Talk:Deism in England and France in the 18th century

Proposal to refactor the deism articles
The wikipedia article on deism has grown overly large and very messy.

Today I refactored the article on deism so that it now has 4 basic sections on: overview, features, classical deism, and contemporary deism.

In the process, I discovered that there is a relatively new article, Deism in England and France in the 18th century, that has a considerable overlap with the first 3 sections of discussion of the article on deism. I could find no comparable wikipedia article on contemporary deism or modern deism.

I propose that the current wikipedia articles on deism should be rationalized and refactored so that they have this structure:
 * a VERY short article on deism. This article would provide a little introductory/overview material, and act as a disambiguation page for...
 * an article on classical deism
 * an article on modern deism

I think the mechanics of this change could be done this way.


 * 1) create a new article on modern deism and move most of the material on contemporary deism in the deism article into it.  In the deism article, leave only a pointer/reference to the new modern deism article.
 * 2) create a new article on classical deism
 * 3) move the material Deism in England and France in the 18th century into the new article on classical deism. In the Deism in England and France in the 18th century article, leave only a pointer/reference to the new classical deism article.
 * 4) move (and merge) most of the material on classical deism in the deism article into new article on classical deism.  In the deism article, leave only a pointer/reference to the new classical deism article.

If people think this would be a good idea, or at least have no objections, I would be willing to do this work.

If I were to do this, my goal in step 4 would be to merge text from the deism and Deism in England and France in the 18th century articles into the new classical deism in a way that preserves most of the text of both sources. Then we could let the normal wikipedia evolutionary/editorial process take over and smooth out the merged text until it becomes one focussed text.

So, I have a request for comment:

StephenFerg (talk) 17:08, 11 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Question: How much is likely to be said about "classical deism" that lies outside the scope of Deism in England and France in the 18th century? That article is already 30kb long - which is about the size at which one would start to consider splitting it up.  If you merge it into a bunch more material about classical deism - then the resulting article would (presumably) be large enough that the immediate next move would be to split it up some more.  If that's the case, then where would the natural split be?  It seems more than likely that a split of 'classical deism' might well fall in a manner where it would make sense to keep the present article. SteveBaker (talk) 18:07, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

England, or British Isles?
Does the article exclude anybody born in or with parents from Wales, Scotland or Ireland? Belle Fast (talk) 17:09, 5 September 2023 (UTC)