V'dibarta Bam

James Jenkins

14:23

I am asking some questions about early times in Jewish and related religions. Starting here the obvious reason that this is the foundation of much religion around the world. I am working to word them with all due respect to your beliefs, should I make an error in wording or presentation, please let me know.

4

Shokhet

15:11

@JamesJenkins But of course :) .....from what I've seen from your questions until now, they look fine.

Monica Cellio

@JamesJenkins thank you for your care in asking your questions (which look fine to me so far). Thanks especially for showing your prior work, e.g. linking to questions you've already investigated. And welcome to Mi Yodeya!

Scimonster

16:05

I've indentified around 20 questions that could benefit from the creation of a schach tag. Anyone agree?

Double AA

@JamesJenkins You may find meta.judaism.stackexchange.com/q/32/759 interesting.

3

Shokhet

@Scimonster I was actually also thinking about that....I figure if it didn't already exist, then there weren't enough questions for it. If you wanna make it, then go for it :)

(who knows, you might make Taxonomist someday ;-)

Scimonster

@Shokhet i keep trying to look for possibilities:)

Shokhet

@Scimonster :)

(I think I'll make it sometime this week with how-to....:D)

Scimonster

@Shokhet Good luck. ;)

Shokhet

16:11

@Scimonster By the way.....two things about the "i" in the middle of a sentence.....

(1) I apologize if I've edited it out of your posts in the past ( I think I have but can't find it ); I'll try to be more careful of it in the future.

(2) What makes you think that it's "obsolete"?

Scimonster

@Shokhet Don't worry about it if you've done so in the past

@Shokhet I read that it was originally capitalized so that it wouldn't get lost in the middle of a sentence. Way back when, it didn't have a dot, so it could easily be mistaken for an extra line. Now that it has a dot, we can lowercase it.

Double AA

@Scimonster If you do then please try and write up a basic tag wiki/excerpt

Scimonster

@DoubleAA Yes, of course.

Double AA

(That is not a requirement for making new tags but I think it is good practice.)

Shokhet

@Scimonster Interesting.....never heard that before. Thanks for explaining!

James Jenkins

16:17

@DoubleAA thanks for the link, that was helpful.

Double AA

65

Q: Why should the first person pronoun 'I' always be capitalized?

Why should we capitalize first person pronoun 'I' even if it does not appear in the beginning of a sentence? Why it is not the case for other pronouns?

Scimonster

@DoubleAA Good find.

Shokhet

@DoubleAA Thanks for that :)

@Scimonster "England is where the capital “I” first reared its dotless head." english.stackexchange.com/a/7987/74434

@Scimonster In the retagging of questions with the new schach, who thinks we should leave the tag sukkah on questions that primarily ask about the halachos of schach? Example (see comments):

5

Q: Beam for s'chach with wood glue + embedded screws

Let's assume that there is a lechatchila to not use metal object that are mekabel tumah (susceptible to tumah) for something that supports the s'chach ("maamid"), which can be avoided by using something that supports something that supports s'chach ("maamid d'maamid"); but if it was used there is...

halacha sukkah tamei-tahor-ritual-purity schach

Scimonster

16:33

@Shokhet While yes, it is also about the sukkah, it seems to me that if the main point of the question is the schach, not the sukkah, it should be tagged as such.

Shokhet

@Scimonster Think about the guy who just finished learning all of hilchos sukkah in [MB, SA, Chayei Adam, KSA, fill-in-the-blank-halacha-sefer] .....why not let him find all sukkah questions under one tag?

Scimonster

@Shokhet For that matter, why not tag anything with sukkah with sukkot as well?

Shokhet

@Scimonster Of course you should also tag it with schach, but I think that it also has to do with the sukkah

@Scimonster I've seen that done, a lot, but I don't think that is correct.....sukkot should be reserved for questions about the chag -- hakhel, special tefillos, different things like that.

That's just my opinion, though.

Scimonster

@Shokhet Think also about how shabbat works - it also serves as a yom tov tag.

Shokhet

@Scimonster For questions that deal with the halachos that are the same between them, sure.

Scimonster

16:38

@Shokhet But then we can't find yom tov questions all under one tag.

It's the same concern.

Shokhet

@Scimonster For questions that deal with how Yomim Tovim work (but have no overlap with Shabbos), like symbology and meaning, should go under a Yom Tov tag.....questions that overlap with Shabbos should always get both tags?

Scimonster

@Shokhet That's what would make sense to me, but it was decided otherwise long ago.

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Q: The shabbat-yom-tov tag

We have the following tags: shabbat, 248 questions yom-tov, 48 questions shabbat-yomtov, 7 questions One question tagged with the shabbat-yomtov also has either of the others: and it has both. Sixteen other questions are also tagged with both shabbat and yom-tov. What are all these tags for?...

discussion status-completed specific-tag

Double AA

16:56

@Shokhet The tag wikis can recommend other places to look. If someone just finished the entire Talmud they might want all the different masechtot together too, no?

Shokhet

@Scimonster @DoubleAA GTG, sorry!

Monica Cellio

17:55

@Scimonster I'd prefer that the questions about one particular part of the sukkah continue to also be tagged sukkah. I realize we aren't entirely consistent about tags and sub-tags; our tags grew this way, and also sometimes the limit of 5 tags on a question gets in the way. Either way, it'd be good if the tag wiki for sukkah pointed to other related tags.

@Shokhet I agree with this; sukkah is about the structure, and sukkot is about the chag.

Scimonster

18:12

@MonicaCellio Ok then, that's fine. I won't remove sukkah from more that i do.

Isaac Moses

19:30

@MonicaCellio The basic issue is that there's no such formal thing as tag hierarchy (or stemming), where you could, for example, tag something with schach, and it would automatically also come up in searches for sukkah and sukkot. In its absence, I'd be in favor of tagging schach questions with schach and any other relevant tags, and if there's space in the five left over, add sukkah and then sukkot.

2

... it would be cool to have meta-groups, either automatically (as on Flickr) or manually created, so that when you click on any of the three aforementioned tags, you get a link to a "special for Sukkot" group (these three plus lulav-etrog-arba-minim) and a link to a "Sukkot as a holiday" group (sukkot, yom-tov, shmini-atzeres, hallel, musaf, birchas-kohanim or something)

... maybe it would be worthwhile to curate such group links in the relevant tag wikis and/or in a catalog on Meta.

Monica Cellio

19:49

@IsaacMoses anybody interested in resuming work on this?

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Q: Systematic list of tags

As an answer, or perhaps multiple answers, to this question, should be a hierarchy of the tags used on the main site. Here's a bare list, excluding synonyms, with * meaning the tag has been incorporated into an answer: * adultery * agriculture * aishes-chayil * am-yisrael-jewish-nation * anim...

discussion faq tags

@IsaacMoses yeah, I've been wanting tag hierarchies for a long time. Our Shabbat cluster is particularly frustrating that way.

Isaac Moses

@MonicaCellio Oh, right; that. Yes, that could be a good foundation for / component of what I have in mind.

@MonicaCellio "cluster" is the term I was stumbling toward. Thanks

Monica Cellio

@IsaacMoses yes, clusters.

All, while updating that meta post is helpful, also please add links to related tags in tag wikis. Let's help the casual tag-surfer find the other topics he's also probably interested in.

Shokhet

21:53

@IsaacMoses Maybe make a feature request on Meta? That sounds like it would be very useful, especially for cases such as these.

Anyone think that we need a tag for keilim-purity when we already have the one for all tumah/taharah questions? See most recent edit here

And comment

Isn't there a mishna in keilim about nails and broomsticks? On a related note, tags about different areas of taharos might be useful — Yitzchak 5 hours ago

Double AA

22:53

@Shokhet I think keilim-purity is a poor name for it. 'Keilim' doesn't even mean 'purity'.

msh210

23:24

(I've not caught up on back-read here, but...) @MonicaCellio out of curiosity, did you get a your-question-has-a-new-answer ping for judaism.stackexchange.com/a/46244?

msh210

23:42

This seems to be asking for references to someone irrelevant to Judaism in "Jewish texts/records", which I assume means texts written and records kept by Jews (not those that have to do with Judaism). That would put it squarely off-topic. But maybe I'm misunderstanding it? — msh210 ♦ 15 secs ago

James Jenkins

I am trying to figure out how to ask "if Avraham invented Judaism" without being offensive. The question how old is Judaism? suggest that the reliable references for the existence of your religion is around 600 BCE,

I have heard that the only other monotheistic religion of ancient times was RA with some supposition that Avraham borrowed from that. I would prefer not to toss the question out that bluntly, so any suggestions for an approach would be welcome.

msh210

@JamesJenkins Do the answers to that question not address your question as well?

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