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  "path": "/2026/02/18/yak-shaving-part-3-pari-zelah-and-wikipedia/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-02-18T01:36:43.000Z",
  "site": "https://aharoni.wordpress.com",
  "tags": [
    "Queerty",
    "Love on the Spectrum",
    "EMD F40PH",
    "MBTA Subway",
    "MBTA Commuter Rail",
    "Zelah, Judea",
    "I added the Hebrew spelling to the English Wikipedia article",
    "fixed it",
    "I fixed that, too",
    "village with that name in Cornwall",
    "Akademi Kernewek",
    "Wikipedia, a Jamaican Jew, and Yak Shaving",
    "Yak Shaving, part 2: Wikidata, Busiati col Pesto Trapanese, and Other Slow Food"
  ],
  "textContent": "There’s a story behind every Wikipedia edit. This is just one out of many millions. It starts from an award for LGBT reality TV stars and ends with Biblical Hebrew vowels and a village in Cornwall.\n\nApparently, there’s a thing called “Queerties”, an award given out by the Queerty magazine to LGBT media personalities, and one of the categories is “Reality TV star”.\n\n  I don’t know who any of these people are—except Pari Kim\n\nI don’t follow the LGBT culture very deeply, so I wasn’t familiar with the Queerties before today, but I did watch all the episodes of _Love on the Spectrum_ , and I do follow some of its participants on social media. And one of them, Pari Kim, is a nominee.\n\n  I wish I could tell you the model name of the locomotive on Pari’s T-shirt, but I’m not nearly as big an expert in MBTA rolling stock as Pari is. Perhaps it’s EMD F40PH, but I’m not certain. I should probably buy me one of those T-shirts.\n\nPari is awesome for a lot of reasons, and the main ones are that like me, she lives in New England, and like me, she loves trains. Especially the MBTA Subway and the MBTA Commuter Rail, colloquially known in this area as “the T”.\n\nI found out about this because I follow Pari on Instagram, but another name in the nominees list caught my eye: “Zelah”. It sounded Hebrew. It is quite common in the United States and some other traditionally Christian countries to give children obscure Biblical names. I got curious and found that it’s not a name of a person, but of a place. The English Wikipedia has an article about it: Zelah, Judea. Wikipedia articles usually have the native spelling of foreign names, but surprisingly this English Wikipedia article didn’t have a Hebrew spelling.\n\nI looked it up in the Hebrew Bible, and added the spelling to the English Wikipedia: צֵלַע. It perplexed me a bit that it’s spelled with -h in the end, even though the original name doesn’t end with ח or ה, which are usually transliterated as h, but with ע, which is usually not transliterated in the end of the word, as in Joshua, Bathsheba, and Elisha. I should explore why is it like that.\n\n \n\nAnyway,  I added the Hebrew spelling to the English Wikipedia article. But I wanted to be more thorough, and I checked in which other language there’s an article about this Biblical place. The only such language was Russian.\n\nThe Russian article was more curious. It did have Hebrew spelling in the beginning, but it was written backwards! The article’s author probably didn’t really know Hebrew and tried to write it correctly from right to left, but got doubly confused. I  fixed it, but then I noticed that the name appears in the article again, also written backwards and making an incorrect claim: that a variant of this name “Zelah Eleph” is written in one word in Hebrew. It may be written as one word in some ancient translations, but not in Hebrew—it’s definitely two words in the Hebrew text. So  I fixed that, too.\n\nAs I was writing this blog post, I double-checked the Hebrew spelling of that name in the Bible and realized that I actually wrote the vowel signs incorrectly: it’s not צֵלַע, but צֵלָע. So I fixed them yet again.\n\nAs a little follow-up, I checked for other people and things named “Zelah” in Wikipedia. I didn’t find much, but there’s a village with that name in Cornwall. Wikipedia says that the origin of this name is uncertain, and the Biblical place is one possibility. I didn’t have much to add to that, but I did notice that the articles mentions Akademi Kernewek, the organization for the Cornish language, and there was no link from the article about the village to the article about the organization. So I added it. It’s a tiny thing, but it will make finding the article about the organization a little bit easier.\n\nPeople sometimes wonder why on Earth people invest their free time in writing about obscure things on Wikipedia. Here’s my motivation: I learned about a Hebrew name that I didn’t know, and I had to dig through Biblical verses, concordances, and dictionaries to find its correct spelling. Now that I added the Hebrew names to the Wikipedia articles, it will be a bit easier to learn for the next person who is curious about it. Making it easier for other people to learn things that interested me is my motivation.\n\n* * *\n\nIn case you haven’t figured it out yet, there’s another thing in which Pari Kim is like me—we’re both autistic. I figured it out myself only very recently. The next post on this blog will probably be about that.\n\n* * *\n\nPrevious “Yak Shaving” posts:\n\n  *  Wikipedia, a Jamaican Jew, and Yak Shaving\n  *  Yak Shaving, part 2: Wikidata, Busiati col Pesto Trapanese, and Other Slow Food\n\n",
  "title": "Yak Shaving, part 3: Pari, Zelah, and Wikipedia"
}