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There are serious problems with these tables. It is important to solve this as religion is a sensitive issue. The issues include
- Sourcing. The PEW report is insufficiently transparant how exactly the different surveys were standardised, hence it is no clear what has been done with ambiguous membership (e.g. is someone who has been baptised but never attends church, does not pay membership fees, listed as religious or not)
- More sourcing. Pew is a distinctly US based institute, and as only source may hence present a US framed perspective on religion (and this risk of bias is not trivial as the substantial influence of religion in the US is different from other developed countries.
- The source is based on old data (2003 data according to the Pew report itself) which is relevant as changes of 15 years matter
- There are gross mistakes in the use of the source (for example PEW report gives unaffiliated 40+% for the Netherlands, yet the table reports 70% Chrisitianity for the Netherlands). (and in any cases these numbers are outdated)
- The tables contain original research. Given population numbers are not from the year of the religion data (in the Netherlands population of 2010) which gives an implied synthesis of absolute numbers.
- The tables contain even more original research. The author has calculated absolute numbers which is only a simple calculation if the categories are undisputed (they are not as irreligion is not listed yet the remaining percentages are applied to total population numbers, and even if everything was included this would only be simple calculation if the percentages and population totals are from the exact same year).
- This cannot be easily solved as making different surveys comparable would definitely be original research (and Pew actually put in considerable effort into that).
- finally the tables are ridiculously large (almost 20 KB) and should not be inserted into normal articles as they will inevitably distort reading and push almost all articles it is applied to (indirectly) beyond the recommended maximum length of 50kB real text (although the use of templates may not make this visible - length guidelines are about readability and not server storage space WP:length). Arnoutf ( talk) 18:26, 23 November 2017 (UTC)
Various people have edited the numbers over the years so that they don't match the source. In some cases, even the original version did that, for example with Germany. It looks espcially like people don't like seeing the "Pop. 0 - 0.00%", and throw in a few just to make it look good. These should be changed to read "Pop. < 10,000 - < 0.1%" as it is in the source, but I don't know how to do that and make it sort and look right. I've checked and corrected the numbers in the first two sections, Central Europe and Eastern Europe, but I don't have time to do the rest. Also, there is a source from Pew that shows absolute numbers, and they are very different from those that have been calculated here: [1]. -- IamNotU ( talk) 01:35, 22 September 2020 (UTC)
| This template does not require a rating on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||
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There are serious problems with these tables. It is important to solve this as religion is a sensitive issue. The issues include
- Sourcing. The PEW report is insufficiently transparant how exactly the different surveys were standardised, hence it is no clear what has been done with ambiguous membership (e.g. is someone who has been baptised but never attends church, does not pay membership fees, listed as religious or not)
- More sourcing. Pew is a distinctly US based institute, and as only source may hence present a US framed perspective on religion (and this risk of bias is not trivial as the substantial influence of religion in the US is different from other developed countries.
- The source is based on old data (2003 data according to the Pew report itself) which is relevant as changes of 15 years matter
- There are gross mistakes in the use of the source (for example PEW report gives unaffiliated 40+% for the Netherlands, yet the table reports 70% Chrisitianity for the Netherlands). (and in any cases these numbers are outdated)
- The tables contain original research. Given population numbers are not from the year of the religion data (in the Netherlands population of 2010) which gives an implied synthesis of absolute numbers.
- The tables contain even more original research. The author has calculated absolute numbers which is only a simple calculation if the categories are undisputed (they are not as irreligion is not listed yet the remaining percentages are applied to total population numbers, and even if everything was included this would only be simple calculation if the percentages and population totals are from the exact same year).
- This cannot be easily solved as making different surveys comparable would definitely be original research (and Pew actually put in considerable effort into that).
- finally the tables are ridiculously large (almost 20 KB) and should not be inserted into normal articles as they will inevitably distort reading and push almost all articles it is applied to (indirectly) beyond the recommended maximum length of 50kB real text (although the use of templates may not make this visible - length guidelines are about readability and not server storage space WP:length). Arnoutf ( talk) 18:26, 23 November 2017 (UTC)
Various people have edited the numbers over the years so that they don't match the source. In some cases, even the original version did that, for example with Germany. It looks espcially like people don't like seeing the "Pop. 0 - 0.00%", and throw in a few just to make it look good. These should be changed to read "Pop. < 10,000 - < 0.1%" as it is in the source, but I don't know how to do that and make it sort and look right. I've checked and corrected the numbers in the first two sections, Central Europe and Eastern Europe, but I don't have time to do the rest. Also, there is a source from Pew that shows absolute numbers, and they are very different from those that have been calculated here: [1]. -- IamNotU ( talk) 01:35, 22 September 2020 (UTC)