Attribution & data-freshness request from Quranpedia.net (the data source)
Assalamu alaikum,
I'm the maintainer of Quranpedia.net. From our API logs, this dataset (and other Quran Lab datasets) appears to have been built by harvesting our public API (api.quranpedia.net) — e.g. the quranlab-quranpedia-coordinate-witness/1.0 requests on 2026-07-29.
We are genuinely happy to see this content reach more people — spreading it is the mission of the project. But we have two important requests:
1. Attribution. Please credit Quranpedia.net explicitly as the data source in the dataset card (and in the other Quran Lab datasets derived from it), with a link to https://quranpedia.net. The underlying scholarly content — tafsir texts, translations, qiraat data — was collected, structured and corrected by our team over years, and the card currently doesn't mention the source at all.
2. The API was not meant for one-shot scraping and republication. Our content is continuously updated and corrected: Quranic ḍabṭ (diacritics), qiraʾat details and tafsir texts receive fixes regularly. A static scrape frozen at harvest time will silently drift from the corrected text — and for Quranic content, redistributing an outdated copy at dataset scale is a serious problem for every downstream user. If you republish, please (a) state the snapshot date clearly in the card, and (b) re-sync regularly.
Better yet: contact us. We are planning official versioned dumps (with checksums and changelogs) exactly for this use case — that would give you a cleaner, always-current source instead of millions of API calls.
You can reach us at quranpedia.help@gmail.com.
Jazakum Allahu khayran.
Assalamu alaikum,
Jazakum Allahu khayran for reaching out and for the considerable work your team has done on Quranpedia.
We have reviewed your message carefully and have also gone back through the QuranLab source documentation and provenance structure. We would like to clarify an important distinction that may explain what you observed in the API logs.
Quranpedia is explicitly acknowledged in our source documentation. It is currently listed under “Consulted, but never quoted”, rather than among the projects from which corpus text was reproduced.
For example:
The current source record states:
Quranpedia — It told us where one commentary's passages belong, and confirmed the school of two authors. Not a word of it is in the data.
This distinction is intentional.
The API access identified in your logs, including the user-agent quranlab-quranpedia-coordinate-witness/1.0, was used as a coordinate / verification witness, not as the source from which the corpus text itself was reproduced.
Our source documentation distinguishes between two different kinds of use:
Sources whose text or structured material actually forms part of a corpus, and
sources that were consulted to verify attribution, authorship, classification, passage boundaries, or other scholarly metadata.
Quranpedia is documented in the latter category where applicable.
For further context, the current islamic-corpus-graph is not gathered directly from Quranpedia or from another external website. It is derived from our own underlying corpora:
Those underlying corpora in turn document the projects on which each part actually rests.
Across QuranLab these include, depending on the corpus and work, projects and institutions such as Tanzil Project, QuranEnc, Tafsir Center for Quranic Studies, Quranic Universal Library (QUL), OpenITI, Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı, Quranic Arabic Corpus, fawazahmed0/quran-api, fawazahmed0/hadith-api, Open-Hadith-Data, HadeethEnc, EveryAyah, MP3Quran, quran-align and others.
We name these projects deliberately and with gratitude.
For us, attribution is not advertising. It is provenance, gratitude and amanah.
QuranLab is a volunteer effort. We do not consider the Qur'an, classical tafsir, translations, hadith collections, or the work of scholars and digitisation projects to be “ours.” Our contribution is in gathering compatible resources, checking them, aligning them, preserving provenance, structuring them for modern use, and trying to make reliable material easier to reach.
The larger purpose is also important to us.
Our aim is that the Qur'an and authentic Islamic sources should be available faithfully, at high quality, with traceable sources, and across as many languages as reasonably possible.
More and more people now encounter religious material indirectly through search engines, retrieval systems, datasets and AI systems. We would much rather see those systems encounter carefully sourced, attributable and reviewed Qur'anic material than arbitrary copies collected from unknown places on the internet, where errors can be repeated at enormous scale.
So the objective is not to promote QuranLab, Quranpedia, or any other platform as a brand.
The objective is for the truth and the source material to travel faithfully, while the people and projects that helped preserve and transmit it remain properly acknowledged.
This is also why our source files explicitly distinguish between the original work, its author or scholar, the digital project through which material was obtained, and resources that were merely consulted.
Regarding your freshness concern: if Quranpedia is only being used as a verification/reference source and none of its text is being redistributed, then a static Quranpedia text snapshot is not what is being published in those cases.
However, we take your concern seriously.
If there is any specific QuranLab config, file, field, tafsir text, translation, qira'at record, or other material that you believe actually reproduces Quranpedia data, please point us to it. We will review it immediately against its provenance.
If we find that Quranpedia material has in fact been reproduced directly, we are happy to do whichever is appropriate:
- correct or expand the attribution;
- record the proper snapshot/version;
- migrate to your official versioned dumps and checksums;
- establish an appropriate update/synchronisation process; or
- remove the relevant material promptly if you would prefer that it not be redistributed.
We have no interest in retaining anyone's material against their wishes.
The same principle already appears throughout QuranLab: if a rights holder or source maintainer identifies something that should be removed or corrected, we welcome the correction and honour a removal request promptly.
We also very much appreciate your offer regarding official versioned Quranpedia dumps. For any future case where Quranpedia data itself is needed, a maintained upstream release with versions, checksums and changelogs would be far preferable to repeated API collection.
If you can share the intended redistribution terms and your preferred attribution wording for those dumps, we would be happy to incorporate them into our provenance system.
We believe our intentions are very close: to help Qur'anic knowledge reach people accurately and faithfully.
If we can improve the way Quranpedia's contribution is described anywhere in our documentation, please tell us and we will gladly correct it.
Jazakum Allahu khayran for your work and for bringing this to our attention.
Wa alaikum assalam wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh,
Jazakum Allahu khayran for the detailed clarification and for the care you are putting into provenance, attribution, and making reliable Islamic resources available to more people.
We really appreciate the work you are doing at QuranLab, and we are happy to support and help wherever we can. Our goals are very much aligned, and we would be glad to cooperate on anything that can improve the quality, accuracy, and accessibility of the data.
Just to clarify our main concern: we do not have an issue with the data being redistributed or made available as datasets. On the contrary, we are happy for the material to reach more people and be useful in other projects.
The reason we ask projects that redistribute Quranpedia data as a database or dataset to mention Quranpedia as the source is mainly because our data is continuously being reviewed, corrected, and updated.
If someone downloads a copy from another dataset without knowing where it originally came from, they may continue using an older version without realizing that corrections or improvements have since been published upstream. Clear source attribution gives downstream users a way to return to Quranpedia, check for updates, and obtain the latest version of the data.
So for us, attribution is not primarily about ownership or promotion. It is also part of maintaining a reliable update path for the data, especially when dealing with Qur'anic texts and Islamic scholarly material where accuracy is particularly important.
We also appreciate your willingness to use official versioned dumps once they become available. We would be very happy to work with you on this and can help with data formats, versions, checksums, changelogs, or anything else that would make integration with QuranLab easier.
Please feel free to reach out to us anytime. We would be glad to cooperate and support your work.
Jazakum Allahu khayran for your kind response and for the beneficial work you are doing.
More importantly, we pray that Allah keeps sincerity at the heart of all of this work.
May Allah accept the efforts of everyone who serves His Book, reward every scholar, editor, developer, reviewer, reciter, translator and contributor who has helped preserve and transmit it, and forgive our shortcomings and mistakes.
May Allah make us all humble servants of the Qur'an, grant us sincerity in its service, protect us from error, and allow these efforts to become a means by which His words reach people faithfully, accurately and beneficially.
There is a beautiful supplication in the Risale-i Nur that expresses this intention better than we could:
اللهم وفّقنا وإياهما وأمثالهما من إخواننا لخدمة القرآن والإيمان كما تحب وترضى بحق من أنزلتَ عليه القرآن
“O Allah, grant us, them, and our brothers like them success in serving the Qur'an and faith in the manner that You love and are pleased with, for the sake of the one upon whom You revealed the Qur'an.”
Amin.
May Allah make us among those whom He employs in the service of His Book; not as owners of this service, but as its servants. May He grant us sincerity, correctness and steadfastness, make every sincere contribution a sadaqah jariyah, and never deprive us of the honour of serving the Qur'an because of our shortcomings.
May He unite everyone working sincerely for the Qur'an and Islamic knowledge upon goodness, mutual respect and cooperation, and place barakah in all of our efforts.
We look forward to cooperating with you, inshaAllah.
Jazakum Allahu khayran once again for your kindness, your work, and your sincere concern for the accuracy of the Qur'anic tradition.
Wa barakAllahu feekum wa fi juhudikum.