As for developers in robes, I hope you know this is an ancient tradition. Buddhist monastics have always been innovators in information technology. We are the traditional custodians of the Buddhist texts, and have always used the best available methods for preserving and disseminating them.
The first writing in India is Buddhist, and the first surviving manuscripts are Buddhist sutras. Printing was invented in China to make it easier to copy sutras, and in all probability printing with moveable type, too.
Finally, we laid the philosophical foundations for the invention of the number zero. Without us, no computers!
Oh, and thanks for adding the link to SutttaCentral. Just to let you know, though, it has already been undone. Welcome to the wonderful world of Wikipedia!
There’s links to half a dozen external sites at the bottom of the page, all of which are broken and/or of dubious relevance. But when you add an accurate, up to date link to a relevant resource, it gets taken off in an hour flat. This is exactly the experience I had on Wikipedia, and why I gave up on it. The Buddhism pages there are almost all terrible, and they’re not getting any better. This is, of course, one of the reasons I’m interested in developing a Wiki-style resource here.
Hi Ajahn Sujato, good scholar monks existed even during Buddha’s time. In this modern time, good scholar monks ought to make good use of the internet. I really wish SuttaCentral will stay and improve for many many years like accesstoinsight.org does. I actually learned Buddha’s core teachings from there and I’m sure many are like me, so I understand the importance of spreading Buddha’s teachings on the internet.
I didn’t know about those problems of Wikipedia though. By the way, have you guys done SEO? For example it might be good to have https://suttacentral.net/early-buddhist-text/ so that it’s more like to find SuttaCentral than Wikipedia when searching for “early buddhist text”. That way we can bypass ruthless Wikipedia editors? Just a thought.
Yes, we have pretty good SEO, we just looked into it a couple of weeks ago as it happens. “Early Buddhist texts” is the first phrase in our metadata description, so Google knows about it. But Wikipedia always ranks very highly in search engine rankings.