Talk:Kehilla

Please review the links to Kehilla
Kehilla is currently the second most linked-to disambiguation page on Wikipedia. Please can a subject expert sort out the links? I suspect that most should go straight to Qahal, but I don't know enough about the topic to be confident of changing them myself. Certes (talk) 18:58, 8 December 2009 (UTC)
 * I'd rather think the renaming to Qahal was a mistake: in the modern period (Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and after) the sources in English use "kehilla" and not "qahal", a term from the Antique ("biblical") period. As I am not interested in the pre-XXth century history, I won't begin a discussion on the topics, but the "kehilla (modern)" article I recently created should have been named "kehilla", as it is the most common meaning, and the disambiguation page should bear another name. But I won't begin a renaming war about it.--Pylambert (talk) 22:27, 8 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the swift reply. I'm not knowledgeable enough to have an opinion about how these pages should be named.  Is Kehilla likely to remain a dab?  If not, where do you think the existing links to Kehilla should point, or do they need to be examined individually? Certes (talk) 23:07, 8 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Actually, I just went through several pages where there should be a link towards kehilla, and I couldn't find it in most of them, so there's a mystery to be solved... As a matter of fact, I found the explanation: someone has systematically linked "Jewish Community" to "Kehilla" with a hidden link "Kehilla|Jewish community" or "Kehilla|Jewish communities". If a bot could replace all these occurrences by suppressing both "Kehilla|" and the brackets indicating an internal link, it would already considerably reduce the bad links. The correct definition of kehilla as used in the historical literature in English is given in the Shtadlan article: "Typically, a Jewish community (kehila) governed its own internal affairs. The interactions with the outside society, such as tax collection and enforcement of various restrictions and compulsions imposed on the community, were arranged by an internal governing board (kehilla)."--Pylambert (talk) 23:19, 8 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Ah, so those links shouldn't be there at all, because the term in blue refers to a whole community but kehilla (modern), qahal, etc. describe a council? That could be a job for AWB or similar if one of the subject experts has access to it.  (I don't.) Alternatively, if someone can specify the exact edits, we could ask at WP:Bot requests or WP:Computer help desk. Certes (talk) 23:46, 8 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Shouldn't we wait for other opinions before asking for a bot ? I just read (with the google translator) the Hebrew wiki article, it deals mostly with the Jewish communities, with only a section on the communal institution. Indeed, kehilla originally just means "Jewish community" in Hebrew, but it clearly has another meaning in English, more restricted to the institution, "kehilla", "kehilla council", "kehilla executive", "kehilla president" etc. Also the search in Google books shows the current meaning, "Kehilla is the traditional Jewish term for the organic Jewish community." etc. A specific page on the Jewish ethnic vocabulary is badly needed anyway, with e.g. edot, shevatim, as on the French wiki, fr:Vocabulaire de l'islam and fr:Vocabulaire politique arabe (I created this last one in 2005 and it hasn't changed much since then, the purpose was to list several Arabic terms used in a political context in the French-speaking media, including those in the countries with a strong French-Arabic bilingual tradition: Morocco, Algeria, Lebanon etc.) --Pylambert (talk) 00:07, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

I'd naively hoped this may be a matter of mechanically fixing a couple of hundred links. Thanks to your helpful replies, I see there is much more to it. I'm happy to help with the donkey work once a consensus appears, but for now I think I'd better leave this one for those who know the subject. Apologies if I've stirred up any trouble! Certes (talk) 00:37, 10 December 2009 (UTC)
 * I think the bot idea was the good one, if there are indeed "a couple of hundred links". But here's no hurry, let's wait for some other opinions. --Pylambert (talk) 10:13, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

OK, I asked for a bot, it has cleaned most of the wrong links, I've corrected several others, there are still a 40-odd to be cleaned. --Pylambert (talk) 23:44, 14 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Thank you, that's much better! That bot will be useful elsewhere; do you have a link to it please? Certes (talk) 00:20, 15 December 2009 (UTC)
 * I don't know, as the bad links disappeared I figured it was by a bot, but for me it's somewhat like magics, I don't understand how it works, maybe it's like is the Magician of Oz, there's a human being inside the bot ? :-) --Pylambert (talk) 09:41, 15 December 2009 (UTC)
 * The human inside is Woohookitty, who manages several edits per minute using WikiCleaner. Certes (talk) 21:41, 15 December 2009 (UTC)