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Asia Harvest ( https://www.asiaharvest.org/) is an American Christian missionary organisation focusing on Asia and especially on China. They produce extremely detailed (and overestimated) fantasy statistics about Christians for each one of the smallest administrative divisions of the country.
Let's take, for example, the purported 2020 statistics for Shanghai ( https://www.asiaharvest.org/christians-in-china-stats/shanghai). As you can see, they extrapolate absolute numbers on the basis of the very same percentage values for the total population numbers of most of the districts, and then the resulting numbers are divided according to the various statistical subcategories. Amongst the numbers in the tens of subcategories, they cite sources for only three of them, and they are some journals (probably missionary journals) dated to 1990, 1991 and 1992, while the general data are presented as being dated to 2020. The source for some of the totals is, otherwise, Operation World ( https://operationworld.org/), "the definitive volume of prayer information about the world", associated with the Joshua Project, which is already classified as unreliable in the WP:RSP list.
I propose that Asia Harvest and Operation World be added to the Joshua Project entry in the WP:RSP list. Besides, on the Wikipedia article about Operation World it is written that the subject is related to the World Christian Encyclopedia, the predecessor of what is now published as the World Christian Database and World Religion Database, themselves thoroughly discussed in 2018 and 2022-2023, and listed in WP:RSP. Æo ( talk) 18:09, 1 January 2024 (UTC)
Besides, on the Wikipedia article about Operation World it is written that the subject is related to the World Christian Encyclopedia, the predecessor of what is now published as the World Christian Database and World Religion Database, themselves thoroughly discussed in 2018 and 2022-2023
There is no consensus to deprecate these sources(bolding added). If consider Asia Harvest or Operation World is/are affiliated with/comparable to the WCE as a source, that would suggest not deprecating them, but instead merely advising editors to use them with prudence while favoring, where available, stronger, more certainly reliable sources. P-Makoto (she/her) ( talk) 18:43, 1 January 2024 (UTC)
The Joshua Project is an ethnological database created to support Christian missions. It is considered to be generally unreliable due to the lack of any academic recognition or an adequate editorial process. The Joshua Project provides a list of sources from which they gather their data, many of which are related evangelical groups and they too should not be used for ethnological data as they are questionable sources.. Æo ( talk) 19:41, 1 January 2024 (UTC)
We pray that these statistics and prayer points present a reasonably balanced account of what God is doing in our world and of the challenges facing us as we press on to complete the Great Commission. Apart from Operation World, only the World Christian Database/World Religions Database shares our ambition (folly?) in attempting so massive a task as compiling a comprehensive body of data relating to the world’s religions, denominations, and churches, as well as to the progress of the Great Commission.. Here, Operation World and the WRD/WCD are clearly defined as confessional, evangelical entities working together for the "progress of the Great Commission", which is unclear whether it refers to the doctrinal concept or to the American fellowship of evangelical groups which disbanded in 2020.
They are clearly not the very same(bolding added); then you say they
are clearly defined as confessional, evangelical entities working together(bolding added). Are they together, or are they not; and in either case, why is that a reason for depreciation of Asia Harvest (which is the source I thought was under discussion).
compiling a comprehensive body of data relating to the world’s religions, denominations, and churches. To use another example, both Michael Burlingame and Ronald White shared the
ambition (folly?) in attempting so massive a task asnarrating the life of Abraham Lincoln in single-volume biographies. But they were not collaborators.
There has been a long history of close collaboration and mutual sharing of information among Operation World ... and the World Christian Encyclopedia. This is what I meant, and I am still investigating to find further, clearer evidences. Besides, AH and OW appear to be related as well, given that the few references showed by AH are mostly to OW statistics, and in turn OW is clearly connected to the Joshua Project (they are authored/edited by the same person, Patrick Johnstone), which is acknowledged to be a completely unreliable source.
[JP is] a very aggressive evangelistic project. ... Linking or even mentioning this project on this kind of scale should be considered as fundamentalist Christian spam.(Jeroenvrp);
All links to the Joshua Project should be deleted immediately and without question. The information on the site is often original research and totally incorrect. It is not a reliable source at all. The fact that someone can't find alternative information on Google is no excuse: get out of your chair and head to a library.(Caniago);
Here is another example which illustrates the sort of disinformation they are spreading. They invented a whole range sub-ethnic groups of the Javanese ethnic group, yet there are no published academic sources (in books or peer reviewed papers) which mention these sub-ethnic groups at all. There are a plethora of other examples of their disinformation if you compare their website against reliable sources.(Caniago);
The project site is not an academic source. ... The Joshua Project has an religious agenda. Anyone should agree on that. This is very clear on the site and not even that, it is also very offensive. Not only for people of these ethnic groups, but for anyone who condemn these kind of aggressive evangelisation practices. I even find it very scary how they present the data (e.g. see the column "Progress Scale"). It's like: "evangelism meets the Borg". ... The data on the Joshua Project is unreliable, like others before me have proved. ... Information from the English Wikipedia is easily translated to other Wikipedia projects. Although people who translate should double check these kind of sources, unfortunately sources like the Joshua Project are spreading like a virus to those other projects. That's why I am here now, because I noticed the Joshua Project was listed as a source on the Dutch Wikipedia and learned that they came from here. So know your responsibility! ... To conclude this: I am not accusing individual Wikipedians for "fundamentalist Christian spamming". No, what I mean that on a larger scale it's "fundamentalist Christian spamming".(Jeroenvrp);
There are no cases where there Josuha project is the best source of data. A bunch of evangelical missionaries are the last people who can be trusted to present non-biased reliable ethnic data; the examples we have given proven the case.(Caniago).
we should concentrate on whether Asia Harvest and/or Operation World are reliable. There is not a consensus between us about WCE or WCD or WRD. Maybe there can yet be a consensus between us about Asia Harvest and Operation World. P-Makoto (she/her) ( talk) 00:49, 3 January 2024 (UTC)
we should concentrate on whether Asia Harvest and/or Operation World are reliable. Ramos1990 ( talk) 01:12, 3 January 2024 (UTC)
the Ethos statement does not seem like evidence of organizational collaboration, but the statement in the Miller & Johnstone paper clearly tells us about
a long history of close collaboration and mutual sharing of information. Also re-read Erp's comment below, with an excerpt from the Operation World book (2010 edition, p. 25) telling us that
... the Joshua Project List, the World Christian Encyclopedia and a handful of other resources are at the heart of this information, which is both fuel for prayer and data for mission strategy, and on that page the discourse of the author is general, about the shared project in which OW, the JP and the WCE are all actors. In my opinion, there is enough evidence to affirm that the WCE and the OW, and their affiliated projects, are still closely related. The discussion about the WCE and its successors, however, continues below (cf. #World Christian Encyclopedia and World Religion Database/World Christian Database). Æo ( talk) 18:39, 3 January 2024 (UTC)
P-Makoto, I never wrote about:
Regarding the fact that some of the sources we are discussing here (WCE and its successors) have been published by renowned publishing houses, this does not make them reliable. This was already pointed out in the 2022-2023 discussion. The "peer review" and "editorial process" is very often carried out by people belonging to the very same agenda and organisations (those American evangelical organisations)(bolding added). P-Makoto (she/her) ( talk) 19:11, 3 January 2024 (UTC)
These two books come from the same stable. While up to the mid-1990s the databases behind Operation World and the World Christian Encyclopedia were virtually identical, they began to diverge in the 1990s, partly because Operation World took a more generous definition of the word 'evangelical'. In 2010, World Christian Encyclopedia said there were 300 million evangelicals worldwide, whereas Operation World said there were 550 million.... On the same page, the World Religion Database/World Christian Database and the Atlas of Global Christianity are identified as the continuations of the World Christian Encyclopedia, while The Future of Global Christianity is identified as built on the database of Operation World. Other minor publications associated with them (listed on the same page) are: World Christian Trends – AD 30-2200, World Churches Handbook, Global Religious Trends 2010 to 2020, Megatrends and the Persecuted Church, Global Restrictions on Religion, Global Pentecostalism, The New Faces of Christianity, The Next Christendom, Barna Updates ( https://www.barna.org), and Global Mapping International ( https://www.gmi.org). Ultimately, they are all affiliated with the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization, the same who launched the 10/40 window concept. Æo ( talk) 21:17, 1 January 2024 (UTC)
Operate World took a more generous definition of the word 'evangelical'. In 2010, World Christian Encyclopedia said there were 300 million evangelicals worldwide, whereas Operation World said there were 550 million. You speak of WCE/WRD/WCDs'
connection with Asia Harvest/Operation World; however, what seems to be demonstrated is their disconnection; if Operation World and Asia Harvest are overstating, WRD/WCD/WCE apparently are holding back in comparison. P-Makoto (she/her) ( talk) 01:23, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
...some argue based on the idea that they wouldn't have any reason to give inaccurate figures. This isn't a useful argument. There's also strong opposition to using them as a source. According to their list of data sources, a solid majority of their sources are just other evangelical groups... They shouldn't be ranked beside census counts as equivalent... They should be considered unusable due to a lack of verifiable methodology and recognition for statistical or academic contribution, even when setting aside all questions of advocacy and bias.(Elaqueate);
We have no idea where they get their data, it's not part of their primary mission, and there's no significant penalty to them for errors, so I see no reason to consider them as a reliable source for population statistics.(Mangoe);
I looked at the source, and I believe you. It's a hobby site by three random religious enthusiasts. Certainly not a reliable source for population data.(Alsee). Regarding the use of non-academic sources ("newspapers, magazines, nonfiction books published with non-academic but still reputable presses"), P-Makoto, yes, I think they should be eschewed and I always try to eschew them when I contribute to Wikipedia. Besides, other considerations apply in this specific case, given that we are dealing with a field of information, statistics, for which there are official censuses and statistical institutions which provide "hard data" — i.e. precise numerical results which constitute "facts" subject to minimal interpretation —, and even in the case we need "soft data" — i.e. unofficial and not always accurate data —, there are still impartial and reliable survey agencies to rely upon. In said field of information, we do not need WP:SPECULATIONs produced by organisations with blatant agendas of evangelism, proselytism or propaganda through unclear methodologies (in our case the methodologies are declared, indeed: word of mouth from priests, pastors and other church staff). Æo ( talk) 14:08, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
Religious advocacy group, cites unreliable data sources.(PaleoNeonate);
Publishes false or fabricated information, and should be deprecated. You cannot trust any of that website's claimed population numbers for ethnic groups even to an order of magnitude.(anonymous IP);
Very obviously unreliable. Attempting to use it as a source is absurd.(Tayi Arajakate). The use of the Joshua Project on Wikipedia even caused the creation of an article about a non-existing ethnic group: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Jawa Pesisir Lor. Æo ( talk) 15:06, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
Regarding the use of non-academic sources ("newspapers, magazines, nonfiction books published with non-academic but still reputable presses"), P-Makoto, yes, I think they should be eschewed and I always try to eschew them when I contribute to Wikipedia.
<...a foreword by Patrick Johnstone, author of the best-selling Operation World, who "I have relied much on the information in 'Operation China' during compilation of the section on China for the latest edition of 'Operation World'. May this unique book go a long way to focus prayer on the need for the gospel among these peoples.'>. Patrick Johnstone is mentioned in your comment above (20:13, January 1). AH and OW are definitely related. Æo ( talk) 02:00, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
The results of this massive, multidecade data collection effort were eventually made available in the form of the religious data on the Operation World website, which is hosted by Global Mapping International, and the ethnolinguistic data on the interactive website of the Joshua Project, for which Johnstone was a senior editor. Therefore additional details on the sources of our information can be found at the website of the Joshua Project, which is currently managed by the U.S. Center for World Missions.. If my understanding is correct, based on our previous findings, Johnstone was ultimately behind both Operation World and the Joshua Project. Æo ( talk) 16:23, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
There has been a long history of close collaboration and mutual sharing of information among Operation World, the Summer Institute of Linguistics, and the World Christian Encyclopedia.. Æo ( talk) 17:04, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
The author declares that he has published "a global census": the problem is that a census is "an official enumeration of the population, with details as to age, sex, occupation, etc.". So no, it's clearly not a census of any kind. Far from that.(AlessandroDe). Æo ( talk) 19:46, 3 January 2024 (UTC)
unfortunately sources like the Joshua Project are spreading like a virus. This is why I think that, perhaps, it is time for the further step of deprecation.
still being used. Things have not changed since; just take a look at these September 2023 additions (of OW-JP data via AH), complete with a map (and this is not the only case).-- Æo ( talk) 21:06, 7 January 2024 (UTC)
The
#Operation World, Joshua Project and Asia Harvest are databases of religion demographics related to the Christian missionary movement. OW and the JP are both edited by the Christian missionary Patrick Johnstone, while AH, which reproduces OW-JP statistics for Asia and China, is edited by the Christian missionary Paul Hattaway. The JP has been the subject of more than ten discussions on this noticeboard, with almost all comments finding it completely unreliable. The latest
discussion with RfC in 2021 decided its inclusion in the perennial sources' list as a generally unreliable source. Despite this, it is still widely used throughout Wikipedia (cf.
1), and its associated projects OW and AH are also widely used (cf.
3,
4), and this was already a matter of complaint in the previous discussions.
Should the JP, and its associated projects OW and AH, be WP:DEPRECATED? Answer yes or no.
Æo ( talk) 17:30, 10 January 2024 (UTC)
Our latest discussion about the World Christian Encyclopedia and its successors, the World Religion Database and World Christian Database, currently also presenting their statistics through the platform of the Association of Religion Data Archives, was in late 2022-early 2023. As demonstrated in the section above (see comments 20:13, 1 January by Erp; 20:16, 1 January addendum by Æo; 17:04, 2 January addendum by Æo; 18:39, 3 January by Æo), the WCE and its successors have some connection and/or collaborate and share information with Patrick Johnstone's Operation World and Joshua Project and their network (incl. Paul Hattaway's Asia Harvest, et al.), and ultimately the WCE and OW branched out around the mid 1990s from the same statistical database, and they all seem to be affiliated with the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization (see comment 21:17, 1 January by Æo).
A new critical essay about the WCE and its successors, which adds to those already mentioned in the foregoing 2022-2023 discussion, was published right last year: Adam Stewart's Problematizing the Statistical Study of Global Pentecostalism: An Evaluation of David B. Barrett's Research Methodology, in Michael Wilkinson & Jörg Haustein's The Pentecostal World (Routledge, 2023, pp. 457-471). It criticises the methodologies of David B. Barrett, a Welsh Anglican priest and the creator of the WCE, which were used to compile the WCE itself. Todd M. Johnson and Gina A. Zurlo, who are also mentioned in the essay and are the theorists and directors of "Global Christianity" studies at the Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, are otherwise the continuators of the WCE in the form of the WRD/WCD.
Within the essay, the author elaborates: <... what I call the “Pentecostal growth paradigm,” initially promulgated by David B. Barrett, and now ubiquitous within the field of Pentecostal studies, as well as four common critiques of the paradigm ... the complicated typology conceptualized by Barrett in the first edition of the World Christian Encyclopedia in order to classify and measure Pentecostals around the world ... the – very limited – information that Barrett provides regarding the data collection techniques that he used to gather the data contained in the first edition of the World Christian Encyclopedia ... the construct validity threats contained within Barrett’s typology of Pentecostalism and data collection techniques, which, I argue, provide sufficient evidence to substantiate previous claims that the Pentecostal growth paradigm lacks the methodological rigor required to provide valid research results ...>
(p. 457).
Other quotes:
<... a trend of steadily increasing estimates of global Pentecostal adherence ranging anywhere from 250 to 694 million ... The genealogy of this authorial ritual can be traced back to David B. Barrett’s original attempt to enumerate all of the various forms of global Christianity published in the first edition of the World Christian Encyclopedia in 1982, which, he argued, revealed the substantial numerical growth of Pentecostalism between 1968 and 1981. This is confirmed by Johnson who writes that “virtually all estimates for the number of Pentecostals in the world are related to Barrett’s initial detailed work”. Barrett persisted in this project for another two decades, which was continued by his closest academic successors, namely, Todd M. Johnson and, more recently, Gina A. Zurlo, who continue to record the ostensibly boundless growth of Pentecostalism around the world, a perspective which I refer to here as the Pentecostal growth paradigm ...>;
<... who flaunted estimates of Pentecostal growth in an attempt to legitimate their particular religious organizations, proselytistic efforts, beliefs, and/or practices. Non-Pentecostal scholars of Pentecostalism, of course, also played no small role in reifying the Pentecostal growth paradigm. Estimates of the dramatic numerical growth of Pentecostalism served “to legitimate their work among their disciplinary peers who largely understood Pentecostalism as either a social compensatory mechanism for the poor, uneducated, and oppressed or – from the opposite perspective – an oppressive form of cultural imperialism that homogenizes vulnerable poor and uneducated global populations” ...>, and explains that
<Some scholars of Pentecostalism – even when sometimes citing the continually ballooning estimates of global Pentecostalism themselves – are critical of the Pentecostal growth paradigm, and, especially, of Barrett’s contribution to this discourse. In my review of the academic literature, I detect four common critiques of the Pentecostal growth paradigm. First are concerns that Barrett’s early research methodology might not have been sufficiently sophisticated to provide valid results. Second is the charge that Barrett’s use of the three waves metaphor carries an ahistorical, Americentric, and teleological bias ... Third, is a more specific critique closely related to the more general second critique, which asserts that, although the increasing prevalence of Pentecostal adherence around the world is not seriously debated by scholars of Pentecostalism, a significant portion of increasing Pentecostal growth estimates are the result of definitional sprawl rather than an increase in the actual number of adherents ...>;
<Allan Anderson, who has characterized Barrett’s estimates of global Pentecostalism as, variously, “wild guesses,” “debatable,” “inaccurate or inflated,” “considerably inflated,” “wildly speculative” “controversial and undoubtedly inflated,” “inflated wild guesses,” and “statistical speculations” ...>;
<Barrett’s description of the data collection techniques that he used in order to gather the data contained in the frst edition of the World Christian Encyclopedia was incredibly short – just two paragraphs ... Another notable characteristic of the data collection techniques employed by Barrett is a very liberal approach to estimation. He wrote, for instance, “The word ‘approximately’ is the operative word in this survey; absolute precision and accuracy are not to be expected, nor in fact are they necessary for practical working purposes. This means that although the tables and other statistics may help readers who want specific individual figures, they are mainly designed to give the general-order picture set in the total national and global context. To this end, where detailed local statistics compiled from grass-roots sources have not been available or were incomplete, the tables supply general-order estimates provided by persons familiar with the local statistical situation.” Barrett even admits to extrapolating estimates of the total national populations of those Christian organizations that largely recorded only either child (e.g., Catholics who mainly record baptized infants) or adult (e.g., Baptists who mainly record confessing adults) adherents. He explained, “the missing figure … has been estimated and added either by the churches themselves or the editors.” Barrett explained, for instance, that he estimated the total number of Catholic adherents within a country “by multiplying total affiliated Catholics (baptized plus catechumens) by the national figure for the percentage of the population over 14 years old”.>;
<... his [Barrett's] cavalier approach to data collection and estimation raise significant red flags regarding the validity of his work.>;
<The presence of significant monomethod bias represents a catastrophic failure of Barrett’s research design, which, as a result, does not meet the minimum standards of valid social scientific research. In addition to this more fundamental construct validity threat, the first edition of the World Christian Encyclopedia also contains evidence of five other threats to construct validity relating to data collection techniques, namely, reactivity to the experimental situation, experimenter expectancies, attention and contact with participants, cues of the experimental situation, and timing of measurement.>;
Unfortunately, the research methodology employed by Barrett – specifically his typology of Pentecostalism and data collection techniques – was simply too flawed in order to provide valid social scientific research results that can be trusted and longitudinally or geographically compared. My analysis confirms Anderson’s claim that, “Scholars should no longer assume that there are some 600 million pentecostals in the world without further qualification”>.
I have also found further older papers containing negative critiques of the WCE and its successors:
-- Æo ( talk) 18:48, 3 January 2024 (UTC)
these databases are global debases from academic publishers and they provide useful data that others simply do not have: this is simply false; there are statistics produced by national censuses, national statistical institutes, and independent reliable survey organisations. Regarding your claim that
no survey or census is definitive on religion: censuses are official countings of the characteristics of the whole population of a country, and in the case they have any shortcomings there are other surveys produced by national statistical organisations or independent reliable survey organisations. "Independent reliable" organisations necessarily means non-confessional, non-missionary, non-evangelistic, while "survey" organisations necessarily means that they actually conduct polls among populations. The WCE/WRD/WCD, given the evidence, is neither the first, nor the second thing.
None of the particular calculations are provided, nor is there any accounting for methodological decisions in any particular case; neither transparency nor replicability are in evidence, which makes social scientific evaluation of how they reached their conclusions impossible..
However, as we pointed out before, this source has several shortcomings. First, and probably the most important, the data does not consider the possibility of double practice, very common in Sub Saharan Africa and Latin America countries. Comparing to the other source of information we realize the data is biased towards Christian religion. A clear example is the case of Kenya in which the distribution of religions is considered to be similar to Spain or Italy. The distribution of religious groups between 1970 and 1980 does not change in many countries. There are only about seventeen countries that present change in proportions. But those changes occur in countries where there is double practice and they usually imply an increase in the percentage of Christians and a reduction in the size of animist followers. Because of these reasons we take the data coming from the WCE with a lot of caution..
... however, the WCD does have higher estimates of percent Christian within countries. ... we find that WCD estimates of American Christian groups are generally higher than those based on surveys and denominational statistics. ... the WCD counts tiny religious minorities, classifies some Muslim groups within the neoreligionist and ethnoreligionist categories, and has higher numbers of nonreligious.(p. 680); the conclusions about correlation with other datasets:
... the WCD tends to overestimate percent Christian relative to the other data sets. Scatterplots show that the majority of the points lie above the y - x line, indicating the WCD estimate for percent Christian within countries is generally higher than the other estimates. Although the bias is slight, it is consistent, and consequently, the WCD estimates a higher ratio of Christians in the world.(p. 684); and the final conclusions:
We find some evidence for the three main criticisms directed at the WCD regarding estimation, ambiguous religious categories, and bias. The WCD consistently gives a higher estimate for percent Christian in comparison to other cross-national data sets. ... We also found evidence of overestimation when we compared WCD data on American denominational adherence to American survey data such as ARIS, due in part to inclusion of children, and perhaps also to uncritical acceptance of estimates from religious institutions. ... we find the WCD likely underestimates percent Muslim in former Communist countries and countries with popular syncretistic and traditional religions. ... Data on percent nonreligious are not highly correlated among the five data sets..
unpublished data from “unprocessed” or “incomplete” national censuses. Æo ( talk) 17:00, 4 January 2024 (UTC)
lacks the methodological rigor required to provide valid research results, and a reference to the fact that these results systematically overestimate Christianity (as found by all the critical papers quoted above) and underestimate other religions (as found by Hsu et al.). Regarding WP:BIASED, I think that it is important to keep it because in my view it is quite clear that the source is biased; for me, the relationship that it has with the OW-JP, its origins as a Christian missionary project, the fact that it is edited by the Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (which, by the way, is itself directly related to Billy Graham and his Lausanne Movement), are all indicators of a clear bias, and in any case, this is clearly stated by Reynal-Querol & Montalvo where they wrote
we realize the data is biased towards Christian religion.
Barrett directly addresses and emphatically rejects what he calls the “folly of triumphalism” ... Despite this assurance, Barrett’s occupation as a missionary, stated belief that all of the world would be evangelized by the end of the twentieth century, and, not least of all, his development of a “theology of Christian enumeration” that explains the purpose of his work as helping “the followers of Christ to discern at what points to commit their resources in order to implement their commission” serve to make this, probably, the least debatable criticism ... The particular strength of this last critique might also possibly explain why, in his recent dismissal of the critiques commonly levied against Barrett’s work, Johnson [of the GCTS] elects not to address the accusation of triumphalism..
To describe Barrett’s enumeration of Pentecostals – let alone of Christians as a whole – in the first edition of the World Christian Encyclopedia as confusing would be a drastic understatement. Guiding the entire work is Barrett’s conceptualization of Christianity ...; and again on p. 466:
Barrett's ... collection techniques in order to enumerate Pentecostals and other Christians around the world. Therefore, Barret's project affects Christianity as a whole, and not merely Pentecostalism. Stewart clept it "Pentecostal growth paradigm" apparently because such a paradigm was
... adopted and more widely disseminated by Pentecostal clergy and scholars – mostly in the Global North ...(p. 458). This is probably a reference to the OW and its affiliated networks; I remind that the book Operation World (2010, p. 25) declares that
... the World Christian Encyclopedia and a handful of other resources are at the heart of this information ....
Considering the discussion here, which is very quite long, I concur with the original 2022-2023 consensus against depreciation of these sources. They are definitely used by academic researchers and the sources presented do verify that they are good for use in Wikipedia. Robert D. Woodberry's confirmation of Hsu findings of general reliability across 4 datasets are certainly notable here as multiple sources converge on overall reliability. Keeping in mind that there are many problems with all sources including census data (WRD methodology states that only about half of the world's censuses even ask about religion and that this is declining further) certainly means that many other sources need to be used by default. This is verifiable in the US, which has nothing on religion for so many decades. And numerous other nations have removed such questions for privacy and expense reasons.
I do see room for BOTH (World Christian Encyclopedia and World Religion Database/World Christian Database) and numerous other databases to be used on Wikipedia. After all, these are all just estimates at the end and the Pentecostal and Atheism examples here exhibit the need to use multiple sources to make some sense of adherents (upper and lower estimates). I will say that polls, surveys, etc also fail to predict verifiable things like political elections [8] so I can only imagine the difficulty in religion demographics.
I think a good median on the perennial table is to keep the wording as is minus "The methodology of these sources has been questioned as WP:PARTISAN and WP:CRYSTAL." since these pass on comparison with multiple other datasets. Twice with this noticeboard by the same proposer AEO. The wording would sound neutral, very basic, inclusive, and not too specific. "Preference" does not mean "removal" or "prohibited". It allows coexistence of sources. Thus I think this is reasonable. desmay ( talk) 01:28, 5 January 2024 (UTC)
After all, these are all just estimates– No, there are precise statistics from censuses and national surveys, possibly integrated by other good-quality statistics from independent neutral survey organisations, for most countries. We do not need speculative projections from non-neutral organisations of Christian evangelism. But this has already been widely discussed. The WCE/WRD/WCD are regularly spammed on Wikipedia and this causes a lot of nuisance for editors in the field of religion statistics like me, Erp and others (see here, here, etc.).
... polls, surveys, etc also fail to predict verifiable things like political elections so I can only imagine the difficulty in religion demographics– Actually, I think that a cultural identifier such as religion is much more verifiable and measurable than fleeting opinions such as political votes.
Twice with this noticeboard by the same proposer AEO– I did not open the 2022-2023 discussion myself, and, in any case, what is the problem? I also opened a discussion about WP:STATISTA last year, which resulted in its categorisation as WP:GUNREL. I read a lot, I noticed that the WCE/WRD/WCD were still being spammed throughout Wikipedia, I found new evidence of their problematic nature (the new papers presented in this discussion), and therefore I decided to open this new discussion. Æo ( talk) 02:14, 5 January 2024 (UTC)
I continue to support P-Makoto's original proposal to add a further sentence
be changed(bolding added), which I later clarified to
replacing the present description in the table(bolding addeed). Any proposal which merely adds a sentence about a reliable source identifying methodological flaws while retaining the
reference to WP:PARTISAN and WP:CRYSTALwould be contrary to my original position in this discussion. Such a proposal originates from someone other than myself; I suppose it would be best described as Æo's proposal, inspired by an inadvertent misunderstanding of my proposal.
keep the wording as is minus "The methodology of these sources has been questioned as WP:PARTISAN and WP:CRYSTAL."
no objection to the wording being changedif they had
misconstrued the conversation or the close. And I think they have not misconstrued the essence of the 2022-2023 conversation. Æo ( talk) 22:29, 5 January 2024 (UTC)
clause formulated in your original proposal, together with other critical considerations, to the current description formulated by Folly Mox, keeping the latter as it is. Also notice that other users took part, and expressed their opinions, in the 2022-2023 discussion.
For now, I will pause my earlier musing that WCE/WRD/WCD could be re-assessed to "Generally reliable" and would consent to them being left listed as "Additional considerations". P-Makoto (she/her) ( talk) 04:52, 6 January 2024 (UTC)
There is no consensus on the reliability of these data sources. Rough consensus developed that the sources should be used with in-text attribution and to prefer the use of stronger sources. Some editors questioned their methodology and consider them to be partisan.
Firefangledfeathers ( talk / contribs) 02:38, 6 January 2024 (UTC)There is no consensus on the reliability of these data sources. Rough consensus developed that the sources should be used with in-text attribution and to prefer the use of stronger sources. Some editors noted that data from these sources is commonly used by high-quality publications, while others questioned their methodology and consider them to be partisan.
Together, censuses or surveys provided estimates for 175 countries representing 95% of the world’s population. In the remaining 57 countries, representing 5% of the world’s population, the primary sources for the religious-composition estimates include population registers and institutional membership statistics reported in the World Religion Database and other sources.JoelleJay ( talk) 03:44, 8 January 2024 (UTC)
In her comments, Ramos quoted the abstract from Brierley's World Religion Database: Detail Beyond Belief! (2010) emphasising the author's seemingly positive evaluation of the source. However, reading through the essay one finds that in the conclusions the author points out that: ... This illustrates the dilemma for the compilers of the WCE and WRD. The Church of England may claim 26 million people, roughly the number living in the UK who have been baptized in the church either as infants or adults. The WRD treats this as their official source. However, not all of these now regard themselves as belonging to the Church of England and so did not tick the "Christian" box on the census form. Result? The WRD puts the Christian percent as 81 percent, the census as 72 percent, with the difference virtually entirely in the group of people who have left (as other research has shown). Which source should the WRD trust or use? This is their statistical nightmare, and the WRD in this instance opts for denominational information and does not judge between the two (though perhaps it should). This perhaps explains why some highly erudite commentators, such as Philip Jenkins, whose books on the world Christian scene have been so powerful and helpful, criticize the numbers in the WCE (and doubtless will those found in the WRD). Jenkins sometimes uses the CIA data instead, but there is no guarantee that that is more reliable.
. This was written in 2010 with the data from the 2001 British census in mind; fourteen years later, things have not changed: compare
WRD UK 2020 data with the
2021 UK census data.
The strength
of the database, according to Brierley, merely consists in its unprecedented ... attempt on a worldwide basis to compile numbers for the different religions in a broadly compatible manner for each country.
. Moreover, Brierley also concludes that: ... Christian and religious commentators have no option but to use it, despite hang-ups on definitions and individual numbers. ... These figures are not just for academic reflection and analysis but for strategic use and application.
"Strategic use and application" refers to Christian mission, since
Brierly is a Christian minister and/or missionary himself.
Ramos also quoted from Woodberry's World Religion Database: Impressive—but Improvable (2010); on the first page of the paper (unfortunately, I can't access the full text) we read: ... the editors seem to have constructed their estimates of religious distribution primarily from surveys of denominations and missionaries, not from censuses or representative surveys of individuals. Denominations, however, typically overestimate the number of members they have, and liturgical (and state-sponsored) denominations generally count anyone who has ever been baptized as a member—even infant baptisms of people who no longer claim Christian identity or attend church.
.
There is also another paper of the same series,
Arles' World Religion Database: Realities and Concerns (2010), but I can't access its full text.
Brierley's, Woodberry's and Arles' papers were all published on the
International Bulletin of Missionary Research, and Brierley, Arles and probably Woodberry as well, are/were Christian ministers and/or missionaries, and therefore I think it is important to underline that these papers belong to the Christian missionary environment to which the WCE/WRD/WCD itself belongs. Such papers are missionary sources which recommend the use of another missionary source, highlighting its strength as an unprecedented attempt to quantify the world's religious populations, while at the same time criticising its flaws. Other "high-quality publications" might be uncritical in their use of the WCE/WRD/WCD, and indeed essays like those of Brierley, Woodberry, Arles, and also Hsu et al., Stewart, and the others already discussed, were published precisely to warn against the uncritical use of such sources.
Liedhegener & Odermatt's
Religious Affiliation in Europe (2013), already quoted in the 2022-2023 discussion, pointed out that (p. 9) the WCE/WRD/WCD ... is not an unproblematic source, because its data, gathered originally from the World Christian Encyclopedia, result mostly from country reports prepared by American missionaries. Therefore, a systematic bias of its data in favor of Christianity is a major, although controversial point of criticism.
.
As pointed out by JoelleJay hereabove, the Pew Research Center itself is very cautious in its use of WCE/WRD/WCD data, also considering that Pew mostly bases its studies on its own (real) surveys. On p. 53 of Pew's
The Global Religious Landscape (2010) we read about their criteria for their use of WRD data: In cases where censuses and surveys lacked sufficient detail on minority groups, the estimates also drew on estimates provided by the World Religion Database, which takes into account other sources of information on religious affiliation, including statistical reports from religious groups themselves.
.
Folly Mox, in their <18:55, 5 January> comment, correctly warned that the WCE/WRD/WCD are still widely cited throughout Wikipedia in a great number of articles, mostly in infoboxes and tables and without further explanation about their nature, methodology and probable bias. This has been going on for years: many articles still uncritically report WCE/WRD/WCD data referenced to the
ARDA or
Gordon-Conwell websites; many of them are articles about countries and the data are reproduced directly in the country infobox, passed off as 2020 data despite the fact that they are speculative projections. Therefore, I think that it would be important that
WP:CRYSTAL be mentioned in the description in the perennial sources' list.
That being said, my proposal for the description in the perennial sources' list is the following one:
There is no consensus on the reliability of these sources of data about religious populations, and concerns have been raised that they may be WP:BIASED and that they are WP:SPECULATIVE projections. Rough consensus developed that the sources should be used with in-text attribution and to prefer the use of stronger sources (e.g. censuses and national surveys). While these data sources have been used in some high-quality publications, others have questioned their methodology and consider them to be partisan, and especially prone to an overestimation of Christianity.
Æo ( talk) 19:44, 6 January 2024 (UTC)
You have to use other sources by default to compensate— yes, there is plenty of neutral statistical sources to fill gaps where we don't have data from censuses and surveys from national statistical organisations, and therefore we don't need the WCE/WRD/WCD or any other sources produced by Christian missionaries. Æo ( talk) 22:04, 6 January 2024 (UTC)
The WCD reports the total adherent count within Christian denominations and movements is 226 million, of whom 20 million are estimated to be doubly affiliated, leaving 206 million unique adherents. An additional 46 million claim to be Christians but are not affiliated with a church, for a total of 252 million affiliated and unaffiliated Christians. The 2005 Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches’ tabulation of official church membership is 163 million. In contrast to the WCD, the Yearbook does not count members of independent churches or adjust for doubly affiliated adherents. This difference of 43–63 million adherents between the Yearbook and the WCD warrants further examination. ... The WCD adjusts for “doubly counted” adherents, who may be on multiple membership lists, when aggregating up from denomination level statistics to religious blocks and total religious adherents. However, we do not know how the WCD derives its estimate of 20 million doubly counted U.S. adherents. Current WCD estimates of American Christian populations are generally higher than those based on survey evidence and denominational statistics. The WCD estimate of the total Christian population does not sufficiently reflect the recent downward trend in the percentage of Americans professing Christian identity in surveys.; pp. 689-691, analysing inconsistent estimates of Christians in other countries:
We find two major groups of countries with inconsistent estimates: African countries with religious syncretism or a history of social disorder, and formerly Communist countries. ... African countries with very inconsistent estimates for percent Christian (Angola, Burundi, Congo-Brazzaville, Cote d’Ivoire, Gabon, Ghana, Zambia, and Zimbabwe) have some populations that mix religious practices. ... For India, which others have cited as problematic, the WCD has a higher estimate for percent Christian than the other data sets ... the difference comes from Christian believers in high and low castes identifying themselves as Hindu for various reasons, ... and the existence of “isolated radio believers” who do not affiliate with particular denominations. The WCE does not explain how it estimates the number of isolated radio believers, presumably a particularly difficult population to measure.. Æo ( talk) 14:56, 7 January 2024 (UTC)
Further criticism of the WRD is expressed in the following paper:
A number of data collection projects have arisen to meet this demand, including the World Religion Database ... Although the scope and comprehensiveness of these databases are admirable, and while they provide perhaps the only source of data for some regions and periods of time, there are nevertheless a number of limitations with their estimates. ... Although these databases rightly respect the adage that some data are preferable to none at all, we have no way of ascertaining the degree of uncertainty attached to any particular estimate because none are provided. Without uncertainty estimates, analysts are led to treat census measures and expert opinions as equally valid. Second, the methods used to adjust sample survey data, combine data, and obtain estimates when no data are available are less than fully transparent. Adjusting, combining, interpolating, and extrapolating data require modeling. Yet neither the assumptions underlying the model nor the exact methods for doing so are fully specified. In addition, the uncertainty induced by modeling is again ignored.. -- Æo ( talk) 21:12, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
There was a strong argument that the sources should be assessed as generally unreliable based on the methodological critiques. Birdsall and Beaman 2020 was cited for a general concern around carefully defining religion, religiosity, restrictions on religion, and religious hostility in conducting surveys on religious affiliation. McKinnon 2020 was cited for its finding that WCD significantly overestimated the percentage of Anglicans in Nigeria over other surveys. Stewart 2023 was generally cited in the discussion by one editor without analysis, and it is not the closer's role to parse the source and evaluate the strength of its argument.
Despite general agreement that these concerns are legitimate, there was consensus that the sources are used with caution by reliable sources, including the Pew Research Center, Oxford Handbooks, and Cambridge reference works (some postdating the methodological critiques), and that they are published by reliable publishers— Oxford University Press, Edinburgh University Press, and Brill. There was no effective counterargument to the point that Wikipedia should do what other reliable sources do: proceed with caution. voorts ( talk/ contributions) 04:00, 17 February 2024 (UTC)
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The #World Christian Encyclopedia and World Religion Database/World Christian Database are currently used in many Wikipedia articles (cf. 1, 2, 3, 4) to cite statistics on religion demography, and finding a consensus on the reliability of these sources in the discussion above has been difficult. Foregoing discussions on the same sources include one in 2018 and one in 2022-2023 (with RfC).
In this request for comment, it is possible to:
Æo ( talk) 18:06, 10 January 2024 (UTC)
Ramos' argument is opened by an
ad hominem
WP:PA (in which she falsely accuses me of
WP:FORUMSHOPPING, manipulates the facts of the 2022-2023 discussion as she already tried to do
in January 2023 and
on 6 January 2024 in the discussion above, and accuses me of using the same arguments whilst I have presented plenty of new evidence, starting from Stewart's 2023 essay), which would be enough to make her argument
fallacious. Then, she builds upon a few lines, already reiterated again and again in the discussion above, excerpted from the
2008 Hsu et al. paper which, however, is overall mostly critical of the source under discussion. Regarding the CIA and the US SD, they are not statistical institutes, and they collect statistics about religions from other sources, often from the WCE/WRD/WCD itself (e.g.
US SD 2022 India report)! The Pew's very restrictive criteria in its use of WCE/WRD/WCD data have been thoroughly explained by
JoelleJay and by myself in the discussion above, and once again by Erp in her comment hereabove. Then, Ramos continues by stating that no sources have been presented showing the opposite on such a multiple global datasets scale
, which is misleading: various scholarly sources presented (even Hsu et al. itself!) found a systematic overestimation of Christianity and underestimation of other categories in WCE/WRD/WCD data, and various other problems, but Ramos chooses to completely ignore all the critical problems highlighted by such scholarly sources. Anne-Marie Kool's
Revisiting Mission in, to and from Europe through Contemporary Image Formation (2016), another essay which is highly critical of the source under discussion,
already quoted in the 2022-2023 discussion, warns that: widespread caution is raised with regard to the accuracy of the figures and not to engage in statistical analysis with the data
.
Æo (
talk) 20:51, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
It might well be that the great quantity of details easily silenced possible critical voices. It is peculiar that hardly any serious critical interaction and discussion of the underlying methodology of the Atlas has taken place, neither of its two data providing predecessors (footnote 65: Except for a not very convincing study: BECKY HSU et al.). The data are simply taken for granted, as I have taken them for as authoritative in my teaching and research during the last two decades.. It is a statement of repentance for having used the highly problematic WCE/WRD/WCD data in her past works.
We ran correlations of the five data sets with each other on the percentage of adherents to the major world religions (Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism) as well as the nonreligious (Table 2). The WCD is highly correlated with the other four data sets, with most correlations near 0.90, which suggests that its data for percent Christian, percent Muslim, percent Buddhist, and percent Hindu are generally reliable. However, the other data sets often do not have information for all countries, so the correlations only represent the countries where other data sets record percentages for those religious categories. Most notably, the nonreligious data are not highly correlated between most of the data sets. While all of the data sets have mostly complete data for percent Christian and percent Muslim, data on percent Buddhist, percent Hindu, and percent nonreligious are incomplete in various data sets. The nonreligious category has few observations in State Department and CIA data and is best represented in the WCD, WVS, and Pew. The estimates for Hindus and Buddhists are especially problematic in the CIA data. Figure 1 shows that the WCD tends to overestimate percent Christian relative to the other data sets. Scatterplots show that the majority of the points lie above the y - x line, indicating the WCD estimate for percent Christian within countries is generally higher than the other estimates. Although the bias is slight, it is consistent, and consequently, the WCD estimates a higher ratio of Christians in the world. This suggests that while the percentage Christian estimates are closely related among the data sets, the tendency is for them to be slightly higher in the WCD.
although the bias is slight, it is consistent, and consequently, the WCD estimates a higher ratio of Christians, is not the only one to have found such an overestimation; almost all the other papers cited have highlighted it. For instance, Liedhegener & Odermatt found
a systematic bias of its data in favor of Christianity. It is "systematic" and "consistent" throughout all countries, which means that even if the percentage of overestimation for each country were low (e.g. 3%), the overall result on the world population would be significant. The evidence suggests that in some cases the percentage of overestimation is very high: e.g. Australia WRD 2020 ~57%, cfr. Australia Census 2021 ~44% — overestimation of 13%; Canada WRD 2020 ~63%, cfr. Canada Census 2021 ~53% — overestimation of 10%; Czechia WRD 2020 ~35%, cfr. Czechia Census 2021 ~12% — overestimation of 23%; Hungary WRD 2020 ~87%, cfr. Hungary Census 2021 ~42% — overestimation of 45%; Isle of Man WRD 2020 ~84%, cfr. Isle of Man Census 2021 ~55% — overestimation of 29%; and there are many other examples. Æo ( talk) 23:00, 14 January 2024 (UTC)
Postponing the archiving. Will ask for a WP:CR soon.Æo, when is
soon? I struggle to see what two more weeks will accomplish that the last month and a half hasn't. P-Makoto (she/her) ( talk) 03:49, 14 February 2024 (UTC)
There is a discussion ongoing at Talk:Battle of Bakhmut#Ukrainian losses "per Wagner" where @ Alexiscoutinho insists Prigozhin casualty numbers should be kept at the infobox [21] while numbers published in Journal of Advanced Military Studies (usmcu.edu) article Project MUSE - Russia's War in Ukraine: Two Decisive Factors (jhu.edu) are not reliable enough for the infobox [22] .
My point is There are no proofs in this discussion for Prigozhin numbers reliability, and he is unreliable thus has no place in the infobox. He is unreliable per any threshold of reliability and return of his numbers is unwarranted. Balance is about balance among reliable sources and is to be achieved using reliable sources. That has all already been discussed and answered and we are in no need to repeat.
What the opinion would be? ManyAreasExpert ( talk) 18:38, 6 February 2024 (UTC)
Extended content
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Prigozhin can be used for assessing Russian losses as he would not say a number which is more than they what lose. Assessment of Ukrainian losses however is different and he is not a reliable source for this figure. It can be left within article body but I'm removing it from the infobox. ManyAreasExpert ( talk) 11:43, 5 February 2024 (UTC)
Dr. Gilbert W. Merkx reliabilityIn fact, I would ask you to demonstrate how that "academic source" you cited is objectively "more reliable" than all the other estimates. I've checked the publication and I really wasn't impressed. Firstly, it's a review piece that talks about the war as a whole, thus talks about a bit of everything. The only part I found that was related to casualties in the battle of Bakhmut was this:
|
20,000+ killed or wounded.
20,000+ killed or woundedUkrainian loses which doesn't mention western sources. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested « @» ° ∆t° 22:49, 9 February 2024 (UTC)
... and that means ... ? Thanks! ManyAreasExpert ( talk) 20:28, 10 February 2024 (UTC)Prigozhin would be considered reliable for the losses according to the Wagner group, in the way that any group is reliable for their own words. Putting these details in the content on the article allows for any criticism of them to also be added, something the infobox can't handle.
— User:ActivelyDisinterested 22:11, 9 February 2024 (UTC)
newer and independentshould we actually assume that? Alexis Coutinho ( talk) 22:25, 9 February 2024 (UTC)
Information provided in passing by an otherwise reliable source that is not related to the principal topics of the publication may not be reliable; editors should cite sources focused on the topic at hand where possible.Alexis Coutinho ( talk) 14:09, 10 February 2024 (UTC)
Thanks! Right now it says Fall 2023 research suggests that recent estimates[who?] have Russian losses at 32,000–43,000 dead and 95,000 wounded and Ukrainian losses at 15–20% of the Russian's in the article body. ManyAreasExpert ( talk) 22:33, 9 February 2024 (UTC)"an estimate in the Journal of Advanced Military Studies" could work
— User:ActivelyDisinterested 22:19, 9 February 2024 (UTC)
Is Yevgeny Prigozhin and the Wagner group reliable for estimates of loses suffered by the Wagner group during the battle of Bakhmut? Should Wagner groups estimates of Ukrainian loses be included in the infobox? -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested « @» ° ∆t° 21:35, 10 February 2024 (UTC)
No, any claims of this nature by Prigozin should be regarded as a disinformation.Your personal opinion. Also, see WP:INTEXT. Alexis Coutinho ( talk) 04:27, 17 February 2024 (UTC)
Are the estimates given by Merkx in this article [29] in the Journal of Advanced Military Studies reliable? -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested « @» ° ∆t° 21:35, 10 February 2024 (UTC)
recent estimates suggest that Russian forces suffered between 32,000 and 43,000 dead and 95,000 wounded, with Ukrainian losses at about 15–20 percent of that.These don't appear to be an Merkx estimate and the only thing close I can find is an estimate for the entire war not just the battle of Bakhmut. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested « @» ° ∆t° 21:40, 10 February 2024 (UTC)
Hello, my user name is Sewnbegun. I am new to Wikipedia and here for editing mainly lists/tables (obviously not exclusively) regarding comics, tv series and films. I searched many sources which I though can be reliable sources; in the list at WP:RSP. I was surprise that only three (Screen Rant, IGN and Gizmodo) are considered as reliable source, for one (Dexerto) is advised to find alternative source while remaining are missing (including the ones that constantly tells about comics - like Comic Book Resources and Aiptcomics). So I am starting a new enquiry about that remaining sources of my list and can somebody help me to know which of them are reliable?:
Sewnbegun ( talk) 18:13, 18 February 2024 (UTC)
References
Is this an RS (giving its dodgy rep) especially for someone being dead? Slatersteven ( talk) 12:46, 14 February 2024 (UTC)
I'll leaved it for today, I will get back to you. Slatersteven ( talk) 18:21, 14 February 2024 (UTC)
I've seen this pop up in searches now and then, aboutpage: [34]. Where does it fall on the newspaper "general reliability" scale? Gråbergs Gråa Sång ( talk) 11:59, 15 February 2024 (UTC)
known for publishing falsehoods, hoaxes, and conspiracy theoriesSoftlem ( talk) 12:09, 15 February 2024 (UTC)
One of those stories, which was bylined by BNN Breaking founder Gurbaksh Chahal and was riddled with inaccuracies;
The sheer volume of stories on the site raises questions about whether they’re being generated with the help of artificial intelligence tools, according to Hany Farid, a professor at the UC Berkeley who specializes in deep-fake technology.[35]
The site BNN News made the false report...;
Instead of making a correction...[36]
Twitter said it is suspending scores of new accounts purporting to be part of a "news network" called BNN[37]
smothering the woman with a pillow and hitting and kicking her 117 times over a half hour period[39], perhaps he should be focused on dealing with other problems in his life. LEPRICAVARK ( talk) 14:15, 15 February 2024 (UTC)
hungry Argentine up-and-comerto find various syndications of this story, all attributed/credited. All except BNN, that is. I guess their AI model was unable to find a paraphrase for this unusual construction?
This policy does not apply to talk pages and other pages which evaluate article content and sources, such as deletion discussions or policy noticeboards.
No, I have no conflict with BNN. Please forgive my fussiness, but I want to make sure you understood the question. I didn't ask if you had a conflict with BNN. I asked if you had a conflict of interest:
Conflict of interest (COI) editing involves contributing to Wikipedia about yourself, family, friends, clients, employers, or your financial and other relationships.
it's also crucial that such evaluations are rooted in verifiable factsI agree. If you read further up the thread, you'll see it's a verifiable fact that BNN has engaged in copyright infringement, so as well as reliability concerns, this site should not be used on Wikipedia per WP:COPYVIO. Barnards.tar.gz ( talk) 15:53, 19 February 2024 (UTC)
The assertion that BNN has engaged in copyright infringement relies on verifiable evidence, not just claims or allegations.Bingo. Barnards.tar.gz ( talk) 16:26, 19 February 2024 (UTC)
The sources are:
Rudolf Steiner joined the Nazi party in its early days—supports the claim that Steiner was a member of the NSDAP.
Was discussed at Talk:Rudolf Steiner#Drop the claim. tgeorgescu ( talk) 06:20, 17 February 2024 (UTC)
Hello all,
I can see that NewsMeter, Newsmeter, newsmeter.in and so on have never been created.
Those or variants are currently used on
If appropriate, please do ask for or perform WP:REVDEL on any or all of this without asking me.
I seek your opinions about this.
Shirt58 ( talk) 🦘 10:33, 20 February 2024 (UTC)
A self-published academic study on the subject of transport makes an important point, published (on Google Docs) in a form acceptable to policy, by a multiply-published expert, see [51] and [52]. I feel that we should include it in the article Low Traffic Neighbourhood, as follows:
In 2022 local elections were held across London. Many candidates had tweeted about LTNs, Labour candidates generally positively, Conservatives generally against; these tweets seemed to make very little difference to the number of votes cast for these candidates. If anything, tweeting positively about LTNs may have increased the number of votes for Labour councillors. Sound and fury? The impact of councillors’ LTN positions on voting behaviour in Greater London. July 2023. Jamie Furlong, Athena Brook, Charlie Hicks, Professor Rachel Aldred. accessed 28 Jan 2024.
Is this source acceptable? Richard Keatinge ( talk) 14:04, 12 February 2024 (UTC)
Self-published expert sources may be considered reliable when produced by an established subject-matter expert, whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable, independent publications(see WP:EXPERTSPS). As co-authors Jamie Furlong and Rachel Aldred are both established experts in the subject of Low Traffic Neighborhoods who have been published in reliable academic sources, on those grounds, this self-published source is a reliable source.
The administrator only vets items for the eligibility of authors/depositors, and valid layout & format. The validity and authenticity of the content of submissions is not checked.so it still counts as a WP:SPS, but given that it clearly passes WP:EXPERTSPS it is at least notionally usable for a brief relatively-uncontroversial sentence like this. -- Aquillion ( talk) 14:23, 16 February 2024 (UTC)
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 425 | Archive 426 | Archive 427 | Archive 428 | Archive 429 | Archive 430 | → | Archive 435 |
Asia Harvest ( https://www.asiaharvest.org/) is an American Christian missionary organisation focusing on Asia and especially on China. They produce extremely detailed (and overestimated) fantasy statistics about Christians for each one of the smallest administrative divisions of the country.
Let's take, for example, the purported 2020 statistics for Shanghai ( https://www.asiaharvest.org/christians-in-china-stats/shanghai). As you can see, they extrapolate absolute numbers on the basis of the very same percentage values for the total population numbers of most of the districts, and then the resulting numbers are divided according to the various statistical subcategories. Amongst the numbers in the tens of subcategories, they cite sources for only three of them, and they are some journals (probably missionary journals) dated to 1990, 1991 and 1992, while the general data are presented as being dated to 2020. The source for some of the totals is, otherwise, Operation World ( https://operationworld.org/), "the definitive volume of prayer information about the world", associated with the Joshua Project, which is already classified as unreliable in the WP:RSP list.
I propose that Asia Harvest and Operation World be added to the Joshua Project entry in the WP:RSP list. Besides, on the Wikipedia article about Operation World it is written that the subject is related to the World Christian Encyclopedia, the predecessor of what is now published as the World Christian Database and World Religion Database, themselves thoroughly discussed in 2018 and 2022-2023, and listed in WP:RSP. Æo ( talk) 18:09, 1 January 2024 (UTC)
Besides, on the Wikipedia article about Operation World it is written that the subject is related to the World Christian Encyclopedia, the predecessor of what is now published as the World Christian Database and World Religion Database, themselves thoroughly discussed in 2018 and 2022-2023
There is no consensus to deprecate these sources(bolding added). If consider Asia Harvest or Operation World is/are affiliated with/comparable to the WCE as a source, that would suggest not deprecating them, but instead merely advising editors to use them with prudence while favoring, where available, stronger, more certainly reliable sources. P-Makoto (she/her) ( talk) 18:43, 1 January 2024 (UTC)
The Joshua Project is an ethnological database created to support Christian missions. It is considered to be generally unreliable due to the lack of any academic recognition or an adequate editorial process. The Joshua Project provides a list of sources from which they gather their data, many of which are related evangelical groups and they too should not be used for ethnological data as they are questionable sources.. Æo ( talk) 19:41, 1 January 2024 (UTC)
We pray that these statistics and prayer points present a reasonably balanced account of what God is doing in our world and of the challenges facing us as we press on to complete the Great Commission. Apart from Operation World, only the World Christian Database/World Religions Database shares our ambition (folly?) in attempting so massive a task as compiling a comprehensive body of data relating to the world’s religions, denominations, and churches, as well as to the progress of the Great Commission.. Here, Operation World and the WRD/WCD are clearly defined as confessional, evangelical entities working together for the "progress of the Great Commission", which is unclear whether it refers to the doctrinal concept or to the American fellowship of evangelical groups which disbanded in 2020.
They are clearly not the very same(bolding added); then you say they
are clearly defined as confessional, evangelical entities working together(bolding added). Are they together, or are they not; and in either case, why is that a reason for depreciation of Asia Harvest (which is the source I thought was under discussion).
compiling a comprehensive body of data relating to the world’s religions, denominations, and churches. To use another example, both Michael Burlingame and Ronald White shared the
ambition (folly?) in attempting so massive a task asnarrating the life of Abraham Lincoln in single-volume biographies. But they were not collaborators.
There has been a long history of close collaboration and mutual sharing of information among Operation World ... and the World Christian Encyclopedia. This is what I meant, and I am still investigating to find further, clearer evidences. Besides, AH and OW appear to be related as well, given that the few references showed by AH are mostly to OW statistics, and in turn OW is clearly connected to the Joshua Project (they are authored/edited by the same person, Patrick Johnstone), which is acknowledged to be a completely unreliable source.
[JP is] a very aggressive evangelistic project. ... Linking or even mentioning this project on this kind of scale should be considered as fundamentalist Christian spam.(Jeroenvrp);
All links to the Joshua Project should be deleted immediately and without question. The information on the site is often original research and totally incorrect. It is not a reliable source at all. The fact that someone can't find alternative information on Google is no excuse: get out of your chair and head to a library.(Caniago);
Here is another example which illustrates the sort of disinformation they are spreading. They invented a whole range sub-ethnic groups of the Javanese ethnic group, yet there are no published academic sources (in books or peer reviewed papers) which mention these sub-ethnic groups at all. There are a plethora of other examples of their disinformation if you compare their website against reliable sources.(Caniago);
The project site is not an academic source. ... The Joshua Project has an religious agenda. Anyone should agree on that. This is very clear on the site and not even that, it is also very offensive. Not only for people of these ethnic groups, but for anyone who condemn these kind of aggressive evangelisation practices. I even find it very scary how they present the data (e.g. see the column "Progress Scale"). It's like: "evangelism meets the Borg". ... The data on the Joshua Project is unreliable, like others before me have proved. ... Information from the English Wikipedia is easily translated to other Wikipedia projects. Although people who translate should double check these kind of sources, unfortunately sources like the Joshua Project are spreading like a virus to those other projects. That's why I am here now, because I noticed the Joshua Project was listed as a source on the Dutch Wikipedia and learned that they came from here. So know your responsibility! ... To conclude this: I am not accusing individual Wikipedians for "fundamentalist Christian spamming". No, what I mean that on a larger scale it's "fundamentalist Christian spamming".(Jeroenvrp);
There are no cases where there Josuha project is the best source of data. A bunch of evangelical missionaries are the last people who can be trusted to present non-biased reliable ethnic data; the examples we have given proven the case.(Caniago).
we should concentrate on whether Asia Harvest and/or Operation World are reliable. There is not a consensus between us about WCE or WCD or WRD. Maybe there can yet be a consensus between us about Asia Harvest and Operation World. P-Makoto (she/her) ( talk) 00:49, 3 January 2024 (UTC)
we should concentrate on whether Asia Harvest and/or Operation World are reliable. Ramos1990 ( talk) 01:12, 3 January 2024 (UTC)
the Ethos statement does not seem like evidence of organizational collaboration, but the statement in the Miller & Johnstone paper clearly tells us about
a long history of close collaboration and mutual sharing of information. Also re-read Erp's comment below, with an excerpt from the Operation World book (2010 edition, p. 25) telling us that
... the Joshua Project List, the World Christian Encyclopedia and a handful of other resources are at the heart of this information, which is both fuel for prayer and data for mission strategy, and on that page the discourse of the author is general, about the shared project in which OW, the JP and the WCE are all actors. In my opinion, there is enough evidence to affirm that the WCE and the OW, and their affiliated projects, are still closely related. The discussion about the WCE and its successors, however, continues below (cf. #World Christian Encyclopedia and World Religion Database/World Christian Database). Æo ( talk) 18:39, 3 January 2024 (UTC)
P-Makoto, I never wrote about:
Regarding the fact that some of the sources we are discussing here (WCE and its successors) have been published by renowned publishing houses, this does not make them reliable. This was already pointed out in the 2022-2023 discussion. The "peer review" and "editorial process" is very often carried out by people belonging to the very same agenda and organisations (those American evangelical organisations)(bolding added). P-Makoto (she/her) ( talk) 19:11, 3 January 2024 (UTC)
These two books come from the same stable. While up to the mid-1990s the databases behind Operation World and the World Christian Encyclopedia were virtually identical, they began to diverge in the 1990s, partly because Operation World took a more generous definition of the word 'evangelical'. In 2010, World Christian Encyclopedia said there were 300 million evangelicals worldwide, whereas Operation World said there were 550 million.... On the same page, the World Religion Database/World Christian Database and the Atlas of Global Christianity are identified as the continuations of the World Christian Encyclopedia, while The Future of Global Christianity is identified as built on the database of Operation World. Other minor publications associated with them (listed on the same page) are: World Christian Trends – AD 30-2200, World Churches Handbook, Global Religious Trends 2010 to 2020, Megatrends and the Persecuted Church, Global Restrictions on Religion, Global Pentecostalism, The New Faces of Christianity, The Next Christendom, Barna Updates ( https://www.barna.org), and Global Mapping International ( https://www.gmi.org). Ultimately, they are all affiliated with the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization, the same who launched the 10/40 window concept. Æo ( talk) 21:17, 1 January 2024 (UTC)
Operate World took a more generous definition of the word 'evangelical'. In 2010, World Christian Encyclopedia said there were 300 million evangelicals worldwide, whereas Operation World said there were 550 million. You speak of WCE/WRD/WCDs'
connection with Asia Harvest/Operation World; however, what seems to be demonstrated is their disconnection; if Operation World and Asia Harvest are overstating, WRD/WCD/WCE apparently are holding back in comparison. P-Makoto (she/her) ( talk) 01:23, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
...some argue based on the idea that they wouldn't have any reason to give inaccurate figures. This isn't a useful argument. There's also strong opposition to using them as a source. According to their list of data sources, a solid majority of their sources are just other evangelical groups... They shouldn't be ranked beside census counts as equivalent... They should be considered unusable due to a lack of verifiable methodology and recognition for statistical or academic contribution, even when setting aside all questions of advocacy and bias.(Elaqueate);
We have no idea where they get their data, it's not part of their primary mission, and there's no significant penalty to them for errors, so I see no reason to consider them as a reliable source for population statistics.(Mangoe);
I looked at the source, and I believe you. It's a hobby site by three random religious enthusiasts. Certainly not a reliable source for population data.(Alsee). Regarding the use of non-academic sources ("newspapers, magazines, nonfiction books published with non-academic but still reputable presses"), P-Makoto, yes, I think they should be eschewed and I always try to eschew them when I contribute to Wikipedia. Besides, other considerations apply in this specific case, given that we are dealing with a field of information, statistics, for which there are official censuses and statistical institutions which provide "hard data" — i.e. precise numerical results which constitute "facts" subject to minimal interpretation —, and even in the case we need "soft data" — i.e. unofficial and not always accurate data —, there are still impartial and reliable survey agencies to rely upon. In said field of information, we do not need WP:SPECULATIONs produced by organisations with blatant agendas of evangelism, proselytism or propaganda through unclear methodologies (in our case the methodologies are declared, indeed: word of mouth from priests, pastors and other church staff). Æo ( talk) 14:08, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
Religious advocacy group, cites unreliable data sources.(PaleoNeonate);
Publishes false or fabricated information, and should be deprecated. You cannot trust any of that website's claimed population numbers for ethnic groups even to an order of magnitude.(anonymous IP);
Very obviously unreliable. Attempting to use it as a source is absurd.(Tayi Arajakate). The use of the Joshua Project on Wikipedia even caused the creation of an article about a non-existing ethnic group: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Jawa Pesisir Lor. Æo ( talk) 15:06, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
Regarding the use of non-academic sources ("newspapers, magazines, nonfiction books published with non-academic but still reputable presses"), P-Makoto, yes, I think they should be eschewed and I always try to eschew them when I contribute to Wikipedia.
<...a foreword by Patrick Johnstone, author of the best-selling Operation World, who "I have relied much on the information in 'Operation China' during compilation of the section on China for the latest edition of 'Operation World'. May this unique book go a long way to focus prayer on the need for the gospel among these peoples.'>. Patrick Johnstone is mentioned in your comment above (20:13, January 1). AH and OW are definitely related. Æo ( talk) 02:00, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
The results of this massive, multidecade data collection effort were eventually made available in the form of the religious data on the Operation World website, which is hosted by Global Mapping International, and the ethnolinguistic data on the interactive website of the Joshua Project, for which Johnstone was a senior editor. Therefore additional details on the sources of our information can be found at the website of the Joshua Project, which is currently managed by the U.S. Center for World Missions.. If my understanding is correct, based on our previous findings, Johnstone was ultimately behind both Operation World and the Joshua Project. Æo ( talk) 16:23, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
There has been a long history of close collaboration and mutual sharing of information among Operation World, the Summer Institute of Linguistics, and the World Christian Encyclopedia.. Æo ( talk) 17:04, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
The author declares that he has published "a global census": the problem is that a census is "an official enumeration of the population, with details as to age, sex, occupation, etc.". So no, it's clearly not a census of any kind. Far from that.(AlessandroDe). Æo ( talk) 19:46, 3 January 2024 (UTC)
unfortunately sources like the Joshua Project are spreading like a virus. This is why I think that, perhaps, it is time for the further step of deprecation.
still being used. Things have not changed since; just take a look at these September 2023 additions (of OW-JP data via AH), complete with a map (and this is not the only case).-- Æo ( talk) 21:06, 7 January 2024 (UTC)
The
#Operation World, Joshua Project and Asia Harvest are databases of religion demographics related to the Christian missionary movement. OW and the JP are both edited by the Christian missionary Patrick Johnstone, while AH, which reproduces OW-JP statistics for Asia and China, is edited by the Christian missionary Paul Hattaway. The JP has been the subject of more than ten discussions on this noticeboard, with almost all comments finding it completely unreliable. The latest
discussion with RfC in 2021 decided its inclusion in the perennial sources' list as a generally unreliable source. Despite this, it is still widely used throughout Wikipedia (cf.
1), and its associated projects OW and AH are also widely used (cf.
3,
4), and this was already a matter of complaint in the previous discussions.
Should the JP, and its associated projects OW and AH, be WP:DEPRECATED? Answer yes or no.
Æo ( talk) 17:30, 10 January 2024 (UTC)
Our latest discussion about the World Christian Encyclopedia and its successors, the World Religion Database and World Christian Database, currently also presenting their statistics through the platform of the Association of Religion Data Archives, was in late 2022-early 2023. As demonstrated in the section above (see comments 20:13, 1 January by Erp; 20:16, 1 January addendum by Æo; 17:04, 2 January addendum by Æo; 18:39, 3 January by Æo), the WCE and its successors have some connection and/or collaborate and share information with Patrick Johnstone's Operation World and Joshua Project and their network (incl. Paul Hattaway's Asia Harvest, et al.), and ultimately the WCE and OW branched out around the mid 1990s from the same statistical database, and they all seem to be affiliated with the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization (see comment 21:17, 1 January by Æo).
A new critical essay about the WCE and its successors, which adds to those already mentioned in the foregoing 2022-2023 discussion, was published right last year: Adam Stewart's Problematizing the Statistical Study of Global Pentecostalism: An Evaluation of David B. Barrett's Research Methodology, in Michael Wilkinson & Jörg Haustein's The Pentecostal World (Routledge, 2023, pp. 457-471). It criticises the methodologies of David B. Barrett, a Welsh Anglican priest and the creator of the WCE, which were used to compile the WCE itself. Todd M. Johnson and Gina A. Zurlo, who are also mentioned in the essay and are the theorists and directors of "Global Christianity" studies at the Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, are otherwise the continuators of the WCE in the form of the WRD/WCD.
Within the essay, the author elaborates: <... what I call the “Pentecostal growth paradigm,” initially promulgated by David B. Barrett, and now ubiquitous within the field of Pentecostal studies, as well as four common critiques of the paradigm ... the complicated typology conceptualized by Barrett in the first edition of the World Christian Encyclopedia in order to classify and measure Pentecostals around the world ... the – very limited – information that Barrett provides regarding the data collection techniques that he used to gather the data contained in the first edition of the World Christian Encyclopedia ... the construct validity threats contained within Barrett’s typology of Pentecostalism and data collection techniques, which, I argue, provide sufficient evidence to substantiate previous claims that the Pentecostal growth paradigm lacks the methodological rigor required to provide valid research results ...>
(p. 457).
Other quotes:
<... a trend of steadily increasing estimates of global Pentecostal adherence ranging anywhere from 250 to 694 million ... The genealogy of this authorial ritual can be traced back to David B. Barrett’s original attempt to enumerate all of the various forms of global Christianity published in the first edition of the World Christian Encyclopedia in 1982, which, he argued, revealed the substantial numerical growth of Pentecostalism between 1968 and 1981. This is confirmed by Johnson who writes that “virtually all estimates for the number of Pentecostals in the world are related to Barrett’s initial detailed work”. Barrett persisted in this project for another two decades, which was continued by his closest academic successors, namely, Todd M. Johnson and, more recently, Gina A. Zurlo, who continue to record the ostensibly boundless growth of Pentecostalism around the world, a perspective which I refer to here as the Pentecostal growth paradigm ...>;
<... who flaunted estimates of Pentecostal growth in an attempt to legitimate their particular religious organizations, proselytistic efforts, beliefs, and/or practices. Non-Pentecostal scholars of Pentecostalism, of course, also played no small role in reifying the Pentecostal growth paradigm. Estimates of the dramatic numerical growth of Pentecostalism served “to legitimate their work among their disciplinary peers who largely understood Pentecostalism as either a social compensatory mechanism for the poor, uneducated, and oppressed or – from the opposite perspective – an oppressive form of cultural imperialism that homogenizes vulnerable poor and uneducated global populations” ...>, and explains that
<Some scholars of Pentecostalism – even when sometimes citing the continually ballooning estimates of global Pentecostalism themselves – are critical of the Pentecostal growth paradigm, and, especially, of Barrett’s contribution to this discourse. In my review of the academic literature, I detect four common critiques of the Pentecostal growth paradigm. First are concerns that Barrett’s early research methodology might not have been sufficiently sophisticated to provide valid results. Second is the charge that Barrett’s use of the three waves metaphor carries an ahistorical, Americentric, and teleological bias ... Third, is a more specific critique closely related to the more general second critique, which asserts that, although the increasing prevalence of Pentecostal adherence around the world is not seriously debated by scholars of Pentecostalism, a significant portion of increasing Pentecostal growth estimates are the result of definitional sprawl rather than an increase in the actual number of adherents ...>;
<Allan Anderson, who has characterized Barrett’s estimates of global Pentecostalism as, variously, “wild guesses,” “debatable,” “inaccurate or inflated,” “considerably inflated,” “wildly speculative” “controversial and undoubtedly inflated,” “inflated wild guesses,” and “statistical speculations” ...>;
<Barrett’s description of the data collection techniques that he used in order to gather the data contained in the frst edition of the World Christian Encyclopedia was incredibly short – just two paragraphs ... Another notable characteristic of the data collection techniques employed by Barrett is a very liberal approach to estimation. He wrote, for instance, “The word ‘approximately’ is the operative word in this survey; absolute precision and accuracy are not to be expected, nor in fact are they necessary for practical working purposes. This means that although the tables and other statistics may help readers who want specific individual figures, they are mainly designed to give the general-order picture set in the total national and global context. To this end, where detailed local statistics compiled from grass-roots sources have not been available or were incomplete, the tables supply general-order estimates provided by persons familiar with the local statistical situation.” Barrett even admits to extrapolating estimates of the total national populations of those Christian organizations that largely recorded only either child (e.g., Catholics who mainly record baptized infants) or adult (e.g., Baptists who mainly record confessing adults) adherents. He explained, “the missing figure … has been estimated and added either by the churches themselves or the editors.” Barrett explained, for instance, that he estimated the total number of Catholic adherents within a country “by multiplying total affiliated Catholics (baptized plus catechumens) by the national figure for the percentage of the population over 14 years old”.>;
<... his [Barrett's] cavalier approach to data collection and estimation raise significant red flags regarding the validity of his work.>;
<The presence of significant monomethod bias represents a catastrophic failure of Barrett’s research design, which, as a result, does not meet the minimum standards of valid social scientific research. In addition to this more fundamental construct validity threat, the first edition of the World Christian Encyclopedia also contains evidence of five other threats to construct validity relating to data collection techniques, namely, reactivity to the experimental situation, experimenter expectancies, attention and contact with participants, cues of the experimental situation, and timing of measurement.>;
Unfortunately, the research methodology employed by Barrett – specifically his typology of Pentecostalism and data collection techniques – was simply too flawed in order to provide valid social scientific research results that can be trusted and longitudinally or geographically compared. My analysis confirms Anderson’s claim that, “Scholars should no longer assume that there are some 600 million pentecostals in the world without further qualification”>.
I have also found further older papers containing negative critiques of the WCE and its successors:
-- Æo ( talk) 18:48, 3 January 2024 (UTC)
these databases are global debases from academic publishers and they provide useful data that others simply do not have: this is simply false; there are statistics produced by national censuses, national statistical institutes, and independent reliable survey organisations. Regarding your claim that
no survey or census is definitive on religion: censuses are official countings of the characteristics of the whole population of a country, and in the case they have any shortcomings there are other surveys produced by national statistical organisations or independent reliable survey organisations. "Independent reliable" organisations necessarily means non-confessional, non-missionary, non-evangelistic, while "survey" organisations necessarily means that they actually conduct polls among populations. The WCE/WRD/WCD, given the evidence, is neither the first, nor the second thing.
None of the particular calculations are provided, nor is there any accounting for methodological decisions in any particular case; neither transparency nor replicability are in evidence, which makes social scientific evaluation of how they reached their conclusions impossible..
However, as we pointed out before, this source has several shortcomings. First, and probably the most important, the data does not consider the possibility of double practice, very common in Sub Saharan Africa and Latin America countries. Comparing to the other source of information we realize the data is biased towards Christian religion. A clear example is the case of Kenya in which the distribution of religions is considered to be similar to Spain or Italy. The distribution of religious groups between 1970 and 1980 does not change in many countries. There are only about seventeen countries that present change in proportions. But those changes occur in countries where there is double practice and they usually imply an increase in the percentage of Christians and a reduction in the size of animist followers. Because of these reasons we take the data coming from the WCE with a lot of caution..
... however, the WCD does have higher estimates of percent Christian within countries. ... we find that WCD estimates of American Christian groups are generally higher than those based on surveys and denominational statistics. ... the WCD counts tiny religious minorities, classifies some Muslim groups within the neoreligionist and ethnoreligionist categories, and has higher numbers of nonreligious.(p. 680); the conclusions about correlation with other datasets:
... the WCD tends to overestimate percent Christian relative to the other data sets. Scatterplots show that the majority of the points lie above the y - x line, indicating the WCD estimate for percent Christian within countries is generally higher than the other estimates. Although the bias is slight, it is consistent, and consequently, the WCD estimates a higher ratio of Christians in the world.(p. 684); and the final conclusions:
We find some evidence for the three main criticisms directed at the WCD regarding estimation, ambiguous religious categories, and bias. The WCD consistently gives a higher estimate for percent Christian in comparison to other cross-national data sets. ... We also found evidence of overestimation when we compared WCD data on American denominational adherence to American survey data such as ARIS, due in part to inclusion of children, and perhaps also to uncritical acceptance of estimates from religious institutions. ... we find the WCD likely underestimates percent Muslim in former Communist countries and countries with popular syncretistic and traditional religions. ... Data on percent nonreligious are not highly correlated among the five data sets..
unpublished data from “unprocessed” or “incomplete” national censuses. Æo ( talk) 17:00, 4 January 2024 (UTC)
lacks the methodological rigor required to provide valid research results, and a reference to the fact that these results systematically overestimate Christianity (as found by all the critical papers quoted above) and underestimate other religions (as found by Hsu et al.). Regarding WP:BIASED, I think that it is important to keep it because in my view it is quite clear that the source is biased; for me, the relationship that it has with the OW-JP, its origins as a Christian missionary project, the fact that it is edited by the Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (which, by the way, is itself directly related to Billy Graham and his Lausanne Movement), are all indicators of a clear bias, and in any case, this is clearly stated by Reynal-Querol & Montalvo where they wrote
we realize the data is biased towards Christian religion.
Barrett directly addresses and emphatically rejects what he calls the “folly of triumphalism” ... Despite this assurance, Barrett’s occupation as a missionary, stated belief that all of the world would be evangelized by the end of the twentieth century, and, not least of all, his development of a “theology of Christian enumeration” that explains the purpose of his work as helping “the followers of Christ to discern at what points to commit their resources in order to implement their commission” serve to make this, probably, the least debatable criticism ... The particular strength of this last critique might also possibly explain why, in his recent dismissal of the critiques commonly levied against Barrett’s work, Johnson [of the GCTS] elects not to address the accusation of triumphalism..
To describe Barrett’s enumeration of Pentecostals – let alone of Christians as a whole – in the first edition of the World Christian Encyclopedia as confusing would be a drastic understatement. Guiding the entire work is Barrett’s conceptualization of Christianity ...; and again on p. 466:
Barrett's ... collection techniques in order to enumerate Pentecostals and other Christians around the world. Therefore, Barret's project affects Christianity as a whole, and not merely Pentecostalism. Stewart clept it "Pentecostal growth paradigm" apparently because such a paradigm was
... adopted and more widely disseminated by Pentecostal clergy and scholars – mostly in the Global North ...(p. 458). This is probably a reference to the OW and its affiliated networks; I remind that the book Operation World (2010, p. 25) declares that
... the World Christian Encyclopedia and a handful of other resources are at the heart of this information ....
Considering the discussion here, which is very quite long, I concur with the original 2022-2023 consensus against depreciation of these sources. They are definitely used by academic researchers and the sources presented do verify that they are good for use in Wikipedia. Robert D. Woodberry's confirmation of Hsu findings of general reliability across 4 datasets are certainly notable here as multiple sources converge on overall reliability. Keeping in mind that there are many problems with all sources including census data (WRD methodology states that only about half of the world's censuses even ask about religion and that this is declining further) certainly means that many other sources need to be used by default. This is verifiable in the US, which has nothing on religion for so many decades. And numerous other nations have removed such questions for privacy and expense reasons.
I do see room for BOTH (World Christian Encyclopedia and World Religion Database/World Christian Database) and numerous other databases to be used on Wikipedia. After all, these are all just estimates at the end and the Pentecostal and Atheism examples here exhibit the need to use multiple sources to make some sense of adherents (upper and lower estimates). I will say that polls, surveys, etc also fail to predict verifiable things like political elections [8] so I can only imagine the difficulty in religion demographics.
I think a good median on the perennial table is to keep the wording as is minus "The methodology of these sources has been questioned as WP:PARTISAN and WP:CRYSTAL." since these pass on comparison with multiple other datasets. Twice with this noticeboard by the same proposer AEO. The wording would sound neutral, very basic, inclusive, and not too specific. "Preference" does not mean "removal" or "prohibited". It allows coexistence of sources. Thus I think this is reasonable. desmay ( talk) 01:28, 5 January 2024 (UTC)
After all, these are all just estimates– No, there are precise statistics from censuses and national surveys, possibly integrated by other good-quality statistics from independent neutral survey organisations, for most countries. We do not need speculative projections from non-neutral organisations of Christian evangelism. But this has already been widely discussed. The WCE/WRD/WCD are regularly spammed on Wikipedia and this causes a lot of nuisance for editors in the field of religion statistics like me, Erp and others (see here, here, etc.).
... polls, surveys, etc also fail to predict verifiable things like political elections so I can only imagine the difficulty in religion demographics– Actually, I think that a cultural identifier such as religion is much more verifiable and measurable than fleeting opinions such as political votes.
Twice with this noticeboard by the same proposer AEO– I did not open the 2022-2023 discussion myself, and, in any case, what is the problem? I also opened a discussion about WP:STATISTA last year, which resulted in its categorisation as WP:GUNREL. I read a lot, I noticed that the WCE/WRD/WCD were still being spammed throughout Wikipedia, I found new evidence of their problematic nature (the new papers presented in this discussion), and therefore I decided to open this new discussion. Æo ( talk) 02:14, 5 January 2024 (UTC)
I continue to support P-Makoto's original proposal to add a further sentence
be changed(bolding added), which I later clarified to
replacing the present description in the table(bolding addeed). Any proposal which merely adds a sentence about a reliable source identifying methodological flaws while retaining the
reference to WP:PARTISAN and WP:CRYSTALwould be contrary to my original position in this discussion. Such a proposal originates from someone other than myself; I suppose it would be best described as Æo's proposal, inspired by an inadvertent misunderstanding of my proposal.
keep the wording as is minus "The methodology of these sources has been questioned as WP:PARTISAN and WP:CRYSTAL."
no objection to the wording being changedif they had
misconstrued the conversation or the close. And I think they have not misconstrued the essence of the 2022-2023 conversation. Æo ( talk) 22:29, 5 January 2024 (UTC)
clause formulated in your original proposal, together with other critical considerations, to the current description formulated by Folly Mox, keeping the latter as it is. Also notice that other users took part, and expressed their opinions, in the 2022-2023 discussion.
For now, I will pause my earlier musing that WCE/WRD/WCD could be re-assessed to "Generally reliable" and would consent to them being left listed as "Additional considerations". P-Makoto (she/her) ( talk) 04:52, 6 January 2024 (UTC)
There is no consensus on the reliability of these data sources. Rough consensus developed that the sources should be used with in-text attribution and to prefer the use of stronger sources. Some editors questioned their methodology and consider them to be partisan.
Firefangledfeathers ( talk / contribs) 02:38, 6 January 2024 (UTC)There is no consensus on the reliability of these data sources. Rough consensus developed that the sources should be used with in-text attribution and to prefer the use of stronger sources. Some editors noted that data from these sources is commonly used by high-quality publications, while others questioned their methodology and consider them to be partisan.
Together, censuses or surveys provided estimates for 175 countries representing 95% of the world’s population. In the remaining 57 countries, representing 5% of the world’s population, the primary sources for the religious-composition estimates include population registers and institutional membership statistics reported in the World Religion Database and other sources.JoelleJay ( talk) 03:44, 8 January 2024 (UTC)
In her comments, Ramos quoted the abstract from Brierley's World Religion Database: Detail Beyond Belief! (2010) emphasising the author's seemingly positive evaluation of the source. However, reading through the essay one finds that in the conclusions the author points out that: ... This illustrates the dilemma for the compilers of the WCE and WRD. The Church of England may claim 26 million people, roughly the number living in the UK who have been baptized in the church either as infants or adults. The WRD treats this as their official source. However, not all of these now regard themselves as belonging to the Church of England and so did not tick the "Christian" box on the census form. Result? The WRD puts the Christian percent as 81 percent, the census as 72 percent, with the difference virtually entirely in the group of people who have left (as other research has shown). Which source should the WRD trust or use? This is their statistical nightmare, and the WRD in this instance opts for denominational information and does not judge between the two (though perhaps it should). This perhaps explains why some highly erudite commentators, such as Philip Jenkins, whose books on the world Christian scene have been so powerful and helpful, criticize the numbers in the WCE (and doubtless will those found in the WRD). Jenkins sometimes uses the CIA data instead, but there is no guarantee that that is more reliable.
. This was written in 2010 with the data from the 2001 British census in mind; fourteen years later, things have not changed: compare
WRD UK 2020 data with the
2021 UK census data.
The strength
of the database, according to Brierley, merely consists in its unprecedented ... attempt on a worldwide basis to compile numbers for the different religions in a broadly compatible manner for each country.
. Moreover, Brierley also concludes that: ... Christian and religious commentators have no option but to use it, despite hang-ups on definitions and individual numbers. ... These figures are not just for academic reflection and analysis but for strategic use and application.
"Strategic use and application" refers to Christian mission, since
Brierly is a Christian minister and/or missionary himself.
Ramos also quoted from Woodberry's World Religion Database: Impressive—but Improvable (2010); on the first page of the paper (unfortunately, I can't access the full text) we read: ... the editors seem to have constructed their estimates of religious distribution primarily from surveys of denominations and missionaries, not from censuses or representative surveys of individuals. Denominations, however, typically overestimate the number of members they have, and liturgical (and state-sponsored) denominations generally count anyone who has ever been baptized as a member—even infant baptisms of people who no longer claim Christian identity or attend church.
.
There is also another paper of the same series,
Arles' World Religion Database: Realities and Concerns (2010), but I can't access its full text.
Brierley's, Woodberry's and Arles' papers were all published on the
International Bulletin of Missionary Research, and Brierley, Arles and probably Woodberry as well, are/were Christian ministers and/or missionaries, and therefore I think it is important to underline that these papers belong to the Christian missionary environment to which the WCE/WRD/WCD itself belongs. Such papers are missionary sources which recommend the use of another missionary source, highlighting its strength as an unprecedented attempt to quantify the world's religious populations, while at the same time criticising its flaws. Other "high-quality publications" might be uncritical in their use of the WCE/WRD/WCD, and indeed essays like those of Brierley, Woodberry, Arles, and also Hsu et al., Stewart, and the others already discussed, were published precisely to warn against the uncritical use of such sources.
Liedhegener & Odermatt's
Religious Affiliation in Europe (2013), already quoted in the 2022-2023 discussion, pointed out that (p. 9) the WCE/WRD/WCD ... is not an unproblematic source, because its data, gathered originally from the World Christian Encyclopedia, result mostly from country reports prepared by American missionaries. Therefore, a systematic bias of its data in favor of Christianity is a major, although controversial point of criticism.
.
As pointed out by JoelleJay hereabove, the Pew Research Center itself is very cautious in its use of WCE/WRD/WCD data, also considering that Pew mostly bases its studies on its own (real) surveys. On p. 53 of Pew's
The Global Religious Landscape (2010) we read about their criteria for their use of WRD data: In cases where censuses and surveys lacked sufficient detail on minority groups, the estimates also drew on estimates provided by the World Religion Database, which takes into account other sources of information on religious affiliation, including statistical reports from religious groups themselves.
.
Folly Mox, in their <18:55, 5 January> comment, correctly warned that the WCE/WRD/WCD are still widely cited throughout Wikipedia in a great number of articles, mostly in infoboxes and tables and without further explanation about their nature, methodology and probable bias. This has been going on for years: many articles still uncritically report WCE/WRD/WCD data referenced to the
ARDA or
Gordon-Conwell websites; many of them are articles about countries and the data are reproduced directly in the country infobox, passed off as 2020 data despite the fact that they are speculative projections. Therefore, I think that it would be important that
WP:CRYSTAL be mentioned in the description in the perennial sources' list.
That being said, my proposal for the description in the perennial sources' list is the following one:
There is no consensus on the reliability of these sources of data about religious populations, and concerns have been raised that they may be WP:BIASED and that they are WP:SPECULATIVE projections. Rough consensus developed that the sources should be used with in-text attribution and to prefer the use of stronger sources (e.g. censuses and national surveys). While these data sources have been used in some high-quality publications, others have questioned their methodology and consider them to be partisan, and especially prone to an overestimation of Christianity.
Æo ( talk) 19:44, 6 January 2024 (UTC)
You have to use other sources by default to compensate— yes, there is plenty of neutral statistical sources to fill gaps where we don't have data from censuses and surveys from national statistical organisations, and therefore we don't need the WCE/WRD/WCD or any other sources produced by Christian missionaries. Æo ( talk) 22:04, 6 January 2024 (UTC)
The WCD reports the total adherent count within Christian denominations and movements is 226 million, of whom 20 million are estimated to be doubly affiliated, leaving 206 million unique adherents. An additional 46 million claim to be Christians but are not affiliated with a church, for a total of 252 million affiliated and unaffiliated Christians. The 2005 Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches’ tabulation of official church membership is 163 million. In contrast to the WCD, the Yearbook does not count members of independent churches or adjust for doubly affiliated adherents. This difference of 43–63 million adherents between the Yearbook and the WCD warrants further examination. ... The WCD adjusts for “doubly counted” adherents, who may be on multiple membership lists, when aggregating up from denomination level statistics to religious blocks and total religious adherents. However, we do not know how the WCD derives its estimate of 20 million doubly counted U.S. adherents. Current WCD estimates of American Christian populations are generally higher than those based on survey evidence and denominational statistics. The WCD estimate of the total Christian population does not sufficiently reflect the recent downward trend in the percentage of Americans professing Christian identity in surveys.; pp. 689-691, analysing inconsistent estimates of Christians in other countries:
We find two major groups of countries with inconsistent estimates: African countries with religious syncretism or a history of social disorder, and formerly Communist countries. ... African countries with very inconsistent estimates for percent Christian (Angola, Burundi, Congo-Brazzaville, Cote d’Ivoire, Gabon, Ghana, Zambia, and Zimbabwe) have some populations that mix religious practices. ... For India, which others have cited as problematic, the WCD has a higher estimate for percent Christian than the other data sets ... the difference comes from Christian believers in high and low castes identifying themselves as Hindu for various reasons, ... and the existence of “isolated radio believers” who do not affiliate with particular denominations. The WCE does not explain how it estimates the number of isolated radio believers, presumably a particularly difficult population to measure.. Æo ( talk) 14:56, 7 January 2024 (UTC)
Further criticism of the WRD is expressed in the following paper:
A number of data collection projects have arisen to meet this demand, including the World Religion Database ... Although the scope and comprehensiveness of these databases are admirable, and while they provide perhaps the only source of data for some regions and periods of time, there are nevertheless a number of limitations with their estimates. ... Although these databases rightly respect the adage that some data are preferable to none at all, we have no way of ascertaining the degree of uncertainty attached to any particular estimate because none are provided. Without uncertainty estimates, analysts are led to treat census measures and expert opinions as equally valid. Second, the methods used to adjust sample survey data, combine data, and obtain estimates when no data are available are less than fully transparent. Adjusting, combining, interpolating, and extrapolating data require modeling. Yet neither the assumptions underlying the model nor the exact methods for doing so are fully specified. In addition, the uncertainty induced by modeling is again ignored.. -- Æo ( talk) 21:12, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
There was a strong argument that the sources should be assessed as generally unreliable based on the methodological critiques. Birdsall and Beaman 2020 was cited for a general concern around carefully defining religion, religiosity, restrictions on religion, and religious hostility in conducting surveys on religious affiliation. McKinnon 2020 was cited for its finding that WCD significantly overestimated the percentage of Anglicans in Nigeria over other surveys. Stewart 2023 was generally cited in the discussion by one editor without analysis, and it is not the closer's role to parse the source and evaluate the strength of its argument.
Despite general agreement that these concerns are legitimate, there was consensus that the sources are used with caution by reliable sources, including the Pew Research Center, Oxford Handbooks, and Cambridge reference works (some postdating the methodological critiques), and that they are published by reliable publishers— Oxford University Press, Edinburgh University Press, and Brill. There was no effective counterargument to the point that Wikipedia should do what other reliable sources do: proceed with caution. voorts ( talk/ contributions) 04:00, 17 February 2024 (UTC)
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The #World Christian Encyclopedia and World Religion Database/World Christian Database are currently used in many Wikipedia articles (cf. 1, 2, 3, 4) to cite statistics on religion demography, and finding a consensus on the reliability of these sources in the discussion above has been difficult. Foregoing discussions on the same sources include one in 2018 and one in 2022-2023 (with RfC).
In this request for comment, it is possible to:
Æo ( talk) 18:06, 10 January 2024 (UTC)
Ramos' argument is opened by an
ad hominem
WP:PA (in which she falsely accuses me of
WP:FORUMSHOPPING, manipulates the facts of the 2022-2023 discussion as she already tried to do
in January 2023 and
on 6 January 2024 in the discussion above, and accuses me of using the same arguments whilst I have presented plenty of new evidence, starting from Stewart's 2023 essay), which would be enough to make her argument
fallacious. Then, she builds upon a few lines, already reiterated again and again in the discussion above, excerpted from the
2008 Hsu et al. paper which, however, is overall mostly critical of the source under discussion. Regarding the CIA and the US SD, they are not statistical institutes, and they collect statistics about religions from other sources, often from the WCE/WRD/WCD itself (e.g.
US SD 2022 India report)! The Pew's very restrictive criteria in its use of WCE/WRD/WCD data have been thoroughly explained by
JoelleJay and by myself in the discussion above, and once again by Erp in her comment hereabove. Then, Ramos continues by stating that no sources have been presented showing the opposite on such a multiple global datasets scale
, which is misleading: various scholarly sources presented (even Hsu et al. itself!) found a systematic overestimation of Christianity and underestimation of other categories in WCE/WRD/WCD data, and various other problems, but Ramos chooses to completely ignore all the critical problems highlighted by such scholarly sources. Anne-Marie Kool's
Revisiting Mission in, to and from Europe through Contemporary Image Formation (2016), another essay which is highly critical of the source under discussion,
already quoted in the 2022-2023 discussion, warns that: widespread caution is raised with regard to the accuracy of the figures and not to engage in statistical analysis with the data
.
Æo (
talk) 20:51, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
It might well be that the great quantity of details easily silenced possible critical voices. It is peculiar that hardly any serious critical interaction and discussion of the underlying methodology of the Atlas has taken place, neither of its two data providing predecessors (footnote 65: Except for a not very convincing study: BECKY HSU et al.). The data are simply taken for granted, as I have taken them for as authoritative in my teaching and research during the last two decades.. It is a statement of repentance for having used the highly problematic WCE/WRD/WCD data in her past works.
We ran correlations of the five data sets with each other on the percentage of adherents to the major world religions (Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism) as well as the nonreligious (Table 2). The WCD is highly correlated with the other four data sets, with most correlations near 0.90, which suggests that its data for percent Christian, percent Muslim, percent Buddhist, and percent Hindu are generally reliable. However, the other data sets often do not have information for all countries, so the correlations only represent the countries where other data sets record percentages for those religious categories. Most notably, the nonreligious data are not highly correlated between most of the data sets. While all of the data sets have mostly complete data for percent Christian and percent Muslim, data on percent Buddhist, percent Hindu, and percent nonreligious are incomplete in various data sets. The nonreligious category has few observations in State Department and CIA data and is best represented in the WCD, WVS, and Pew. The estimates for Hindus and Buddhists are especially problematic in the CIA data. Figure 1 shows that the WCD tends to overestimate percent Christian relative to the other data sets. Scatterplots show that the majority of the points lie above the y - x line, indicating the WCD estimate for percent Christian within countries is generally higher than the other estimates. Although the bias is slight, it is consistent, and consequently, the WCD estimates a higher ratio of Christians in the world. This suggests that while the percentage Christian estimates are closely related among the data sets, the tendency is for them to be slightly higher in the WCD.
although the bias is slight, it is consistent, and consequently, the WCD estimates a higher ratio of Christians, is not the only one to have found such an overestimation; almost all the other papers cited have highlighted it. For instance, Liedhegener & Odermatt found
a systematic bias of its data in favor of Christianity. It is "systematic" and "consistent" throughout all countries, which means that even if the percentage of overestimation for each country were low (e.g. 3%), the overall result on the world population would be significant. The evidence suggests that in some cases the percentage of overestimation is very high: e.g. Australia WRD 2020 ~57%, cfr. Australia Census 2021 ~44% — overestimation of 13%; Canada WRD 2020 ~63%, cfr. Canada Census 2021 ~53% — overestimation of 10%; Czechia WRD 2020 ~35%, cfr. Czechia Census 2021 ~12% — overestimation of 23%; Hungary WRD 2020 ~87%, cfr. Hungary Census 2021 ~42% — overestimation of 45%; Isle of Man WRD 2020 ~84%, cfr. Isle of Man Census 2021 ~55% — overestimation of 29%; and there are many other examples. Æo ( talk) 23:00, 14 January 2024 (UTC)
Postponing the archiving. Will ask for a WP:CR soon.Æo, when is
soon? I struggle to see what two more weeks will accomplish that the last month and a half hasn't. P-Makoto (she/her) ( talk) 03:49, 14 February 2024 (UTC)
There is a discussion ongoing at Talk:Battle of Bakhmut#Ukrainian losses "per Wagner" where @ Alexiscoutinho insists Prigozhin casualty numbers should be kept at the infobox [21] while numbers published in Journal of Advanced Military Studies (usmcu.edu) article Project MUSE - Russia's War in Ukraine: Two Decisive Factors (jhu.edu) are not reliable enough for the infobox [22] .
My point is There are no proofs in this discussion for Prigozhin numbers reliability, and he is unreliable thus has no place in the infobox. He is unreliable per any threshold of reliability and return of his numbers is unwarranted. Balance is about balance among reliable sources and is to be achieved using reliable sources. That has all already been discussed and answered and we are in no need to repeat.
What the opinion would be? ManyAreasExpert ( talk) 18:38, 6 February 2024 (UTC)
Extended content
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Prigozhin can be used for assessing Russian losses as he would not say a number which is more than they what lose. Assessment of Ukrainian losses however is different and he is not a reliable source for this figure. It can be left within article body but I'm removing it from the infobox. ManyAreasExpert ( talk) 11:43, 5 February 2024 (UTC)
Dr. Gilbert W. Merkx reliabilityIn fact, I would ask you to demonstrate how that "academic source" you cited is objectively "more reliable" than all the other estimates. I've checked the publication and I really wasn't impressed. Firstly, it's a review piece that talks about the war as a whole, thus talks about a bit of everything. The only part I found that was related to casualties in the battle of Bakhmut was this:
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20,000+ killed or wounded.
20,000+ killed or woundedUkrainian loses which doesn't mention western sources. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested « @» ° ∆t° 22:49, 9 February 2024 (UTC)
... and that means ... ? Thanks! ManyAreasExpert ( talk) 20:28, 10 February 2024 (UTC)Prigozhin would be considered reliable for the losses according to the Wagner group, in the way that any group is reliable for their own words. Putting these details in the content on the article allows for any criticism of them to also be added, something the infobox can't handle.
— User:ActivelyDisinterested 22:11, 9 February 2024 (UTC)
newer and independentshould we actually assume that? Alexis Coutinho ( talk) 22:25, 9 February 2024 (UTC)
Information provided in passing by an otherwise reliable source that is not related to the principal topics of the publication may not be reliable; editors should cite sources focused on the topic at hand where possible.Alexis Coutinho ( talk) 14:09, 10 February 2024 (UTC)
Thanks! Right now it says Fall 2023 research suggests that recent estimates[who?] have Russian losses at 32,000–43,000 dead and 95,000 wounded and Ukrainian losses at 15–20% of the Russian's in the article body. ManyAreasExpert ( talk) 22:33, 9 February 2024 (UTC)"an estimate in the Journal of Advanced Military Studies" could work
— User:ActivelyDisinterested 22:19, 9 February 2024 (UTC)
Is Yevgeny Prigozhin and the Wagner group reliable for estimates of loses suffered by the Wagner group during the battle of Bakhmut? Should Wagner groups estimates of Ukrainian loses be included in the infobox? -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested « @» ° ∆t° 21:35, 10 February 2024 (UTC)
No, any claims of this nature by Prigozin should be regarded as a disinformation.Your personal opinion. Also, see WP:INTEXT. Alexis Coutinho ( talk) 04:27, 17 February 2024 (UTC)
Are the estimates given by Merkx in this article [29] in the Journal of Advanced Military Studies reliable? -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested « @» ° ∆t° 21:35, 10 February 2024 (UTC)
recent estimates suggest that Russian forces suffered between 32,000 and 43,000 dead and 95,000 wounded, with Ukrainian losses at about 15–20 percent of that.These don't appear to be an Merkx estimate and the only thing close I can find is an estimate for the entire war not just the battle of Bakhmut. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested « @» ° ∆t° 21:40, 10 February 2024 (UTC)
Hello, my user name is Sewnbegun. I am new to Wikipedia and here for editing mainly lists/tables (obviously not exclusively) regarding comics, tv series and films. I searched many sources which I though can be reliable sources; in the list at WP:RSP. I was surprise that only three (Screen Rant, IGN and Gizmodo) are considered as reliable source, for one (Dexerto) is advised to find alternative source while remaining are missing (including the ones that constantly tells about comics - like Comic Book Resources and Aiptcomics). So I am starting a new enquiry about that remaining sources of my list and can somebody help me to know which of them are reliable?:
Sewnbegun ( talk) 18:13, 18 February 2024 (UTC)
References
Is this an RS (giving its dodgy rep) especially for someone being dead? Slatersteven ( talk) 12:46, 14 February 2024 (UTC)
I'll leaved it for today, I will get back to you. Slatersteven ( talk) 18:21, 14 February 2024 (UTC)
I've seen this pop up in searches now and then, aboutpage: [34]. Where does it fall on the newspaper "general reliability" scale? Gråbergs Gråa Sång ( talk) 11:59, 15 February 2024 (UTC)
known for publishing falsehoods, hoaxes, and conspiracy theoriesSoftlem ( talk) 12:09, 15 February 2024 (UTC)
One of those stories, which was bylined by BNN Breaking founder Gurbaksh Chahal and was riddled with inaccuracies;
The sheer volume of stories on the site raises questions about whether they’re being generated with the help of artificial intelligence tools, according to Hany Farid, a professor at the UC Berkeley who specializes in deep-fake technology.[35]
The site BNN News made the false report...;
Instead of making a correction...[36]
Twitter said it is suspending scores of new accounts purporting to be part of a "news network" called BNN[37]
smothering the woman with a pillow and hitting and kicking her 117 times over a half hour period[39], perhaps he should be focused on dealing with other problems in his life. LEPRICAVARK ( talk) 14:15, 15 February 2024 (UTC)
hungry Argentine up-and-comerto find various syndications of this story, all attributed/credited. All except BNN, that is. I guess their AI model was unable to find a paraphrase for this unusual construction?
This policy does not apply to talk pages and other pages which evaluate article content and sources, such as deletion discussions or policy noticeboards.
No, I have no conflict with BNN. Please forgive my fussiness, but I want to make sure you understood the question. I didn't ask if you had a conflict with BNN. I asked if you had a conflict of interest:
Conflict of interest (COI) editing involves contributing to Wikipedia about yourself, family, friends, clients, employers, or your financial and other relationships.
it's also crucial that such evaluations are rooted in verifiable factsI agree. If you read further up the thread, you'll see it's a verifiable fact that BNN has engaged in copyright infringement, so as well as reliability concerns, this site should not be used on Wikipedia per WP:COPYVIO. Barnards.tar.gz ( talk) 15:53, 19 February 2024 (UTC)
The assertion that BNN has engaged in copyright infringement relies on verifiable evidence, not just claims or allegations.Bingo. Barnards.tar.gz ( talk) 16:26, 19 February 2024 (UTC)
The sources are:
Rudolf Steiner joined the Nazi party in its early days—supports the claim that Steiner was a member of the NSDAP.
Was discussed at Talk:Rudolf Steiner#Drop the claim. tgeorgescu ( talk) 06:20, 17 February 2024 (UTC)
Hello all,
I can see that NewsMeter, Newsmeter, newsmeter.in and so on have never been created.
Those or variants are currently used on
If appropriate, please do ask for or perform WP:REVDEL on any or all of this without asking me.
I seek your opinions about this.
Shirt58 ( talk) 🦘 10:33, 20 February 2024 (UTC)
A self-published academic study on the subject of transport makes an important point, published (on Google Docs) in a form acceptable to policy, by a multiply-published expert, see [51] and [52]. I feel that we should include it in the article Low Traffic Neighbourhood, as follows:
In 2022 local elections were held across London. Many candidates had tweeted about LTNs, Labour candidates generally positively, Conservatives generally against; these tweets seemed to make very little difference to the number of votes cast for these candidates. If anything, tweeting positively about LTNs may have increased the number of votes for Labour councillors. Sound and fury? The impact of councillors’ LTN positions on voting behaviour in Greater London. July 2023. Jamie Furlong, Athena Brook, Charlie Hicks, Professor Rachel Aldred. accessed 28 Jan 2024.
Is this source acceptable? Richard Keatinge ( talk) 14:04, 12 February 2024 (UTC)
Self-published expert sources may be considered reliable when produced by an established subject-matter expert, whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable, independent publications(see WP:EXPERTSPS). As co-authors Jamie Furlong and Rachel Aldred are both established experts in the subject of Low Traffic Neighborhoods who have been published in reliable academic sources, on those grounds, this self-published source is a reliable source.
The administrator only vets items for the eligibility of authors/depositors, and valid layout & format. The validity and authenticity of the content of submissions is not checked.so it still counts as a WP:SPS, but given that it clearly passes WP:EXPERTSPS it is at least notionally usable for a brief relatively-uncontroversial sentence like this. -- Aquillion ( talk) 14:23, 16 February 2024 (UTC)