Over the last few months I’ve found around 20 EBT parallels not yet listed on SC (at the time of finding them at least), but I’ve never been able to figure out how or where you’re actually meant to suggest them. I thought there might be a dedicated thread here, but the closest is this wiki post which I don’t think gets checked very often, and I can’t find anything on the Github page (though maybe that’s just due to my unfamiliarity with the site).
If there is a dedicated place for suggesting new parallels I think it should be made more conspicuous, and if there isn’t I think it should be made even if it wouldn’t necessarily be very active. Right now it seems like the process for people who aren’t intimately involved with SC is just to make posts about one-off parallels they find or mention it to someone who can add them but I think it would be far more useful for there to be a dedicated place for new parallels to be suggested.
Thank you. I still hold to what I suggested in the topic, but I will post them there for now.
Are you aware of any standards or limitations for length, detail, etc. for a comment there? Since I was going to post them in a forum post I didn’t include links to many of them, and pointed to some places with more parallels I didn’t mention.
Yes, that makes sense. Not everyone wants to file a comment there. I’m not even sure if someone is actively looking at the comments there, but I was pointed to the issue.
You can only write up to 64k characters, which is more than enough for a typical usage.
You can only write up to 64k characters, which is more than enough for a typical usage
Oh yes, I’m not planning on writing that much.
What I meant was whether or not there is some sort of assumed format or standards I should adhere to. For instance, that I should focus on making it concise, or on detailing the contents of each parallel, or easiest for someone to implement the recommended parallels (e.g by adding links to each parallel), or refrain from recommending related sources with more parallels that I haven’t actually listed or reviewed, etc.
I think (someone correct me if I’m wrong) the bigger issue currently is that there isn’t anyone actively maintaining the parallels file for Suttacentral. It’s a giant JSON file that functions as a spreadsheet associating texts together. Some of those texts are hosted on Suttacentral (like the Chinese Agamas), and some are only references. There are texts that could be added, too, but we’re long on people who want to see things done and short on people who want to do things.
I’ve told Ajahn @Sujato that I’d look over it, but I can’t really make sense of the json data’s structure. If I knew the logic I could give it a shot (unless someone more experienced wants to have at it!)
I’ve only looked at it a couple times and added a couple parallels for SA sutras in the past. It seems like each “parallels” array is like a row in a spreadsheet. Each text in the list will list the other texts as its parallels on its sutta card. Otherwise, the file is like a giant spreadsheet with thousands of rows, as far as I can tell.
The issue that I think can turn into a headache is adding parallels for texts that SuttaCentral isn’t tracking yet, like the Tibetan texts @saavaka has been find parallels in. If there’s no info for the text yet, a person will have to figure out all the places in the repo that it needs to be added for a new text to appear on the website. Basically, some documentation is needed for how to do such tasks …
