"Purim - Mi Yodeya?" book: next steps

Question

A few months ago we discussed ideas for a Purim publication and followed that up with more discussion in a dedicated chat room (which anybody is welcome to join). There were two main proposals: a book like last year's haggadah, and a smaller publication, perhaps printed on large paper and folded, suitable for use in shlach manot baskets.

I like both of these ideas and they are not incompatible -- both could be worked on. We kind of bogged down on implementation details for the latter -- how to format it, how to get them printed, etc. So, while I still hope that somebody will carry that idea forward, for this post I'd like to talk about a book like the haggadah.

The plan

As we did last year, we (= some folks in chat) propose to collect suggestions for questions, enlist the community to edit selected questions into the book's format using a markdown template to be supplied, import the results into a nicely-formatted document, and produce a PDF for download. We have some volunteers and would love to have more. We expect this to be no bigger than last year's haggadah (quite possibly smaller), and based on feedback from last year, we'd like to be a little more selective about the questions.

The first step is to collect suggestions from the community for questions to include. Please link your favorite Purim-related questions in the answer to this question. Currently we envision three sections/types of questions (let us know what we missed):

• questions about the Megillah

• questions about Purim mitzvot and customs

• Purim Torah

We'd like to get this started early so that if we need to winnow the list or go hunting for more questions in a neglected area, there's time for that to happen. Please use this post to brainstorm!

While you're looking at candidate questions, please improve them. We want the source question and its answers to be the best they can be. The only editing in the book should be book-specific considerations.

Once we've built up a list of suggestions we'll move on to the next step, book-specific editing.

Time to start editing!

We have several questions (in an answer below) that are ready for book editing, and more that are awaiting review (please help and update the answer with your assessment). It's time to start editing! Add your submissions to the following posts:

• Purim Mi Yodeya call for submissions: part 0 (Introduction)

• Purim Mi Yodeya call for submissions: part 1 (megillah)

• Purim Mi Yodeya call for submissions: part 2 (mitzvot and customs)

• Purim Mi Yodeya call for submissions: part 3 (Purim Torah)

• Purim Mi Yodeya call for submissions: adjuncts

I've set an arbitrary deadline of Wednesday, February 26 for drafts, so we have time to edit into a book, proofread that, and have the results out in enough time for y'all to share the book with all your friends. Please let me know if you see problems with any of this.

Also...

For reference, last year's analogue of this question (and from there you can use the tag to see the other posts for that project).

If you're willing to help with editing (see last year's posts for an idea of what that entails; it doesn't have to be a lot of work per person), please leave a comment on this post saying so. Feel free to delete that comment after leaving it if you don't want to commit publicly; moderators can see deleted comments.

Answer 1

Rough timeline for the rest of the project, from edited submissions on:

• Due Wednesday, February 26: Submit edited content - Community
• Due Wednesday, February 26: Write introduction and possibly chapter intros (especially for Purim Torah) - ???
• Due Wednesday, February 26: Produce back matter (glossary, bibliography, etc., if applicable) on Meta. - ???
• Due Sunday, March 2: Produce first draft of publishable book in MS Word - Isaac
• Due Tuesday, March 4: Proofread first draft and produce list of errata - TRiG and SLM
• Due Wednesday, March 5: Revise Word document to address proofreading results and produce PDF document final draft candidate - Isaac or ???
• Due Thursday, March 6: Proofread final draft candidate - ???
• Due Sunday, March 9: Make any final fixes, produce final document, and put it up on the Internet for distribution - Isaac or ???
• Monday, March 10 - Friday, March 14: Promote, promote, promote - Community

Answer 2

This answer contains the template for editing questions. It's the same as last year's, with some minor exceptions, such as URL formats.

---

Question title?

Ploni Asker asked: Question body goes here. Be sure to remove hyperlinks; you can turn them into footnotes or parenthetical comments, or remove them if they're not important enough for a print publication. Use the regular markdown formatting. (Hint: if you use the edit link on a question or answer you can cut/paste the original markdown. Don't save your edit, though -- cancel!)

For both questions and answers, feel free to edit for clarity, grammar, tangents, etc.

---

Reuven Answerer said: include the answer best (in your judgment) for this publication. Keep it focused; if there is tangential information that, while great online, seems like too much here, edit it down. Identify sources but don't include URLs (here).

If other answers cover the same territory but add something small, you can incorporate them with: Shimon Answerer added ... .

Yitzchak Answerer said: if there's a second answer that brings a different perspective, include it here. Try to keep it down to one or two answers; the result should not exceed a page in the PDF (in a reasonable font size). We want these to be short enough that people will use them, but long enough to be worth doing so.

Feel free to vary the verb -- "answered", "said", "offered an alternative", etc.

---

Sources:

• Citation that didn't work inline, e.g. a long URL
• Another one
• ...

---

Original question: Title (if significantly different from Question Title, above) and URL of source question, in the following form: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA mi.yodeya.com/q/#####

Contributors:
Names and URLs of contributors, in the following form:

• Ploni mi.yodeya.com/u/###

Use your judgment about what links should be called out. I would propose that well-known sources (e.g. Shulchan Aruch, Bavli, etc) can just be named "inline" in the answers; this is for things that don't fit that way.

---

Here's a cheat sheet to cut/paste from:

## Heading ##

__XXX asked:__ ... 

----------

__XXX said:__ ...

__XXX said:__ ...

----------

Sources:

*

----------

Original question: (AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA)  mi.yodeya.com/q/#####     

Contributors:     
- AAAAA mi.yodeya.com/u/###    
- AAAAA mi.yodeya.com/u/###    

---

Example 1

Example 2

(Examples are from the haggadah.)

Answer 3

Please link questions here:

Questions about the megillah:

• What meaning do the names of the ten sons of Haman have?

• Would Esther really have kept silent?

• How did Mordechai get *all* the Jews of Shushan to agree to fast for three days?

• Why did Esther make two parties; why not just one?

• Why do we honor Charvona, specifically?

• Why was Esther afraid to go to the King the second time, but not the first time?

• ...

Questions about mitzvot and customs:

• Different miracle-publicization strategies on Chanuka and Purim

• How to teach the Purim story to children? - consider putting this one first, since this section will immediately follow the questions about the megillah itself

• Where did the "different bracha for mishloach manos" idea come from? — IMO this is edited to the extent that it's suitable for publication if we use it at all. However, of its three answers one says "you're right, there's no halachic source, and here's proof", and the other two are mere conjecture as to a source. The question is IMO better than the answers.

• Is indirect matanot l'evyonim ok? — IMO the answer is suitable for publication as is, but the question would need to be edited to remove the Mi Yodeya reference (or at least to refer to it differently). - done, with edits to the question to remove the dependence on the link

• How did the Sages know that Jerusalem had a wall in the times of Joshua?

• Halachos of an Aveil with Mishloach Manos

• Nightime Seudah on Purim

• Can Purim Torah be heretical? - this has one good answer that revolves around an anecdote and doesn't bring halachic sources; is that ok or are we better off not addressing this question in this book without that?

• ...

Purim Torah:

• Haman was Basar b’Chalav, so how could we eat him?

• Rejecting others' friend requests on Facebook done, except for one answer. See comments.

• Surviving the zombie apocalypse? done

• What's up with this strange new hechsher? I think this works better online than it would in print, especially given the use of photos. Also, the short URL involved doesn't work [well] these days.

• On the qualifications to be queen of Persia - but see http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/13709925#13709925 et seqq

• What's an "achashvei"?

• Eating Hamentashen on Purim

• heresy on Purim (omitted one of the answers) -- and see also the serious counterpart above (can purim torah be heretical?)

• ...

Answer 4

Note that the site's license, cc by-sa 3.0, requires a link to the license itself. We should make sure to include its URL in the publication. (IANAL.)

That's http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/.