The manual that answers

Dunyazad needed a manual. The tool for holding stories together proved to be the right tool for holding a manual together. Thus, Tawaddud was born.

Everything new needs a manual, and Dunyazad is no exception. Readers need to know how to access it and choose the language; writers need to know how to submit a story and what happens next; those who certify need to know what to check and how to sign. Pages to write, and some videos, because some things are best understood by watching.

The question was where to put them.

The three wrong boxes

The first idea was to put them among the stories: a “help” section within Dunyazad. But a manual amidst the stories is a road sign in the middle of a forest: useful, and out of place. Dunyazad is made for reading stories, and everything inside it should be.

The second was YouTube for videos and a PDF for the rest. It works, and everyone does it. But a PDF answers questions in the order they were thought of by the writer, and whoever arrives has only one question, theirs, which is in chapter nine and depends on something said in chapter two. And a video on YouTube carries with it the cookies and scripts of someone else, on a site that promises not to follow anyone.

The third step was to ask an assistant. But an assistant who hasn't read the Dunyazad manual – and no one has, because it didn't exist – still answers, with the same confident voice. When it comes to things that aren't written anywhere, invention is the only option.

The tool that already existed

That's when a simple idea came to mind. Dunyazad isn't a container for stories: it's a tool for holding texts together. Every person, place, object or idea has a stable identity; every story declares what it hooks onto; the links have weight; and anyone who asks something of the site's assistant receives an answer taken from the documents, with the document cited.

A manual is the text that needs all of this the most. Its “people, places and ideas” are the concepts: the tag, the draft, the certifier, the source language. Every page must be complete, like a story, because whoever opens it has a question and doesn't want a chapter. And from every page you must be able to see what comes before, what comes after, what seems distant and depends on the same rule.

With little expense, the same tool that supports the stories could support the manual. All it took was giving it another name and another door.

The slave who answered

The name comes from where Dunyazad comes from. In One Thousand and One Nights there is a story without genies and without lamps: a young man from Baghdad squanders his inheritance and is left with only one thing, a slave, Tawaddud, whom his father had educated in every science. It is she who tells him what to do: take me to the caliph and ask for ten thousand dinars.

Harun al-Rashid does not pay on trust. He summons the scholars of the court, one to know, and each interrogates her for an entire day: the jurist, the doctor, the astronomer, the philosopher, the chess master. She answers each of them, and in the end she asks a question to which no one knows the answer. The caliph pays, and the young man has his fortune again.

The story says two things that a manual should keep in mind. That knowledge is worth it when it answers the question that is asked, not in the order in which it was learned. And that the caliph tested before paying: an answer is worth it if someone answers it.

Tawaddud

Tawaddud is the Dunyazad manual, in the form of a website. Documents and videos on how to read, how to write, how to certify, one per topic, each complete. The concepts are connected to each other and can be traversed: from «the badge» you get to «who certifies», and from there to «what happens to a rejected story», without going through an index. The pages are written by those who built what they describe, with a name and a date, and change when Dunyazad changes.

And when in Dunyazad, Shitsuji is asked "how do I…", the answer comes from here: from the right page, cited. Not from what a model remembers having read somewhere.

What could come next

Tawaddud was born for one thing only, and we would do it even if it served only that purpose. But a new tool opens roads that were not sought. The need from which it was born is not just ours: anyone who builds something has a manual to write and the same three wrong boxes to put it in. If anyone needs a place made like this for their manual, the door is the same.