.4
Urantiapedia is already designed from the beginning to support dozens of different languages, and today when something is added it is only done if it is at least in Spanish and English. For this reason, a menu always appears on the top bar that allows you to select any of the pages between these two languages. And with a small change in the settings of the site an admin can allow new languages to translate the content into them.
Many websites are only related to some parts of The Urantia Book, or only some of the content is translated to several languages. In Urantiapedia the goal is to bring all the content to all the languages of the book.
Is it important to translate Urantia Book related content into other languages? Should we go beyond English? The answer is YES. Hundreds of millions of people around the world speak only one native language that is not English. The utopia of a single language that the Book predicts for the future is unfortunately still very far away. It is imperative that all disseminators of The Urantia Book make an effort to translate their works into at least one other language. Creating a document, article, slide, help, or guide in English is only walk the first mile that the Master asked us to travel. The second mile of true dedication to the Revelations is to make the knowledge reachable to more people.
If anyone says: Do we all have to start learning a second language now to be promoters of The Urantia Book? The answer is a resounding YES. The apostles left their hideout and began to speak to the people in various languages because they had already taken care to learn not one more language, but even several, in order to reach as many people as possible. And they did it in a time of worse schooling and worse means of learning. Today there is no excuse to publish content related to The Urantia Book in only one language. That denotes laziness and the presumption that this effort is not necessary. On the contrary, it is needed more than ever, since we live on a planet that is still long away from having a world native language. English is not that language by a long shot. There are hundreds of millions of people in the world for whom English is not their first language, or they know very little English, or do not have an appropriate level of English to deal with content as complex as The Urantia Book.
¶ Principle II. Multi-collaborative
We want this work of gathering content about The Urantia Book to be done collaboratively and without risks, as part of a team effort.
There are many websites about Urantia Book, we have seen them, and we don’t know of a single one that is a Wiki with the capacity to be updated without risk by dozens of users at the same time.
Pages from Associations and others are actually blogs where if you want to collaborate with secondary works you have to send them to the site administrator. There is no agility, there is no collaboration, there are no mechanisms that allow several people to work “at the same time” on the same content safely.
One of the most important lessons to be learned during your mortal career is teamwork. UB 28:5.14
Urantiapedia is designed to encourage collaboration from the start:
- Urantiapedia is a Wiki, with proven software, called Wiki.js.
- Anyone can contribute having their own user account after passing some validation steps.
- It allows multiple editors and administrators at the same time, each one with their own roles and permissions to avoid unwanted changes. There is no need to bother admin users each time an editor wants to add a change or upload something.
- We have designed a protocol for massive uploads that uses Wiki.js options.
- Users can be updating the same pages at the same time without risk of loosing work. There exists procedures for conflict resolution. It is based on Git, the best current software for conflict management.
- Dozens of simultaneous users can work without problems. The system is designed to be scalable as it grows.
- It has a permanent history of any change that is made. With instant backup within minutes. Nothing is lost, nothing is overwritten, everyone can participate working in a secure, efficient and simultaneous environment.
- Each page has a Comments zone in which anybody with permission to comment can add suggestions or comments for the persons in charge of the page.
- There can be set different permissions for each user to avoid unwanted changes. Permissions can be defined to a very granular level, allowing that users can only edit a single page, the pages that are in a folder (usually their own folder), etc. The options for defining permissions are endless with Wiki.js, and can be changed in just seconds by admins.
Now a tricky question.
Is the creation of content related to The Urantia Book in a collaborative way important? The answer is OF COURSE YES. We can’t keep getting used to the idea of doing solo work, which is the individual effort of a single person in the shadows. The apostles were sent by Jesus in pairs. How many works related to The Urantia Book have you seen recently that are signed by two or more people?
There is an excess of zeal for copyright and authorship in the Urantia community. Revelators indiscriminately used direct or indirect quotes from dozens of human books. And they did not offer a single reference with the exception of the Bible. Revelators didn’t care about copyright. They freely used the information they had at hand to give us the Revelation and did not ask the authors of those works for permission. Why don’t we do the same with our Secondary Works?
The important thing is not who writes what, but how many people can be reached with those writings. How many people can benefit in understanding The Urantia Book?
Of course Urantiapedia is designed to have permissions. Users that wants to upload content in which they are the only allowed ones to change can do that. We can set permissions in a folder for only one user or a few users so they are the only ones that can update the pages inside that folder. A common scenario is a user that wants to upload articles or study aids to Urantiapedia but doesn’t want to allow anybody to change them. We can do that of course. Although we encourage all users to let the community to update anything.
¶ Principle III. Selflessness
We want this project to be one of altruistic service to others, especially to future generations.
We need more tan anything inspired people, not money.
- Inspired people, selfless people that wants to collaborate and to serve without waiting for a reward is the people that brings the best work. We need first of all that type of collaborators.
- Of course we need more that just Urantia Book content. For the technical aspects of the project, we expect to need at least two developers, one in the backend systems and one for the frontend part. As this is completely unrelated to the content about the book, here we expect to hire some collaborators. So money is not the important part, but is important.
- Regardless of the above, the main principle of Urantiapedia is trying to work selflessly, with a voluntary work, the same way the Paradise work is done. For this we are adding the project in different platforms that allow for easy collaboration of teams, as BlueFields, GitHub and Trello.
- Urantiapedia will not have advertisement or merchandising for fund-raising. It will be based solely on donations.
- The costs will be always maintained as low as possible. The most costly part is creation of content and that part will always be selfless and voluntary.
¶ Principle IV. Completeness
We want this website to be a center open to all revelation and to all readers, a place to find all the thoughts and ideas of those who have preceded us.
Urantiapedia aims to comprise everything related to whole Urantia Book, not just parts of it.
There are a number of websites that focuses only in part IV of The Urantia Book and makes Jesus the center of Urantia message. Jesus is not the center of The Urantia Book. Jesus became the center of the Fourth Revelation. But we must avoid that in the Fifth. The center now should be the complete revelation.
. . . Living truth teaches the truth seeker aright only when it is embraced in wholeness . . . UB 195:5.2
Urantiapedia goal is to help in the understanding of all the content in The Urantia Book, and to help in the creation of a single store for linking and gathering all the available knowledge. This is important specially for spreading the revelations in Eastern countries, in which Christ and Jesus are not usual concepts to approach religion and divinity.
On Urantiapedia all ideas are welcome, all readers are welcome, all those who work to disseminate and understand The Urantia Book are welcome.
Since this project was launched a few years ago, it has happened on several occasions that certain readers have contacted us to ask us to limit the content of Urantiapedia. To censor certain writings and to ignore the work of some people. This has not happened once or twice. This situation is beginning to occur with some frequency.
Urantiapedia wants to be a compendium of knowledge about The Urantia Book. To achieve this we cannot censor or ignore anyone or anything. If we did that we would deprive future generations of the lessons learned by all readers and students of The Urantia Book, whether they were right or wrong in their conclusions or in the content of their work. It is up to each generation, based on its lights and understanding, to filter out from this website those contents that are on the right path, and to praise those parts, criticizing with a constructive critical approach the less fortunate parts.
It is worth remembering the event that took place in Gamala, during Jesus’ preaching tour through the Decapolis. John had been in Ashtaroth and had forbidden a man to continue preaching in the name of the Master because he had never been ordained as a preacher by Jesus. And Jesus’ response is well known: “He who is not against us is for us.” UB 159:2.1
In Urantiapedia this is going to be one of our essential principles. The content of this website will seek completeness, and will NOT accept censorship, prejudice, fanaticism or arrogance. We will not accept silencing certain readers because they write things that may not be to the general taste or acceptance. We will not agree to exclude certain religious writings from Urantiapedia because they are from religions that certain readers despise. We will not agree to limit content because some people believe that its content is false and believe themselves to be in possession of the only truth. We will not do content curation either. We want Urantiapedia to be a site open to all reflections that have existed to date on the Fifth Revelation that marks an epoch.
¶ External links
- Urantiapedia Tools - GitHub project
- Urantiapedia-backup - GitHub project
- Urantia Foundation
- Blue Fields
- Wiki.js
- GitHub
- Trello
- List of languages by number of native speakers
- Urantia Foundation News