![]() | This page was nominated for deletion on 2008-03-11. The result of the discussion was Speedy Keep/Mark as failed proposal. |
Hello, I suppose the best way to open discussion is to see roughly what the views in regards to this issue are at present; to phrase this differently: could I have a show of hands?
Clinkophonist ( talk) 18:31, 24 February 2008 (UTC)
I like the idea here, but nearly every section of the Western World's oldest and most published and continually read book is arguable notable under our WP:N guidelines, so I don't see this rule actually meaning anything.
But WP:POVFORKs are bad. We should have a rule leaning towards keeping content in youe "second list," and having "chapter articles" and "book articles" table of content listings point readers primarily to those thematic articles, so the weight is on editors to justify the fork. -- Kendrick7 talk 19:25, 24 February 2008 (UTC)
This issue needs to be addressed differently for the New Testament (where chapter and division were the work of Stephanas) from the Old Testament where generally they are ancient. My comments are thus primarily addressed to the New Testament. Some chapters are meaningful sections, but they can be a hindrance to interpretation. For example, 1 Cor. 13 (the much quoted chapter on love) is the middle of a long section 1 Cor. 12-14, which is all concerned with spiritual gifts; thus the chapter breaks are a hindrance to good exegesis.
In my opinion, there should be an article on the Bible and the books of the Bible, but everything else seems pointless. I am appalled that there are articles on a scant two or three verses. Merge all of those verses back into the book from which they came and have a section called notable verses. That should do the trick. - LA @ 22:06, 24 February 2008 (UTC)
Every individual chapter--indeed, every individual verse--of the Bible and Koran and similar sources has had centuries of criticism, and I doubt there is a single chapter for which literally hundred of commentaries in RSs could not be found , from multiple points of view. The intrinsic nature of Holy Scripture and the reliance of traditional communities upon it as a basis for organization and action, as well as speculation, has provided material for this. Such discussions have normally been organised in recent centuries by chapters and verse in the Christian tradition. They have always been organised by similar units in the Muslim tradition. If I can ever get free of the debate over whether characters in notable fiction should have articles, I'll do some examples. I think enough editors could be assembled to gradually do all of at least the two scriptures I've mentioned.
The use of larger units can be relevant as well, as a supplement. For parshas and lectionaries and the like they would normally be contents articles. But in most cases there would be some discussion in the literature over the basis for the divisions, which are not usually arbitrary.
How to handle thematic pericopes will obviously depend on their importance. I can see instances where it might be appropriate to use them instead of verses, or in addition. For the key example mentioned first, each individual phrase in the parable has given rise to considerable interpretation on its own. The various views on Jesus' writing in the sand alone would make a long article.
DGG ( talk) 18:03, 26 February 2008 (UTC)
There is a substantial volume of academic criticism covering the works of Shakespeare, centuries even. I doubt there is a single manuscript page of his for which literally hundreds of commentaries couldn't be found, for multiple points of view. But that's irrelevant - its a red herring. Encyclopedias don't discuss his works on a page-by-page basis; they cover them on a subject-by-subject/scene-by-scene basis. Clinkophonist ( talk) 11:36, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
As far as I can tell, every tiny snippet of the bible will be proven to be notable under the general notability guideline. Each will have been the subject of multiple non-trivial mentions in reliable secondary sources. It's been around and read by millions annually for a couple thousand years. It has been studied and entire books written analyzing it. All parts of it. There are numerous books that do nothing but take each verse of the bible and analyze it, probably in every spoken language. This is an entire field of scholarly discipline. This proposal is rediculous. My briefest look for sources yields hundreds each possible single verse of the bible, all of these sources I am referring to would be certainly be considered reliable. Jerry talk ¤ count/logs 23:33, 26 February 2008 (UTC)
There may be hundreds of sources for every single verse - but this is irrelevant. That doesn't mean there should be chapter-by-chapter articles any more than there should be articles on an every 5 verses-by-every 5 verses basis. And the latter is clearly ridiculous. The chapter-by-chapter division is no different. The chapters weren't there to start with - they had no significance to the authors - they are meaningless divisions, based more on "how many verses have we had so far" than "where does this bit of the story end". Clinkophonist ( talk) 11:40, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
Comparing lectionary bits and chapters of the Bible (not "bible") with famous structures and their street addresses is that the street addresses aren't prominent. Although the chapters aren't always divided in the best places (look at I Corinthians 12/13), they're the basis by which virtually everyone has looked at the Bible in recent centuries. This isn't to say that we can't have separate articles on different sections, such as the woman-caught-in-adultery mentioned above, but (1) that's not a story that fits properly into any chapter, being parts of two chapters, and (2) it's well known by itself, rather than by the long "John 7:53-8:11 (?)" name. Go look at prominent modern commentaries — although they normally cover in one piece a section that spans chapters, they're generally based on chapters. What's more, almost all chapter divisions and contents (aside from minor textual questions, such as Mark 14:30) are firmly fixed; to implement a change of chapter divisions in the Bible would be harder than changing almost anything else in society, since billions of people use the Bible. There's no question of notability for individual chapters of the Bible, and abandoning the chapter-based system of articles has no real need to be changed for other reasons either. Nyttend ( talk) 01:05, 27 February 2008 (UTC)
The key thing about a commentary is that it is not an encyclopedia. Conversely, Wikipedia is an Encyclopedia, not a guide/textbook (see WP:NOT).
My point was that chapters aren't inherently prominent either, just like street addresses. 1 Chronicles 2, for example, is the middle third of a genealogy - there's nothing particularly significant about the third on its own, rather than elements of it or the genealogy as a whole. Isaiah 35 starts with a sentence that doesn't even make sense unless you include the previous chapter - it refers to a "them" without saying who "they" are; it begins half way through something.
And if commentaries don't 100% of the time cover the bible in a strictly chapter-by-chapter basis, and instead have a dedicated section for things that span chapters, then they too agree with my proposal - articles should be about topics not chapters. The dedicated section is a section split by topic, not by chapter. And by spanning the border between two chapters, they are agreeing that the chapter division itself is NOT an appropriate place to put the division between two articles.
As for "changes" in the chapter divisions, they already exist. There are subtle differences in the arrangement of chapters between the Roman Catholic and Protestant bible translations - the psalms are numbered quite differently, for example (what the Roman Catholics call Psalm 113 is actually Psalm 114 AND Psalm 115 to the Protestants). Clinkophonist ( talk) 11:52, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
Many chapter divisions are pretty random, and quite apart from the textual issues (and Nyttend's example of Mark 14:30 is far from unique) there is very little commentary that actually addresses chapters as whole and discrete elements: people write books, dissertations and papers about books and pericopes (and events, individuals and themes), but not about individual chapters as such.
Rigorous application of policy, as DGG and Jerry point out, would give grounds for individual articles on each verse, and even on each word (in a variety of languages, at that), but this is an argument for having articles by verse and word, not for having articles by chapter.
I can see that it would make a great deal of sense to have individual articles by book and by pericope, with chapter and lectionary divisions as sets of lists, linking to the articles on individual pericopes where appropriate. Wikipedia is supposed to be an encyclopedia, not a Bible commentary or a devotional resource.
The only problem is that this would be entirely impractical, given how wikipedia works - random editors would soon be boldly chipping away at the structure imposed, sapping the hard-won consensus (hypothetically hard-won: in actual fact it isn't likely to be won at all by the looks of things).
In light of this, and by analogy with
WP:CLS, I don't see that it shouldn't be possible to keep chapters, lections and pericopes (
WP:CLP?), as long as there isn't too much content overlap and there's plenty of interlinking between general summaries and comments (by chapter), traditional interpretations and homiletic uses (by lection), and textual and other scholarly issues (by pericope). --
Paularblaster (
talk) 22:48, 28 February 2008 (UTC) --
Paularblaster (
talk)
10:02, 29 February 2008 (UTC)
There are clearly elements of practicality with bold editors, but there are with all policies and guidelines - every now and then, there are transgressions. But the thing about having a policy/guideline is that it is a lot easier to clean up the mess afterwards, than it is without them. Clinkophonist ( talk) 11:59, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
Something to be re-established, in light of the continuing "every bit of the Bible is notable" is that the issue here isn't the notability of parts of the Bible below the level of individual books: the question at issue is how best to reflect the notability of smaller sections in an encyclopedic way. -- Paularblaster ( talk) 20:49, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
The individual books of the bible are notable, because as far as anyone knows (and modulo the synoptic problem) these divisions have always existed. The chapter/verse division, however, is a later and somewhat arbitrary reference scheme. Writing an article on the fifty-fifth chapter of Isaiah is like writing an article on the 28th parallel of latitude: we need these markers to find our way around, but they don't have any other intrinsic significance.
As far as the lectionary is concerned, the driving issue is the days to which the readings are assigned. In both the west and the east there are certain "ordinary" Sundays which are named and have specific subjects (e.g. the "gismas"), but the lectionary is far from a fixed or commonly agreed upon thing. We are at this time going through the introduction of a new lectionary in the west which substitutes not only different readings for the Sundays after Pentecost, but which offers two sets of readings for each Sunday in the three year cycle. As far as I know, it's going to be impossible to write properly cited articles on each of the six possibilities (plus the three possibilities from the predecessor lectionary, and so forth); an article on the 15th Sunday after Pentecost (which isn't even named that way in all traditions) is going to be a structureless assemblage of unrelated traditions.
The third problem is that as the level of detail increases in these articles, the level of disagreement also increases. We already have the problem that articles even on the big subjects are biased towards Catholic and Orthodox expositions, even though in English-speaking lands Catholics are a minority (though admittedly large) and the Orthodox are a statistical blip; the American evangelical majority is poorly expressed. When we get to individual chapters and verses, opinions tend to devolve into preacher-by-preacher exegesis. There is something to be said for keeping the Jewish lectionary articles, especially since the divisions have names rather than numbers. For the Christians, the divisions are just mileposts, and nothing more. Mangoe ( talk) 15:55, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
Two points that occur to me, reading the guidelines and discussion. — Quasirandom ( talk) 20:51, 9 March 2008 (UTC)
The proposal is essentially a massive AfD. The main argument for the AfD is that all of the usual policy arguments Wikipedia normally accepts in AfDs -- notability, reliability and depth of sourcing, etc. -- should not be permitted to prevail, for the sole reason that "other encyclopedias don't include" articles of the disputed type.
So what? Why is what other encyclopedias do a good argument? Wikipedia is different from other encyclopedias. And it's supposed to be that way. Wikipedia is not paper. Wikipedia routinely covers topics in depth not covered in other encyclopedias. The Wikipedia community has repeatedly affirmed that it wants to keep articles on hundreds of thousands of topics from individual Pokeman and Star Trek characters to in-depth families of articles on television series. In doing so, the community has regularly rejected arguments that because other encyclopedias don't have these things Wikipedia shouldn't either. If you want to make a general argument that Wikipedia's deletion policy should be changed to make Wikipedia more like other encyclopedias, you're welcome, but if you can't get the community to change its general philosophy of what Wikipedia should be like, it doesn't seem appropriate to argue for such a repeately rejected approach here, and present it as if it should trump arguments that the Wikipedia community has said are the ones that are supposed to be used in AfD-type discussions. One of the arguments given for deletion was that while Bible commentators typically organize their commentaries by chapter, "encyclopedias don't". But Wikipedia's sourced-based approach and emphasis on "sticking to the sources" encourages organizing articles in a way that makes it easy to link them to supporting reliable sources. Because unlike other encyclopedias, Wikipedia doesn't depend on experts writing articles who are in a position to totally reorganize things in a way different from the underlying sources, sticking to the sources on organization matters makes both article-writing and enforcing verification and related policies easier. Why shouldn't it be acceptable?
As was said at the AfDs for these articles, standard Wikipedia inclusion criteria are easily satisfied here because the fact of the matter is, both individual Bible chapters and the lectionaries of major denominations are virtually all notable and their notability is generally very easy to establish. Other encyclopedias have their criteria, but Wikipedia has its. Best, -- Shirahadasha ( talk) 02:43, 11 March 2008 (UTC)
Wikipedia:WikiProject Bible exists for discussions about how to oganize Bible articles. There is no need to create an entire new page just make and discuss a single proposal about a single aspect of Bible article organization. I would urge the author of this proposal to discuss it through regular channels. Best, -- Shirahadasha ( talk) 02:00, 11 March 2008 (UTC)
Several editors in the previous AfD proposed creating a notability guideline for Bible articles, something like Wikipedia:Notability (Bible articles). The current proposal doesn't seem to be a notability guideline. But a notability guideline would definitely be a legitimate policy-space proposal. Right now, if this proposal were reformulated as a notability guideline, it would seem to consist of a single sentence:
Individual Bible chapters and verses are not notable.
I think this sentence summarizes the entire proposal and also makes it clear that the proposal is an override of rather than a supplement to standard notability criteria, prohibiting the fallback to default criteria that other notability criteria generally permit. One might also want a notability to guideline to address various other issues.
Is this what's intended? Would it be possible to rewrite this proposal in the form of a proposed notability guideline? If so I'll withdraw the MfD whether I agree with the proposal or not. Best, -- Shirahadasha ( talk) 03:29, 11 March 2008 (UTC)
![]() | This page was nominated for deletion on 2008-03-11. The result of the discussion was Speedy Keep/Mark as failed proposal. |
Hello, I suppose the best way to open discussion is to see roughly what the views in regards to this issue are at present; to phrase this differently: could I have a show of hands?
Clinkophonist ( talk) 18:31, 24 February 2008 (UTC)
I like the idea here, but nearly every section of the Western World's oldest and most published and continually read book is arguable notable under our WP:N guidelines, so I don't see this rule actually meaning anything.
But WP:POVFORKs are bad. We should have a rule leaning towards keeping content in youe "second list," and having "chapter articles" and "book articles" table of content listings point readers primarily to those thematic articles, so the weight is on editors to justify the fork. -- Kendrick7 talk 19:25, 24 February 2008 (UTC)
This issue needs to be addressed differently for the New Testament (where chapter and division were the work of Stephanas) from the Old Testament where generally they are ancient. My comments are thus primarily addressed to the New Testament. Some chapters are meaningful sections, but they can be a hindrance to interpretation. For example, 1 Cor. 13 (the much quoted chapter on love) is the middle of a long section 1 Cor. 12-14, which is all concerned with spiritual gifts; thus the chapter breaks are a hindrance to good exegesis.
In my opinion, there should be an article on the Bible and the books of the Bible, but everything else seems pointless. I am appalled that there are articles on a scant two or three verses. Merge all of those verses back into the book from which they came and have a section called notable verses. That should do the trick. - LA @ 22:06, 24 February 2008 (UTC)
Every individual chapter--indeed, every individual verse--of the Bible and Koran and similar sources has had centuries of criticism, and I doubt there is a single chapter for which literally hundred of commentaries in RSs could not be found , from multiple points of view. The intrinsic nature of Holy Scripture and the reliance of traditional communities upon it as a basis for organization and action, as well as speculation, has provided material for this. Such discussions have normally been organised in recent centuries by chapters and verse in the Christian tradition. They have always been organised by similar units in the Muslim tradition. If I can ever get free of the debate over whether characters in notable fiction should have articles, I'll do some examples. I think enough editors could be assembled to gradually do all of at least the two scriptures I've mentioned.
The use of larger units can be relevant as well, as a supplement. For parshas and lectionaries and the like they would normally be contents articles. But in most cases there would be some discussion in the literature over the basis for the divisions, which are not usually arbitrary.
How to handle thematic pericopes will obviously depend on their importance. I can see instances where it might be appropriate to use them instead of verses, or in addition. For the key example mentioned first, each individual phrase in the parable has given rise to considerable interpretation on its own. The various views on Jesus' writing in the sand alone would make a long article.
DGG ( talk) 18:03, 26 February 2008 (UTC)
There is a substantial volume of academic criticism covering the works of Shakespeare, centuries even. I doubt there is a single manuscript page of his for which literally hundreds of commentaries couldn't be found, for multiple points of view. But that's irrelevant - its a red herring. Encyclopedias don't discuss his works on a page-by-page basis; they cover them on a subject-by-subject/scene-by-scene basis. Clinkophonist ( talk) 11:36, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
As far as I can tell, every tiny snippet of the bible will be proven to be notable under the general notability guideline. Each will have been the subject of multiple non-trivial mentions in reliable secondary sources. It's been around and read by millions annually for a couple thousand years. It has been studied and entire books written analyzing it. All parts of it. There are numerous books that do nothing but take each verse of the bible and analyze it, probably in every spoken language. This is an entire field of scholarly discipline. This proposal is rediculous. My briefest look for sources yields hundreds each possible single verse of the bible, all of these sources I am referring to would be certainly be considered reliable. Jerry talk ¤ count/logs 23:33, 26 February 2008 (UTC)
There may be hundreds of sources for every single verse - but this is irrelevant. That doesn't mean there should be chapter-by-chapter articles any more than there should be articles on an every 5 verses-by-every 5 verses basis. And the latter is clearly ridiculous. The chapter-by-chapter division is no different. The chapters weren't there to start with - they had no significance to the authors - they are meaningless divisions, based more on "how many verses have we had so far" than "where does this bit of the story end". Clinkophonist ( talk) 11:40, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
Comparing lectionary bits and chapters of the Bible (not "bible") with famous structures and their street addresses is that the street addresses aren't prominent. Although the chapters aren't always divided in the best places (look at I Corinthians 12/13), they're the basis by which virtually everyone has looked at the Bible in recent centuries. This isn't to say that we can't have separate articles on different sections, such as the woman-caught-in-adultery mentioned above, but (1) that's not a story that fits properly into any chapter, being parts of two chapters, and (2) it's well known by itself, rather than by the long "John 7:53-8:11 (?)" name. Go look at prominent modern commentaries — although they normally cover in one piece a section that spans chapters, they're generally based on chapters. What's more, almost all chapter divisions and contents (aside from minor textual questions, such as Mark 14:30) are firmly fixed; to implement a change of chapter divisions in the Bible would be harder than changing almost anything else in society, since billions of people use the Bible. There's no question of notability for individual chapters of the Bible, and abandoning the chapter-based system of articles has no real need to be changed for other reasons either. Nyttend ( talk) 01:05, 27 February 2008 (UTC)
The key thing about a commentary is that it is not an encyclopedia. Conversely, Wikipedia is an Encyclopedia, not a guide/textbook (see WP:NOT).
My point was that chapters aren't inherently prominent either, just like street addresses. 1 Chronicles 2, for example, is the middle third of a genealogy - there's nothing particularly significant about the third on its own, rather than elements of it or the genealogy as a whole. Isaiah 35 starts with a sentence that doesn't even make sense unless you include the previous chapter - it refers to a "them" without saying who "they" are; it begins half way through something.
And if commentaries don't 100% of the time cover the bible in a strictly chapter-by-chapter basis, and instead have a dedicated section for things that span chapters, then they too agree with my proposal - articles should be about topics not chapters. The dedicated section is a section split by topic, not by chapter. And by spanning the border between two chapters, they are agreeing that the chapter division itself is NOT an appropriate place to put the division between two articles.
As for "changes" in the chapter divisions, they already exist. There are subtle differences in the arrangement of chapters between the Roman Catholic and Protestant bible translations - the psalms are numbered quite differently, for example (what the Roman Catholics call Psalm 113 is actually Psalm 114 AND Psalm 115 to the Protestants). Clinkophonist ( talk) 11:52, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
Many chapter divisions are pretty random, and quite apart from the textual issues (and Nyttend's example of Mark 14:30 is far from unique) there is very little commentary that actually addresses chapters as whole and discrete elements: people write books, dissertations and papers about books and pericopes (and events, individuals and themes), but not about individual chapters as such.
Rigorous application of policy, as DGG and Jerry point out, would give grounds for individual articles on each verse, and even on each word (in a variety of languages, at that), but this is an argument for having articles by verse and word, not for having articles by chapter.
I can see that it would make a great deal of sense to have individual articles by book and by pericope, with chapter and lectionary divisions as sets of lists, linking to the articles on individual pericopes where appropriate. Wikipedia is supposed to be an encyclopedia, not a Bible commentary or a devotional resource.
The only problem is that this would be entirely impractical, given how wikipedia works - random editors would soon be boldly chipping away at the structure imposed, sapping the hard-won consensus (hypothetically hard-won: in actual fact it isn't likely to be won at all by the looks of things).
In light of this, and by analogy with
WP:CLS, I don't see that it shouldn't be possible to keep chapters, lections and pericopes (
WP:CLP?), as long as there isn't too much content overlap and there's plenty of interlinking between general summaries and comments (by chapter), traditional interpretations and homiletic uses (by lection), and textual and other scholarly issues (by pericope). --
Paularblaster (
talk) 22:48, 28 February 2008 (UTC) --
Paularblaster (
talk)
10:02, 29 February 2008 (UTC)
There are clearly elements of practicality with bold editors, but there are with all policies and guidelines - every now and then, there are transgressions. But the thing about having a policy/guideline is that it is a lot easier to clean up the mess afterwards, than it is without them. Clinkophonist ( talk) 11:59, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
Something to be re-established, in light of the continuing "every bit of the Bible is notable" is that the issue here isn't the notability of parts of the Bible below the level of individual books: the question at issue is how best to reflect the notability of smaller sections in an encyclopedic way. -- Paularblaster ( talk) 20:49, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
The individual books of the bible are notable, because as far as anyone knows (and modulo the synoptic problem) these divisions have always existed. The chapter/verse division, however, is a later and somewhat arbitrary reference scheme. Writing an article on the fifty-fifth chapter of Isaiah is like writing an article on the 28th parallel of latitude: we need these markers to find our way around, but they don't have any other intrinsic significance.
As far as the lectionary is concerned, the driving issue is the days to which the readings are assigned. In both the west and the east there are certain "ordinary" Sundays which are named and have specific subjects (e.g. the "gismas"), but the lectionary is far from a fixed or commonly agreed upon thing. We are at this time going through the introduction of a new lectionary in the west which substitutes not only different readings for the Sundays after Pentecost, but which offers two sets of readings for each Sunday in the three year cycle. As far as I know, it's going to be impossible to write properly cited articles on each of the six possibilities (plus the three possibilities from the predecessor lectionary, and so forth); an article on the 15th Sunday after Pentecost (which isn't even named that way in all traditions) is going to be a structureless assemblage of unrelated traditions.
The third problem is that as the level of detail increases in these articles, the level of disagreement also increases. We already have the problem that articles even on the big subjects are biased towards Catholic and Orthodox expositions, even though in English-speaking lands Catholics are a minority (though admittedly large) and the Orthodox are a statistical blip; the American evangelical majority is poorly expressed. When we get to individual chapters and verses, opinions tend to devolve into preacher-by-preacher exegesis. There is something to be said for keeping the Jewish lectionary articles, especially since the divisions have names rather than numbers. For the Christians, the divisions are just mileposts, and nothing more. Mangoe ( talk) 15:55, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
Two points that occur to me, reading the guidelines and discussion. — Quasirandom ( talk) 20:51, 9 March 2008 (UTC)
The proposal is essentially a massive AfD. The main argument for the AfD is that all of the usual policy arguments Wikipedia normally accepts in AfDs -- notability, reliability and depth of sourcing, etc. -- should not be permitted to prevail, for the sole reason that "other encyclopedias don't include" articles of the disputed type.
So what? Why is what other encyclopedias do a good argument? Wikipedia is different from other encyclopedias. And it's supposed to be that way. Wikipedia is not paper. Wikipedia routinely covers topics in depth not covered in other encyclopedias. The Wikipedia community has repeatedly affirmed that it wants to keep articles on hundreds of thousands of topics from individual Pokeman and Star Trek characters to in-depth families of articles on television series. In doing so, the community has regularly rejected arguments that because other encyclopedias don't have these things Wikipedia shouldn't either. If you want to make a general argument that Wikipedia's deletion policy should be changed to make Wikipedia more like other encyclopedias, you're welcome, but if you can't get the community to change its general philosophy of what Wikipedia should be like, it doesn't seem appropriate to argue for such a repeately rejected approach here, and present it as if it should trump arguments that the Wikipedia community has said are the ones that are supposed to be used in AfD-type discussions. One of the arguments given for deletion was that while Bible commentators typically organize their commentaries by chapter, "encyclopedias don't". But Wikipedia's sourced-based approach and emphasis on "sticking to the sources" encourages organizing articles in a way that makes it easy to link them to supporting reliable sources. Because unlike other encyclopedias, Wikipedia doesn't depend on experts writing articles who are in a position to totally reorganize things in a way different from the underlying sources, sticking to the sources on organization matters makes both article-writing and enforcing verification and related policies easier. Why shouldn't it be acceptable?
As was said at the AfDs for these articles, standard Wikipedia inclusion criteria are easily satisfied here because the fact of the matter is, both individual Bible chapters and the lectionaries of major denominations are virtually all notable and their notability is generally very easy to establish. Other encyclopedias have their criteria, but Wikipedia has its. Best, -- Shirahadasha ( talk) 02:43, 11 March 2008 (UTC)
Wikipedia:WikiProject Bible exists for discussions about how to oganize Bible articles. There is no need to create an entire new page just make and discuss a single proposal about a single aspect of Bible article organization. I would urge the author of this proposal to discuss it through regular channels. Best, -- Shirahadasha ( talk) 02:00, 11 March 2008 (UTC)
Several editors in the previous AfD proposed creating a notability guideline for Bible articles, something like Wikipedia:Notability (Bible articles). The current proposal doesn't seem to be a notability guideline. But a notability guideline would definitely be a legitimate policy-space proposal. Right now, if this proposal were reformulated as a notability guideline, it would seem to consist of a single sentence:
Individual Bible chapters and verses are not notable.
I think this sentence summarizes the entire proposal and also makes it clear that the proposal is an override of rather than a supplement to standard notability criteria, prohibiting the fallback to default criteria that other notability criteria generally permit. One might also want a notability to guideline to address various other issues.
Is this what's intended? Would it be possible to rewrite this proposal in the form of a proposed notability guideline? If so I'll withdraw the MfD whether I agree with the proposal or not. Best, -- Shirahadasha ( talk) 03:29, 11 March 2008 (UTC)