Vacation? What is this “vacation”? Here at Urantiapedia we don’t stop even in August. In fact, this past month has been by far the busiest of any month to date. In a single month we have gone from having some 10,000 pages on the web to having nearly 40,000. The reason for this is no doubt that we have started uploading content in all currently supported languages, which are 25.
The two great contents that we have uploaded this month are The Urantia Book and The Bible , both linked to each other through Paramony, that catalog of cross references between both books shown in Urantiapedia as footnotes to each chapter. Now all that content is being uploaded in all languages, including biblical abbreviations and explanatory texts.
Also, don’t forget that we’ve started including illustrations in The Urantia Book, and audio , which currently includes English, Spanish, and French. All this mountain of changes I think deserves more detailed explanations.
¶ Main Pages
- We have added in English and Spanish the main pages of each big section of Urantiapedia, so that the breadcrumb (the path that appears at the top of the web) now works when clicked on it. The parts we have right now are:
- The Urantia Book, with its cross-references to the Bible, has been uploaded in all 25 current languages in which it is translated: Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, German, Greek, English, Spanish, Estonian, Persian, Finnish, French, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Swedish, and Turkish.
- Added audio in English, Spanish and French. The English audio is from a human-read version available on the Urantia Foundation website. The version for Spanish and French has been obtained through an automated process using the IBM Watson platform. In Spanish three voices have been used (two feminine and one masculine), and in French two voices (feminine and masculine) that alternate the reading every certain number of documents. Try them please! We hope you like them! In the future, if the system is to the liking of the readers, we will be expanding the audio to many other languages, and even to more content apart from the Urantia Book.
- Images and illustrations. More than 250 have been inserted in parts I and IV. From here our thanks to Gary Tonge for giving us permission to include some of his fabulous illustrations for part I. In future weeks we will expand this graphic material to illustrate not only everything The Book of Urantia but also The Bible and the Topics. Take a look at the document on the childhood of Jesus to see how they look!
- The Bible, with its cross-references to the Urantia Book, has been uploaded in 17 languages: Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, German, Greek, English, Spanish, Estonian, Persian, Finnish, French, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, and Korean. In the coming weeks we will complete the upload of the rest of the languages, which are already prepared. At the moment the Bibles that we are uploading include the books that are considered canonical. The deuterocanonical and apocryphal will be added later, including apocryphal literature from the New Testament.
- For each book of the Bible, in each language, we have added a page where at the moment there is only a brief explanation of each book taken from Wikipedia and the index. In the future we will add more explanations, especially regarding how each book is related to The Urantia Book. Here is an example from Genesis.
- We have added a page for each author . Now when you click on the breadcrumb you can go to an author page, with some biographical information and an index of everything we have published about that author. It is a work in progress.
- Help has been extended a lot with indications for Milestone II of the project.
- The project status page has been enlarged and detailed with more tasks being undertaken and their progress. We have also included a section with a list of tasks currently in progress where anyone who wants to collaborate can see everything he or she can help with. Cheer up to join the work team! We assure you that it is a very uplifting project!
- Many biblical references have been corrected and their link to the biblical book now appears correctly.
- The process by which Paramony cross-references are added has been completely changed. Previously, JSON files were used, which were difficult to edit and translate. Markdown files are now used, much simpler, in which the part of the texts to be translated has been separated. This makes translations much faster.
- We have added a generator of the complete index (the index of all indexes) that works with all languages.
- We have added an automatic Bible verse corrector. Curiously, in the Turkish translation of the Bible that we have used (which will be available soon), some verses were empty (because the previous verse included them), which produced errors when processing them. This will no longer happen with any other translation. In fact, there were some Bibles that had repeated verses and with this corrector that has also been corrected.
And that’s it! We hope that what we are doing is useful to you. Stay tuned for future updates! We will not stop uploading content! And we encourage you to participate! You already know that to collaborate you can sign up as a volunteer in the Blue Fields project or you can contact us by email at urantiapedia@gmail.com.