Talk:Fiery furnace (Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego)

Characters section, redirects, etc.
The section of the article entitled "Characters" should eliminated: the link to the article about the characters is sufficient (Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego). Looks like there needs to be a lot of merging of the section and the article first.

Also, many of the notes on this talk page about the various redirects and disambiguations regarding the names of the three youths are impacted by the existence of an article dedicated to them!
 * -- Kace7 (talk) 19:55, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

A note about my goals
I've been interested in the story of the fiery furnace for a while now; I've also been disappointed in Wikipedia's poor coverage of that story for a while. Feeling a bit ambitious, I've decided to spend a little time working on the articles about the story and try to improve things a bit.

The primary pages dealing with the story of the fiery furnace are Hananiah (Book of Daniel), Meshach, Abednego, and fiery furnace.


 * 1) I started by doing some very minor cleanup (more like damage control!) on the pages: improving disambiguation links, introducing the Bibleverse template, adding a See also section to pages, and other small fixes.
 * 2) * The links I added under See also were these: Book of Daniel, Daniel, Hananiah (Book of Daniel), Meshach, Abednego, Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon, The Prayer of Azariah and Song of the Three Holy Children
 * 3) * I also cleaned up two related disambiguation pages, Azariah and Shadrach. They're still both a mess.
 * 4) Then I went around to WikiProjects who I thought might be interested in contributing, and added a note on their Talk page. Some of them have a very obvious connection to the story; others, less so. But because I don't know, for example, whether or not the story has any particular signifance to Quakers, I figure it makes more sense to invite the people who know and let them use their expertise. I'm hoping, in the long run, to bring in a lot of people with expertise in many different backgrounds, and forge a very non-biased and NPOV article.
 * 5) * The projects where I posted a note were these projects: Countering systemic bias in religion, Judaism, Bible, Biblical Criticism, Catholicism 101, Orthodox Judaism, Latter Day Saint movement, Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), Seventh-day Adventist Church, Jehovah's Witnesses
 * 6) * Once the merge takes place and (hopefully) the article starts to grow, I'd like to invite members of WikiProjects outside religion to get more on the cultural impact of this story -- for instance, historical situations where this story has played a role, or references to the story in fiction.
 * 7) For the next step, I'm hoping people come, we merge the articles, and people start adding text and links. I personally don't like to write articles that much. I like cleaning up, fixing typos and broken links, organizing and categorizing, starting stubs -- I don't really like actually writing that much. So I'm hoping people will contribute some raw materials, so to speak, and then I'll help refine it.
 * 8) Crossing projects, I'd like to identify relevant source texts and add them to Wikisource. There's already an entry from Easton's Bible Dictionary for Abednego; I'm sure there are other entries in Easton's, that may or may not already be in Wikisource. Certainly there are other religious dictionaries and encyclopedias which discuss the story. We can also go to primary writings by church fathers, rabbis, and scholars about the story. In addition, whatever hymns and liturgies, etc. relate to the story. And finally, cultural / historical documents about its cultural impact. (These have a lesser chance of being in the public domain and therefore being harder to add.) But I'd like not just to write an in-depth, non-biased article, but to have plenty of source material along with it.
 * 9) Finally, if the stars align the right way, I think it'd be pretty cool to take this all the way up to featured article.

So there, in a nutshell, are my goals for this article. It's like a mini-WikiProject in itself. I'm not sure how well it fits in either of this categories, but maybe we could get it into Collaboration of the week or the Article Improvement Drive. It's obviously not eligible for AID at this point, so maybe I'll submit it as a collabo and see what happens. -- Tetraminoe 14:54, 30 December 2005 (UTC)


 * Update I submitted this page as a collaboration of the week; support here. It needs 5 votes (total) by January 6. --Tetraminoe 10:12, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

Merge
I've copied the text from the pages to be merged, removed the mergefrom template from this page, and blanked the other pages and had them redirect here. I've fixed a few links to avoid the redirect, but there are still several to go. (You can help: see my note on "Pages to watch for redirects" below.) A few notes: --Tetraminoe 10:17, 31 December 2005 (UTC)
 * 1) Mishael used to redirect to Meshach, with a disambig note at the top of the page. I've set Mishael to redirect here and moved the disabig note here.
 * 2) There were 2 interwiki language links to Abednego; I've set them to redirect here.

Merge revisited

 * It appears another candidate for merging with / to this article exists. The article Shadrach, Meshack, and Abednego has much of the same information and was either overlooked or post-dates the previous 'cleanup' efforts when the similar article (slightly different spelling = Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego) was redirected to Fiery furnace back in December of 2005.  I'm not a subject matter expert but perhaps someone with the necessary interest / knowledge could consider a merge of these two articles?  one way or the other? Pugetbill 23:14, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

Wikisource
I have created Easton's Bible Dictionary on Wikisource and created the articles there for Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. I have also created the template WikisourceEBD1897 for use on Wikipedia when referring to EBD entries. --Tetraminoe 13:59, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

Pages to watch for redirects
The following pages should be checked periodically to make sure that links have not been made to the redirect (a double redirect) but directly to this page:
 * Hananiah (Book of Daniel) and Hananiah (book of Daniel)
 * Meshach and Mishael
 * Abednego and Abed-nego

There are also several disambiguation pages related to the story of the fiery furnace. Links to these pages should also be checked periodically to see if they should changed to link directly to this page:
 * Hananiah
 * Shadrach
 * Azariah

--Tetraminoe 10:00, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

Removed the stub notices
I have removed the "stub" notices from this article. One notice was right before a link to the main article and the other was a request for expansion for a list that had already been expanded. meshach 02:20, 18 December 2006 (UTC)