WikiProject Christianity
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Arguably the most successful WikiProject running is Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history. One of its apparent advantages is the fact that it breaks down its rather large scope into a fairly large number of functional "subprojects", dealing with the largest regional and topical groupings. This allows for people whose primary interest is a particular field (in our case church) to concentrate on their area of interest. Do the rest of you think that this project would benefit from a similar organizational structure? If yes, the structure of the project might potentially be altered to allow greater focus on the following subjects. Any parties wishing to indicate their support should do so by adding their signature below the name of the listing. We would optimatlly like at least five names before starting a group.
Major "fields" within Christianity might also be reasonably broken out into separate groups. I would think, up front, that this might include one for biographies of major Christians, Christian literature (fiction and non-theological), Christian theology (already extant), Christian graphic arts, maybe one for "electronic media", Christian music (extant in several groups), architecture, and ritual (including clerical garb, liturgical practices, etc.).
There might well be groups for the basic subject of history. It had already been suggested at least once that there a group dealing specifically with Early Christianity, and others might reasonably exist for the era of the Protestant Reformation, and possibly other eras as well.
It would, remotely, be possible for a group on Mary (mother of Jesus), given the amount of content related to her, and even more remotely other individual Christians as well.
We already have an extant Wikipedia:WikiProject Bible, to deal with that subject which is of major importance to not only Christians but Jews and Moslems as well. This raises a possibly contentious point. It would certainly be possible that members of some non-Christian groups might object to content related to the Bible or other interreligious materials having the Christian content overemphasized, in terms of importance or amount of material in an article relating to the Christian content. For such content, however, there already is a Wikipedia:WikiProject Religion/Interfaith work group which regretably isn't particularly active.
This project, like all projects, exists to help editors working to improve content. This includes such activities as assessment, peer review, copyediting, etc. It might very well be the case that either in general or for a specific article, we might best benefit if someone from some other, non-Christian, group were to perform such activity. The books of the Old Testament clearly benefit from a Jewish perspective, for instance, as do the books of the New Testament. In some cases, help from Moslems, Zoroastrians, Hindus, and others might be useful as well. Also, at least potentially, those other groups might benefit from having some help from the Christianity projects as well. Perhaps, and I mean just perhaps, it might be beneficial if we took advantage of and maybe assisted the Religion project in such matters.
One of the sticking points for a group of this size is the "importance" assessments for individual article. A member of a small, newish church will clearly consider his church, the "right" one, to be very important, while others will consider it less so, given its size and possibly comparative lack of broader impact. I have noted that Wikipedia:WikiProject Novels has a page devoted to determining what "importance" grade to give articles. I suppose we could try to do the same thing. I think most of us would agree that any denomination/group would have its main article as the most important. The other, predictable, major subarticles on that group, dealing with its history, ritual and practices, structure, theology, etc., would probably be the next grade down. Other articles, dealing with ecumenical or nondenominational matters, would probably have to be discussed individually. Would any of you be interested in taking part in some discussion of the importance ratings for these "core" group articles and others?
Sorry for the length of the above. Any and all parties should feel free to respond or comment on these matters, regardless of how long things become.
Finally, he shuts up. John Carter ( talk) 17:24, 13 March 2009 (UTC)
Iglesia ni Cristo for one. There has been no activity there for years the scope is almost non-existant. -- Secisek ( talk) 01:06, 24 March 2009 (UTC)
Syriac Christianity and Oriental Orthodoxy, which I am more less the only active member of, could be folded with Eastern Orthodoxy and the Eastern Catholic churches into an Eastern Christianity Project ala the portal. Also, Iglesia ni Cristo is a project that exists to service a category with 18 articles. No wonder there is so little activity. -- Secisek ( talk) 02:29, 24 March 2009 (UTC)
We put the call out for members for Iglesia ni Cristo on a number of ocassions and got no takers. Fold it back for now. As for the Oriental Orthodox, calling them "Eastern Orthodox" would be a big error. However, they are a part of "Eastern Christianity" - as the portal and the current navbox point out at present. It they were all combined, the scope of an "Eastern Christianity project" would then match the portal and give the Eastern Christians that are part of the Roman Catholic Church a project, too. Just a thought.-- Secisek ( talk) 10:47, 25 March 2009 (UTC)
We should probably move on folding Iglesia ni Cristo back into the parent and I propose setting up an "Eastern Christianity wikiproject" with a scope including Eastern Orthodoxy, Oriental Orthodoxy, Syriac Christianity of every kind, the Eastern Churches of the Roman Catholic Church, and the Assyrian Church of the East. -- Secisek ( talk) 09:39, 29 March 2009 (UTC)
Here and now I support, just remember the rename "Eastern Christianity". This already is the scope of the portal as well as a Nav-box and will hopefully be aceptable to all. -- Secisek ( talk) 04:31, 30 March 2009 (UTC)
Importance varies a lot between projects, and between Christianity projects. WP:NOVELS has a page specifically devoted to determining which articles are of Top priority to that project. Would the members of this project be interested in doing the same? John Carter ( talk) 22:23, 15 March 2009 (UTC)
I believe I am one of the few editors who bothers to rate project class (and often - if I have some knowledge of the subject - importance) on almost every article. I will say I do tend to use John's system. The "Top" class is open to debate in our Core topics group and I think those articles should also be the articles on the project nav box or footer. In the subprojects, this is also true - however every project will have "top" articles that are not in the parent's core topics. I would generally mark these as "High" for the parent. If one or more subprojects score an article "High", it is probably "mid" here. Subproject's "mids" and "lows" are going to be "low" here, too. This is a guide and excepetions are made - an article of mid importance to a large portion of Christianity may be high here. That said, I am unsure Bucer meets that cut. His name is almost unknown among Christians today outside of scholarly circles and his direct influence is difficult to see at this point. It is a great article and maybe one of Top importance to a "Reformation" project, but it would be no higher than "mid" here and I am fine with low, too.
Remember, it is far more important to have a proper class assigned to an article than a proper importance, esp. once an aricle is out of the Top priority. It isn't worth a lot of debate. Right now 70%+ of all tagged project pages - almost 19,000 articles - have NO importance at all. -- Secisek ( talk) 04:00, 26 March 2009 (UTC)
I note that MILHIST has a contest page for use in developing articles. Maybe we could set up a similar contest here? John Carter ( talk) 22:23, 15 March 2009 (UTC)
The problem with trying to categorize all groups is it doesn’t always work. For example, the category Sacred Name Groups does not fit in with the Assemblies of Yahweh, as they categorize themselves by another more fitting term, ‘Messianic Israelites’. Also, the AOY would then be included in other categories, including [edit] “Sabbath-Keeping Churches, Non-Adventist”, “Orthodox”… while Jehovah Witnesses would be included in Sacred Name Groups etc, becoming a little confusing. I’ll see if I can the opinions of those who have worked the AOY article to find what their view is. In Citer ( talk) 15:06, 17 March 2009 (UTC)
As most of us know, there are a lot of books and sites dealing with matters of Christianity. Do the rest of you think that it would make any sense to try to generate lists of some of the better sources available for use by the various work group and projects out there? I think it would probably help out most of the Christianity groups if we were able to give the groups a list of the most highly thought of books dealing with the subject.
One of the big problems we have with the number of articles we have is that many of us try to develop the more narrowly-focused articles rather than the more important, but more difficult, parent articles. If, for instance, I knew of an excellent, highly regarded overview book for the Iglesia ni Cristo or Local churches (affiliation), or something like Christian art, an interested party could maybe use that book to help develop the more central, important article, while at the same time provide additional information on other notable topics in that field, either by expanding or creating articles on them. Having people work in that way would definitely help us in improving all our content. John Carter ( talk) 17:55, 20 March 2009 (UTC)
This may strike some of you as odd, I don't know. But I'm at least beginning to think that one of the best ways to deal with the articles of some of the churches or belief families that we work with which don't have a lot of interested editors is to create a navigation template for them which can link the most important articles to that particular faith. As an example, the navigation box for the
African Initiated Church could be made to include links to all the articles related to that subject which are most required to get a full and complete understanding of that subject. Pretty much by definition, this will include links to whatever the "parent" faiths would be, either
Christianity or whichever significant faith family it may have arisen from, as well as links to the most important unique ideas or atypical ideas it might have, the most important individuals in the history of the movement, the various church bodies which might be involved, etc. I would think that only those articles which would be counted as "Top" importance to a dedicated group dealing with that subject, as those articles are the ones which are being linked to in that way from not only the "parent" article on the subject, but also all the other most significant articles.
Actually, this might do some degree even help us avoid proliferation of groups for subject which don't have many specifically interested editors, because the template would effectively serve as a serious of links to the most important articles for people interested in developing content on that subject. Thoughts?
John Carter (
talk) 14:27, 26 March 2009 (UTC)
Always being on the lookout to stealtry ideas of others, I've noticed that the Military history project is trying to start a way to help editors become better at fields other than their general field at
Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Academy. Granted, as that is a comparatively new effort, its hard to tell how successful it will ultimately prove to be, but would the rest of you be interested in having something similar here? Any and all responses are welcome.
John Carter (
talk) 17:10, 26 March 2009 (UTC)
I wonder what the rest of you think of the idea of trying to put most of the content of the various portals we work with on automatic rotation. It might make it a bit easier to keep all of them current. And there are a lot of them:
One of the potentially easier things we could do as a project would be to try to help bring some of our articles up to GA or FA. If there are any GA reviewers out there, I think it might be useful if they could review the various B class articles we have and maybe give a quick review. We could try to bring some coordinated effort into bringing maybe the B class articles closest to GA up to that level, potentially helping out the articles and the visibility of the project, or projects, themselves. Any opinions? John Carter ( talk) 16:08, 31 March 2009 (UTC)
There seem to be quite a number of other "wikis" out there dealing with the main subject of Christianity. Most of them can probably be found at [ this page. Anyone interest in transferring verifiable content from here to there, or there to here, is more than welcome to do so. Would many of you be interested in helping transfer such information? John Carter ( talk) 14:23, 6 April 2009 (UTC)
There is an ongoing problem with how to classify and categorized various churches. I have taken the categorization system Gordon Melton used in the preparation of the list here. Anybody who sees missing churches is encouraged to add them or mention them on the talk page. Thank you. John Carter ( talk) 15:09, 6 April 2009 (UTC)
I don't understand what the deal with the POV is. It sounds like some editors think that any attempt to classify a religious body is POV, which would make it impossible on Wikipedia. But I am wondering why the Church of God bodies have thier own section apart from the Pentecostal family? Besides them sharing similar history, I'm not aware of anything that makes them much different from the other Southern Pentecostal bodies. Ltwin ( talk) 03:17, 7 May 2009 (UTC)
I am starting a list of all the articles related to Christianity of FA, FL, A, or GA class at User:John Carter/Christianity portals. I hope that we can use this list to help "sort" which articles get used in which portals, and thus prevent the unfortunate possibility of one article being included in two different portals at the same time. As of this writing, the list still isn't done, but it should be finished by the end of the day. Any input from any portal maintainers regarding which articles they would like to include in their portals would be more than welcome. Thank you. John Carter ( talk) 15:32, 30 April 2009 (UTC)
The Wikipedia:WikiProject Novels/Chronicles of Narnia task force has been rather inactive lately. I have proposed that its scope be expanded a little, possibly to include Lewis' other fiction, possibly to cover the larger field of Christian fiction in general. Anyone who has an interest in working with any such subject is encouraged to make any comments they deem appropriate here. Thank you for your attention. John Carter ( talk) 23:00, 6 May 2009 (UTC)
Hi. I know a lot of you are going to be going into summer break from college, and a lot of others are just going to be going on vacation sometime in the summer. And what do a lot of people do on vacation? Well, they read something. Well, if you have any interest in any books relevant to Christianity in any of its forms, we now have at least the beginnings of a possible reading list at Wikipedia:WikiProject Christianity/Reading list. I'm hoping that only books that are either very well received as fiction and in some way relevant to Christianity or highly regarded as nonfiction sources for some subject relevant to Christianity get added there. Anyway, just an idea. John Carter ( talk) 20:20, 7 May 2009 (UTC)
I am going through trying to create a list of the various subcategories related to
Category:Christianity. In the process of doing so, I am finding a rather large number of categories which are at best underpopulated, possibly likely to remain so for the near future. Many of these categories have as few as one or two articles. I would think it would probably serve the purposes of the project better if we had fewer such categories. One example of possible overcategorization might be
Category:Japanese Jesuits, which has only two articles. I think it would probably work just as well, if not better, to use the two categories
Category:Japanese Roman Catholics and
Category:Jesuits instead, to reduce the amount of almost excessive categories. I would personally think that, in the event that there are directly relevant other categories which can replace these small categories, like the example above, that removing the small specific categories might be beneficial, and certainly make things easier. I would personally think that, with the possible exception of the categories for major denominations, most of these categories should have at least three, possibly four articles to be kept.
Also, I note that I am repeatedly finding categories relating to Anglicans by nationality, like
Category:Japanese Anglicans, included both in the parent
Category:Japanese Christians and the more specific
Category:Japanese Protestants. This dual categorization strikes me personally as being excessive. Would the rest of you think that these Anglican categories would be better placed in the main category of Christians by nationality, or the child category of Protestants by nationality?
John Carter (
talk) 16:36, 29 May 2009 (UTC)
Wikipedians at
Talk:Roman Catholic Church are discussing the merits of changing the article name as such.
Roman Catholic Church →
Catholic
Church. Please share your opinions
there. --
Carlaude
talk 12:15, 13 June 2009 (UTC)
I've noticed that the various categories for Jesuits, like Category:English Jesuits, are all included as subcategories of the relevant categories for priests. I have a few concerns about this, particularly as there is a good chance for creation of categories for other orders as well, because not all monks are in fact priests. Would the rest of you think that a separate category for members of religious orders and religious orders should maybe be created for use in categorizing these religious order categories? John Carter ( talk) 22:57, 2 July 2009 (UTC)
I think the time may have come for new elections for people for the coordinator positions. If there is no substantial disagreement, I think maybe we might open up for nominations at the middle of the month, for elections to take place the first half of next month. Any opinions, positive or negative? John Carter ( talk) 14:14, 7 July 2009 (UTC)
I just noted that the bot which gives us the Wikipedia:WikiProject Christianity/Popular pages list also gives out individual lists for each subproject of Military history which has apparently requested it. Would the rest of you like to see more specific lists for some of the projects and work groups, and, if so, which? John Carter ( talk) 18:59, 7 July 2009 (UTC)
And yet another idea occurs to me. There have been comments off and on over time about the project perhaps engaging in some sort of collaboration effort. The one downside I personally see to such a collaboration is the fact that very few, if any, important topics relevant to this project have only a single article about them, so that even if people were working on the same topic, they might find that they aren't working on the same article. It might be possible to arrange some sort of topical collaboration, for, perhaps, working on developing the central articles related to a given subject like Baptism, for instance, or maybe the Jehovah's Witnesses, or whatever. We could potentially use the popular pages printout and/or the articles including the topical template for the subject as a guideline for which articles to work on. Thoughts? John Carter ( talk) 19:08, 7 July 2009 (UTC)
Over at Talk:Catholic Church, we have discussed on a couple of occasions the need to discuss the historiography of early Christianity, possibly in a separate article. On numerous occasions, I (and others) have stressed the need to keep that article a summary-level article, relegating the details to subsidiary articles. IMO, this approach is absolutely valid but it suffers from the fact that the historiography of early Christianity is currently dispersed across a number of articles and "the history of the history" is thus almost impossible to piece together from the existing articles. For example, if a reader didn't already know who Walter Bauer and Bart Ehrman were, it would take an intrepid and astute reader to figure out that they were important figures in the development of the modern historical perspective of early Christianity. Even if you disagree with their theories, it is important to know who they are (were) and what their theories are.
For this reason, I have decided to start working on an article that will eventually be titled Historiography of early Christianity. To this end, I have collected bits of text from a number of articles such as Early Christianity, History of early Christianity, Saint Peter, Paul of Tarsus and Primacy of Simon Peter and compiled them into this draft article. Since this initial draft represents only an hour or so of work, it is really still in the very early conceptual stages. The draft is a poorly-structured mish-mash of information and is in desperate need of an organizing framework. I invite all who are interested to review my draft and provide comments. I would particularly appreciate feedback concerning the organization of the article and any key topics that I have missed.
-- Richard S ( talk) 16:43, 2 May 2010 (UTC)
I would like to request comments on this dispute over WP:RS.-- Taiwan boi ( talk) 08:39, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
There are some trouble in coordinating articles about clergy in wikipedias from different languages, both within the various wp's, and especially in the interwikilinking. The reason is that clergy is organised different in different countries; not only depending on different varieties of Christianity being dominating. E.g., the official Lutheran churches in Germany, Sweden, and Norway seem to have somewhat different church organisations, which leads to not completely translatable terminology.
You may note e.g. that Parson iwlinks to the dewp article de:Pfarrer. Now, both names may go back to the Greek παροικία (directly or by means of translation), but that does not mean that they are absolute synonyms. The enwp article almost only concerns clergy being called "parsons", which mainly reduces its aim to the Anglican churches. Similarly, the dewp article mainly focus on clergy being called Pfarrer, which means both some Lutheran and some Catholic priests within German-speaking areas. Now, partly this may be seen as just a question of lack of globalisation in both articles. However, the precise relation of the Anglican terminology to the differences in tithing makes direct translations slightly imprecise. Still, in this case I believe that the iwlinking is fairly reasonable; although I don't quite know how to introduce a section about the German Pfarrers into the parson article, or vice versa.
A worse example is the present iwlinking of Vicar and the Swedish sv:Kyrkoherde. Literary, "kyrkherde" would be translated as "church shepherd", and the title has grown out of a translation of the Latin Pastor ("shepherd"). However, not even within modern Sweden, the two terms "kyrkoherde" and "pastor" are quite synonymous (although both are in use). On the other hand, in the Lutheran church of Germany, "Pastor" is almost synonymous with "Pfarrer". I suspect that the reason for this iwlinkage is the fact that "vicar" to-day often is used informally in a much broader sense within the Anglican church, and that some found this broad sense to be the closest in meaning to "kyrkoherde". Actually, probably historically either rector or parson would be better; there was some considerations of sufficient tithing also in the development within the hierarchy of the "kyrkoherde" position.
I'll probably re-link kyrkoherde to the parson and Pfarrer family. However, from an etymological point of view, this is doubtful, and I'm not sure of what to do with the articles which concentrate on describing several concepts sharing a commonname. Could one add sections about "Corresponding clergy in other countries", or should all be treated separately (so that ultimately each wp would contain one article named "kyrkoherde", another named "pfarrer" a third one named "vicar" ore "vikar", and so on)? Alternatively, should the articles about terms be made to disambiguation pages (somewhat like the Spanish iwsister of vicar, es:Vicario), and there be iwlinkage among the resulting smaller articles about similar concepts? JoergenB ( talk) 21:20, 29 January 2011 (UTC)
Hello, there is a discussion relevant to this WikiProject going on here which involves some users who wish to state that the Christian group, Family Research Council, is in fact a "hate group" in the introduction of the article. Please see the discussion and consider the arguments for or against this inclusion there. Thanks, Anupam Talk 06:13, 10 February 2011 (UTC)
WikiProject Christianity
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no archives yet ( create) |
Arguably the most successful WikiProject running is Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history. One of its apparent advantages is the fact that it breaks down its rather large scope into a fairly large number of functional "subprojects", dealing with the largest regional and topical groupings. This allows for people whose primary interest is a particular field (in our case church) to concentrate on their area of interest. Do the rest of you think that this project would benefit from a similar organizational structure? If yes, the structure of the project might potentially be altered to allow greater focus on the following subjects. Any parties wishing to indicate their support should do so by adding their signature below the name of the listing. We would optimatlly like at least five names before starting a group.
Major "fields" within Christianity might also be reasonably broken out into separate groups. I would think, up front, that this might include one for biographies of major Christians, Christian literature (fiction and non-theological), Christian theology (already extant), Christian graphic arts, maybe one for "electronic media", Christian music (extant in several groups), architecture, and ritual (including clerical garb, liturgical practices, etc.).
There might well be groups for the basic subject of history. It had already been suggested at least once that there a group dealing specifically with Early Christianity, and others might reasonably exist for the era of the Protestant Reformation, and possibly other eras as well.
It would, remotely, be possible for a group on Mary (mother of Jesus), given the amount of content related to her, and even more remotely other individual Christians as well.
We already have an extant Wikipedia:WikiProject Bible, to deal with that subject which is of major importance to not only Christians but Jews and Moslems as well. This raises a possibly contentious point. It would certainly be possible that members of some non-Christian groups might object to content related to the Bible or other interreligious materials having the Christian content overemphasized, in terms of importance or amount of material in an article relating to the Christian content. For such content, however, there already is a Wikipedia:WikiProject Religion/Interfaith work group which regretably isn't particularly active.
This project, like all projects, exists to help editors working to improve content. This includes such activities as assessment, peer review, copyediting, etc. It might very well be the case that either in general or for a specific article, we might best benefit if someone from some other, non-Christian, group were to perform such activity. The books of the Old Testament clearly benefit from a Jewish perspective, for instance, as do the books of the New Testament. In some cases, help from Moslems, Zoroastrians, Hindus, and others might be useful as well. Also, at least potentially, those other groups might benefit from having some help from the Christianity projects as well. Perhaps, and I mean just perhaps, it might be beneficial if we took advantage of and maybe assisted the Religion project in such matters.
One of the sticking points for a group of this size is the "importance" assessments for individual article. A member of a small, newish church will clearly consider his church, the "right" one, to be very important, while others will consider it less so, given its size and possibly comparative lack of broader impact. I have noted that Wikipedia:WikiProject Novels has a page devoted to determining what "importance" grade to give articles. I suppose we could try to do the same thing. I think most of us would agree that any denomination/group would have its main article as the most important. The other, predictable, major subarticles on that group, dealing with its history, ritual and practices, structure, theology, etc., would probably be the next grade down. Other articles, dealing with ecumenical or nondenominational matters, would probably have to be discussed individually. Would any of you be interested in taking part in some discussion of the importance ratings for these "core" group articles and others?
Sorry for the length of the above. Any and all parties should feel free to respond or comment on these matters, regardless of how long things become.
Finally, he shuts up. John Carter ( talk) 17:24, 13 March 2009 (UTC)
Iglesia ni Cristo for one. There has been no activity there for years the scope is almost non-existant. -- Secisek ( talk) 01:06, 24 March 2009 (UTC)
Syriac Christianity and Oriental Orthodoxy, which I am more less the only active member of, could be folded with Eastern Orthodoxy and the Eastern Catholic churches into an Eastern Christianity Project ala the portal. Also, Iglesia ni Cristo is a project that exists to service a category with 18 articles. No wonder there is so little activity. -- Secisek ( talk) 02:29, 24 March 2009 (UTC)
We put the call out for members for Iglesia ni Cristo on a number of ocassions and got no takers. Fold it back for now. As for the Oriental Orthodox, calling them "Eastern Orthodox" would be a big error. However, they are a part of "Eastern Christianity" - as the portal and the current navbox point out at present. It they were all combined, the scope of an "Eastern Christianity project" would then match the portal and give the Eastern Christians that are part of the Roman Catholic Church a project, too. Just a thought.-- Secisek ( talk) 10:47, 25 March 2009 (UTC)
We should probably move on folding Iglesia ni Cristo back into the parent and I propose setting up an "Eastern Christianity wikiproject" with a scope including Eastern Orthodoxy, Oriental Orthodoxy, Syriac Christianity of every kind, the Eastern Churches of the Roman Catholic Church, and the Assyrian Church of the East. -- Secisek ( talk) 09:39, 29 March 2009 (UTC)
Here and now I support, just remember the rename "Eastern Christianity". This already is the scope of the portal as well as a Nav-box and will hopefully be aceptable to all. -- Secisek ( talk) 04:31, 30 March 2009 (UTC)
Importance varies a lot between projects, and between Christianity projects. WP:NOVELS has a page specifically devoted to determining which articles are of Top priority to that project. Would the members of this project be interested in doing the same? John Carter ( talk) 22:23, 15 March 2009 (UTC)
I believe I am one of the few editors who bothers to rate project class (and often - if I have some knowledge of the subject - importance) on almost every article. I will say I do tend to use John's system. The "Top" class is open to debate in our Core topics group and I think those articles should also be the articles on the project nav box or footer. In the subprojects, this is also true - however every project will have "top" articles that are not in the parent's core topics. I would generally mark these as "High" for the parent. If one or more subprojects score an article "High", it is probably "mid" here. Subproject's "mids" and "lows" are going to be "low" here, too. This is a guide and excepetions are made - an article of mid importance to a large portion of Christianity may be high here. That said, I am unsure Bucer meets that cut. His name is almost unknown among Christians today outside of scholarly circles and his direct influence is difficult to see at this point. It is a great article and maybe one of Top importance to a "Reformation" project, but it would be no higher than "mid" here and I am fine with low, too.
Remember, it is far more important to have a proper class assigned to an article than a proper importance, esp. once an aricle is out of the Top priority. It isn't worth a lot of debate. Right now 70%+ of all tagged project pages - almost 19,000 articles - have NO importance at all. -- Secisek ( talk) 04:00, 26 March 2009 (UTC)
I note that MILHIST has a contest page for use in developing articles. Maybe we could set up a similar contest here? John Carter ( talk) 22:23, 15 March 2009 (UTC)
The problem with trying to categorize all groups is it doesn’t always work. For example, the category Sacred Name Groups does not fit in with the Assemblies of Yahweh, as they categorize themselves by another more fitting term, ‘Messianic Israelites’. Also, the AOY would then be included in other categories, including [edit] “Sabbath-Keeping Churches, Non-Adventist”, “Orthodox”… while Jehovah Witnesses would be included in Sacred Name Groups etc, becoming a little confusing. I’ll see if I can the opinions of those who have worked the AOY article to find what their view is. In Citer ( talk) 15:06, 17 March 2009 (UTC)
As most of us know, there are a lot of books and sites dealing with matters of Christianity. Do the rest of you think that it would make any sense to try to generate lists of some of the better sources available for use by the various work group and projects out there? I think it would probably help out most of the Christianity groups if we were able to give the groups a list of the most highly thought of books dealing with the subject.
One of the big problems we have with the number of articles we have is that many of us try to develop the more narrowly-focused articles rather than the more important, but more difficult, parent articles. If, for instance, I knew of an excellent, highly regarded overview book for the Iglesia ni Cristo or Local churches (affiliation), or something like Christian art, an interested party could maybe use that book to help develop the more central, important article, while at the same time provide additional information on other notable topics in that field, either by expanding or creating articles on them. Having people work in that way would definitely help us in improving all our content. John Carter ( talk) 17:55, 20 March 2009 (UTC)
This may strike some of you as odd, I don't know. But I'm at least beginning to think that one of the best ways to deal with the articles of some of the churches or belief families that we work with which don't have a lot of interested editors is to create a navigation template for them which can link the most important articles to that particular faith. As an example, the navigation box for the
African Initiated Church could be made to include links to all the articles related to that subject which are most required to get a full and complete understanding of that subject. Pretty much by definition, this will include links to whatever the "parent" faiths would be, either
Christianity or whichever significant faith family it may have arisen from, as well as links to the most important unique ideas or atypical ideas it might have, the most important individuals in the history of the movement, the various church bodies which might be involved, etc. I would think that only those articles which would be counted as "Top" importance to a dedicated group dealing with that subject, as those articles are the ones which are being linked to in that way from not only the "parent" article on the subject, but also all the other most significant articles.
Actually, this might do some degree even help us avoid proliferation of groups for subject which don't have many specifically interested editors, because the template would effectively serve as a serious of links to the most important articles for people interested in developing content on that subject. Thoughts?
John Carter (
talk) 14:27, 26 March 2009 (UTC)
Always being on the lookout to stealtry ideas of others, I've noticed that the Military history project is trying to start a way to help editors become better at fields other than their general field at
Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Academy. Granted, as that is a comparatively new effort, its hard to tell how successful it will ultimately prove to be, but would the rest of you be interested in having something similar here? Any and all responses are welcome.
John Carter (
talk) 17:10, 26 March 2009 (UTC)
I wonder what the rest of you think of the idea of trying to put most of the content of the various portals we work with on automatic rotation. It might make it a bit easier to keep all of them current. And there are a lot of them:
One of the potentially easier things we could do as a project would be to try to help bring some of our articles up to GA or FA. If there are any GA reviewers out there, I think it might be useful if they could review the various B class articles we have and maybe give a quick review. We could try to bring some coordinated effort into bringing maybe the B class articles closest to GA up to that level, potentially helping out the articles and the visibility of the project, or projects, themselves. Any opinions? John Carter ( talk) 16:08, 31 March 2009 (UTC)
There seem to be quite a number of other "wikis" out there dealing with the main subject of Christianity. Most of them can probably be found at [ this page. Anyone interest in transferring verifiable content from here to there, or there to here, is more than welcome to do so. Would many of you be interested in helping transfer such information? John Carter ( talk) 14:23, 6 April 2009 (UTC)
There is an ongoing problem with how to classify and categorized various churches. I have taken the categorization system Gordon Melton used in the preparation of the list here. Anybody who sees missing churches is encouraged to add them or mention them on the talk page. Thank you. John Carter ( talk) 15:09, 6 April 2009 (UTC)
I don't understand what the deal with the POV is. It sounds like some editors think that any attempt to classify a religious body is POV, which would make it impossible on Wikipedia. But I am wondering why the Church of God bodies have thier own section apart from the Pentecostal family? Besides them sharing similar history, I'm not aware of anything that makes them much different from the other Southern Pentecostal bodies. Ltwin ( talk) 03:17, 7 May 2009 (UTC)
I am starting a list of all the articles related to Christianity of FA, FL, A, or GA class at User:John Carter/Christianity portals. I hope that we can use this list to help "sort" which articles get used in which portals, and thus prevent the unfortunate possibility of one article being included in two different portals at the same time. As of this writing, the list still isn't done, but it should be finished by the end of the day. Any input from any portal maintainers regarding which articles they would like to include in their portals would be more than welcome. Thank you. John Carter ( talk) 15:32, 30 April 2009 (UTC)
The Wikipedia:WikiProject Novels/Chronicles of Narnia task force has been rather inactive lately. I have proposed that its scope be expanded a little, possibly to include Lewis' other fiction, possibly to cover the larger field of Christian fiction in general. Anyone who has an interest in working with any such subject is encouraged to make any comments they deem appropriate here. Thank you for your attention. John Carter ( talk) 23:00, 6 May 2009 (UTC)
Hi. I know a lot of you are going to be going into summer break from college, and a lot of others are just going to be going on vacation sometime in the summer. And what do a lot of people do on vacation? Well, they read something. Well, if you have any interest in any books relevant to Christianity in any of its forms, we now have at least the beginnings of a possible reading list at Wikipedia:WikiProject Christianity/Reading list. I'm hoping that only books that are either very well received as fiction and in some way relevant to Christianity or highly regarded as nonfiction sources for some subject relevant to Christianity get added there. Anyway, just an idea. John Carter ( talk) 20:20, 7 May 2009 (UTC)
I am going through trying to create a list of the various subcategories related to
Category:Christianity. In the process of doing so, I am finding a rather large number of categories which are at best underpopulated, possibly likely to remain so for the near future. Many of these categories have as few as one or two articles. I would think it would probably serve the purposes of the project better if we had fewer such categories. One example of possible overcategorization might be
Category:Japanese Jesuits, which has only two articles. I think it would probably work just as well, if not better, to use the two categories
Category:Japanese Roman Catholics and
Category:Jesuits instead, to reduce the amount of almost excessive categories. I would personally think that, in the event that there are directly relevant other categories which can replace these small categories, like the example above, that removing the small specific categories might be beneficial, and certainly make things easier. I would personally think that, with the possible exception of the categories for major denominations, most of these categories should have at least three, possibly four articles to be kept.
Also, I note that I am repeatedly finding categories relating to Anglicans by nationality, like
Category:Japanese Anglicans, included both in the parent
Category:Japanese Christians and the more specific
Category:Japanese Protestants. This dual categorization strikes me personally as being excessive. Would the rest of you think that these Anglican categories would be better placed in the main category of Christians by nationality, or the child category of Protestants by nationality?
John Carter (
talk) 16:36, 29 May 2009 (UTC)
Wikipedians at
Talk:Roman Catholic Church are discussing the merits of changing the article name as such.
Roman Catholic Church →
Catholic
Church. Please share your opinions
there. --
Carlaude
talk 12:15, 13 June 2009 (UTC)
I've noticed that the various categories for Jesuits, like Category:English Jesuits, are all included as subcategories of the relevant categories for priests. I have a few concerns about this, particularly as there is a good chance for creation of categories for other orders as well, because not all monks are in fact priests. Would the rest of you think that a separate category for members of religious orders and religious orders should maybe be created for use in categorizing these religious order categories? John Carter ( talk) 22:57, 2 July 2009 (UTC)
I think the time may have come for new elections for people for the coordinator positions. If there is no substantial disagreement, I think maybe we might open up for nominations at the middle of the month, for elections to take place the first half of next month. Any opinions, positive or negative? John Carter ( talk) 14:14, 7 July 2009 (UTC)
I just noted that the bot which gives us the Wikipedia:WikiProject Christianity/Popular pages list also gives out individual lists for each subproject of Military history which has apparently requested it. Would the rest of you like to see more specific lists for some of the projects and work groups, and, if so, which? John Carter ( talk) 18:59, 7 July 2009 (UTC)
And yet another idea occurs to me. There have been comments off and on over time about the project perhaps engaging in some sort of collaboration effort. The one downside I personally see to such a collaboration is the fact that very few, if any, important topics relevant to this project have only a single article about them, so that even if people were working on the same topic, they might find that they aren't working on the same article. It might be possible to arrange some sort of topical collaboration, for, perhaps, working on developing the central articles related to a given subject like Baptism, for instance, or maybe the Jehovah's Witnesses, or whatever. We could potentially use the popular pages printout and/or the articles including the topical template for the subject as a guideline for which articles to work on. Thoughts? John Carter ( talk) 19:08, 7 July 2009 (UTC)
Over at Talk:Catholic Church, we have discussed on a couple of occasions the need to discuss the historiography of early Christianity, possibly in a separate article. On numerous occasions, I (and others) have stressed the need to keep that article a summary-level article, relegating the details to subsidiary articles. IMO, this approach is absolutely valid but it suffers from the fact that the historiography of early Christianity is currently dispersed across a number of articles and "the history of the history" is thus almost impossible to piece together from the existing articles. For example, if a reader didn't already know who Walter Bauer and Bart Ehrman were, it would take an intrepid and astute reader to figure out that they were important figures in the development of the modern historical perspective of early Christianity. Even if you disagree with their theories, it is important to know who they are (were) and what their theories are.
For this reason, I have decided to start working on an article that will eventually be titled Historiography of early Christianity. To this end, I have collected bits of text from a number of articles such as Early Christianity, History of early Christianity, Saint Peter, Paul of Tarsus and Primacy of Simon Peter and compiled them into this draft article. Since this initial draft represents only an hour or so of work, it is really still in the very early conceptual stages. The draft is a poorly-structured mish-mash of information and is in desperate need of an organizing framework. I invite all who are interested to review my draft and provide comments. I would particularly appreciate feedback concerning the organization of the article and any key topics that I have missed.
-- Richard S ( talk) 16:43, 2 May 2010 (UTC)
I would like to request comments on this dispute over WP:RS.-- Taiwan boi ( talk) 08:39, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
There are some trouble in coordinating articles about clergy in wikipedias from different languages, both within the various wp's, and especially in the interwikilinking. The reason is that clergy is organised different in different countries; not only depending on different varieties of Christianity being dominating. E.g., the official Lutheran churches in Germany, Sweden, and Norway seem to have somewhat different church organisations, which leads to not completely translatable terminology.
You may note e.g. that Parson iwlinks to the dewp article de:Pfarrer. Now, both names may go back to the Greek παροικία (directly or by means of translation), but that does not mean that they are absolute synonyms. The enwp article almost only concerns clergy being called "parsons", which mainly reduces its aim to the Anglican churches. Similarly, the dewp article mainly focus on clergy being called Pfarrer, which means both some Lutheran and some Catholic priests within German-speaking areas. Now, partly this may be seen as just a question of lack of globalisation in both articles. However, the precise relation of the Anglican terminology to the differences in tithing makes direct translations slightly imprecise. Still, in this case I believe that the iwlinking is fairly reasonable; although I don't quite know how to introduce a section about the German Pfarrers into the parson article, or vice versa.
A worse example is the present iwlinking of Vicar and the Swedish sv:Kyrkoherde. Literary, "kyrkherde" would be translated as "church shepherd", and the title has grown out of a translation of the Latin Pastor ("shepherd"). However, not even within modern Sweden, the two terms "kyrkoherde" and "pastor" are quite synonymous (although both are in use). On the other hand, in the Lutheran church of Germany, "Pastor" is almost synonymous with "Pfarrer". I suspect that the reason for this iwlinkage is the fact that "vicar" to-day often is used informally in a much broader sense within the Anglican church, and that some found this broad sense to be the closest in meaning to "kyrkoherde". Actually, probably historically either rector or parson would be better; there was some considerations of sufficient tithing also in the development within the hierarchy of the "kyrkoherde" position.
I'll probably re-link kyrkoherde to the parson and Pfarrer family. However, from an etymological point of view, this is doubtful, and I'm not sure of what to do with the articles which concentrate on describing several concepts sharing a commonname. Could one add sections about "Corresponding clergy in other countries", or should all be treated separately (so that ultimately each wp would contain one article named "kyrkoherde", another named "pfarrer" a third one named "vicar" ore "vikar", and so on)? Alternatively, should the articles about terms be made to disambiguation pages (somewhat like the Spanish iwsister of vicar, es:Vicario), and there be iwlinkage among the resulting smaller articles about similar concepts? JoergenB ( talk) 21:20, 29 January 2011 (UTC)
Hello, there is a discussion relevant to this WikiProject going on here which involves some users who wish to state that the Christian group, Family Research Council, is in fact a "hate group" in the introduction of the article. Please see the discussion and consider the arguments for or against this inclusion there. Thanks, Anupam Talk 06:13, 10 February 2011 (UTC)