contract between the wiki and the reader, and it is what a future database
import will be written against.
Each page begins with the page name and the license. This is ignored by the reader, but is of course used to index the page.
= Genesis 1 * Please see [[nsv:license|License]] for Copyright notice and Licensing information.
Page ids are lowercase and filed by section, not in one flat namespace:
nsv:<section>:<book>_<chapter> ex. nsv:torah:genesis_1
Sections follow the Tanakh division: torah, neviim, treiasar, ketuvim, with the New Testament under gospel. The wiki also carries apocrypha, apostolic, christian, christian_other, christianb and ntapocrypha, which the reader's canon does not yet include.
Psalms is filed singular – psalm_23, titled “Psalm 23”. Because of this the reader cannot rebuild a chapter's title from the book name; it takes the title from the page's own == heading. Get that heading wrong and the reader shows an empty chapter.
== Genesis 1 === The First Book of Moses, called Genesis. 1 In the beginning[a] God created the heavens and the earth. 2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and a wind[b] from God moved over the waters. === The First Day 3 And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light.
Three heading levels are in play inside a chapter:
| level | meaning |
|---|---|
== Genesis 1 | the chapter |
=== The First Day | a section within the chapter |
==== … | a subsection – a lesser form of the section heading |
Both section and subsection headings render, the subsection a step below its section. Use ==== where a passage subdivides a section rather than starting a new one; do not use it merely because a section feels minor. (The day headings in Genesis 1 were written as ==== and were really sections, so they were moved up.)
'interpreted by the reader' means paragraphs are decided by headings: === The First Day starts a new paragraph, and a blank heading (=== or ==== alone) is invisible but still starts one. Both levels behave the same way.
Other formatting rules:
c and d appear as superscripts where they sit. They need not link anywhere yet.text renders as italics in verse text.After the reading section come the apparatus sections, each a second-level heading:
== Notes == Cross Reference == Commentary == Rashi
Order matters. The reader shows them in the order the page gives them, not in a fixed order of its own. Notes and cross-references appear in the reader's right-hand column; commentary and Rashi below the text.
Spelling matters. Write == Cross Reference – singular, one space, no hyphen. Cross-Reference was written on two pages and its content was silently dropped for years.
Empty sections are skipped. A heading with nothing under it renders nothing, so there is no need to write the skeleton out in advance. == Concordance currently appears on 535 pages with no content on any of them.
Within an apparatus section, content is one of two kinds, and a section may hold both.
Verse-keyed entries open with a marker naming the verse:
== Notes [1] BERESHEIT -- 7225 also means "choice" as well as "first" ... [2] a wind from God -- In Hebrew, 'Ruach Ha-Kodesh' ... [6f] 'a firmament' is h.7549 ...
The marker may carry a letter ([6f], [30h]). The letter identifies which footnote marker in the verse the entry belongs to, matching the [f] in the verse text. It is not a verse number: 6f is a key in its own right.
Entries are shown in the order the page gives them – the reader does not sort them – so write them in verse order.
Book-level material is introduced by a third-level heading and belongs to the work rather than to any verse:
== Commentary === Goals of the Commentary Section The goal of the commentary section is twofold ...
A heading that opens with a verse marker is a verse-keyed entry written as a heading, not book-level material. The words after the marker are the lemma being commented on:
=== [2] "and on the seventh day God ended..."
Loose prose before any heading or marker is treated as book-level and is intentional.
Currently free text, one line per verse marker:
[2] Isaiah 45:7 [2a] Genesis 8:1, Deuteronomy 4:15-18 [26] Leviticus 11:44-45, Leviticus 19:2, 1 Peter 1:16
Shorthand in use, which a human resolves from context and software cannot:
18:19 – chapter:verse in the same bookv.20 – verse in the same chapter4:15-18 – a verse rangeAbout 30% of citations are written in full. Prefer the full form – book, chapter, verse – on anything new. Full citations are what will let the reader show a passage's inbound references, which the wiki cannot do at all.
Each division has a prose page the reader shows when a division is chosen without a book:
nsv:<section>:start ex. nsv:neviim:start
Torah is the exception: it has no start page and uses nsv:torah:Torah.
These pages are ordinary prose. The reader understands headings, nested lists, links, bold, italics and horizontal rules. Links to a chapter (nsv:neviim:Joshua) resolve into the reader; anything with no counterpart renders as plain text rather than a dead link.
Provided by the nsv wiki plugin, so they render on the wiki and in the reader alike. They name what a passage is, not how it should look – which is why they survive a move to a database, where an “indent” would not.
| tag | meaning |
|---|---|
<poetry><pv>…</pv></poetry> | Hebrew parallelism. Line breaks are kept, so a paired line may be written indented. |
<citation><pv>…</pv></citation> | Scripture quoted within scripture – the Old Testament cited in the New. Not for ordinary speech, which quotation marks already handle. |
<letter><pv>…</pv></letter> | An inset document. |
<decree><pv>…</pv></decree> | A proclamation; the formal sibling of a letter. |
| Starts a paragraph here. No closing tag – a paragraph ends where the next one or the next heading begins. |
Selah | The liturgical marker. Renders as Selah, set aside from the text. |
| A line break. Same as DokuWiki's \\; both work. |
may sit immediately before a verse number, which is the usual way to write it:
10 And God called the dry land "earth" ... <p>11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth green herbs ... 12 And the earth brought forth green herbs ...
The wrapping constructs are pure markup: it does not matter where you put them. They may open before a verse number, after it, inside a verse, or span several verses – the reader lifts them out and wraps the verses they cover.
<poetry><pv>1 The LORD is my shepherd;\\ I shall not want.</pv><pv>2 He maketh me to lie down in green pastures.</pv></poetry>
A construct left unclosed is closed at the end of the chapter rather than swallowing the notes below it.
The wrapping tags may also enclose whole verses or sit inside one:
== Psalm 23 1 <poetry><pv>The LORD is my shepherd;\\ I shall not want.</pv></poetry>
Verses may share a line. 3 And God said … 4 And God saw … 5 And God called … is read as three verses, so a paragraph can be written as a paragraph rather than one verse per line. A number is only treated as a verse marker when it is the next verse in sequence – which is what keeps “Noah was 500 years old” from being read as verse 500.
Three implementations share this grammar: the wiki plugin (wiki-plugin/nsv/), the reader (nsv_blocks() in php/nsvlib.php) and this document. Change one, change all three.
A small set of inline tags is permitted anywhere text appears:
''<b>'' ''<strong>'' ''<i>'' ''<em>'' ''<u>'' ''<s>'' ''<sup>'' ''<sub>'' ''<small>'' ''<mark>''
Everything else is shown as text rather than interpreted – attributes included. <b onclick=“…”> is not bold, it is the literal characters, so no page can carry a script or a link out of the wiki into the reader.
DokuWiki's own ... for lemmas. Do not add new ones – write the tags directly.
Note DokuWiki's htmlok setting is off, so the wiki escapes raw HTML even where the reader renders it. Enabling it would allow scripts from anyone who can edit; the allowlist above gives the formatting without the risk.
The Blockquote plugin is installed and claims these. Do not use them for NSV constructs – it will handle them, not us, and no warning is given:
''<blockquote>'' ''<q>'' ''<quote>'' ''<QUOTE>'' ''<cite>''
<blockquote> and <cite> are genuinely useful and work as that plugin intends. <q>, <quote> and <QUOTE> are its inline-quotation tags; they are not used on this wiki, but they cannot be turned off without disabling the whole plugin, so they stay claimed. That is why the NSV construct for quoted scripture is not called <quote>.
Before adding any new NSV tag, check nothing else claims it. A collision is silent: the other plugin simply renders it and the NSV meaning is lost.
The reader ignores anything not listed above – tables, images, embedded HTML, plugins. It will not error, but the content will not appear.
This format is the contract between the wiki and the reader. Every discrepancy found so far cost content silently rather than loudly:
Cross-Reference spelt with a hyphen – content dropped==== subheadings – parsed and then discarded across 889 pages=== heading with no trailing space – paragraph break lostIf the text later moves into a database, this document is the specification the import will be written against. Anything not described here is at risk of being lost in that move.