Talk:Origins of Santa Claus

Cleanup tag
After partially cleaning up this page a bit, I added a cleanup-tag to this article, because of several reasons: (1) Doubtful relevance of some of the content: there is a lot of text about the current Sinterklaas-tradition in the Netherlands, and although this obviously related to Santa Claus, one may ask if all of the details present should indeed be written on this page. What, for example, is the relevance of the accusations of Zwarte Pieten as racist, to the origins of Santa Clause? (2) Messy structure: the term pakjesavond gets introduced in the paragraph about Zwarte Pieten (here originally was written 'boxing day', which as far as I can see is just plain wrong as 'boxing day' refers to the 26th of December), (3) a rather unclear, and non-Wikified reference to 'Siefker': who is this Siefker? What is the title of his book? I'd say we could make something better out of this. -- Joost 18:53, 3 November 2006 (UTC)


 * Phyllis Siefker wrote this: http://www.forteantimes.com/articles/118_santan.shtml .  I daresay that a source made public through Fortean Times is of dubioius value, and should perhaps be removed from the article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 58.147.135.147 (talk • contribs) 16:31, 10 December 2006


 * I saw a description of Phyllis Siefker's Santa Claus: Last of the Wild Men as "a spectacularly ill-informed book published by a vanity press";  as such, I feel it to be somewhat... dubious as a source. I have commented out the section in question. -- DS 22:02, 25 December 2006 (UTC)


 * You can't just blank an article section without first discussing it. The information in this section is verifiable in other sources.  -- Thoric 03:08, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

SOURCES NEEDED!
This article is desperately needing sourcing. We should make it a drive to source all the information in it. As it stands right now, there are just 2 sources for the entire thing. --Lendorien 19:13, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Merge with Santa Claus?
Both articles seem incomplete with the other's content. Morganfitzp 06:29, 4 November 2006 (UTC)
 * I think this origins article certainly has enough content to warrant its own article, and I think a merge would create an excessively long article.   Verkhovensky 01:12, 12 November 2006 (UTC)


 * I agree with the previous comment. But, i think that at least in the article "Santa Claus" should be a short introduction to the Article of "Origins of Santa Claus", or a short part saying its most important. -- Emmi Green 13:32, 12 December 2006 (USH)(University Sacred Heart) Puerto Rico -- —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.45.9.255 (talk • contribs) 17:32, 12 December 2006


 * I have to agree with the two previous comments. I was just looking for exactly this kind of article, not the more general article, and was very, very surprised to a suggestion the two articles be merged.  Seems like overkill; a short paragraph on the main page, with a link to this page, would done the job fine. -- Ratufa 01:47, 25 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Both should be merged. It's quite obvious. And it's quite normative for wikipedia, which has long articles. It would still not be one of the longer ones. And who cares about length anyway?! Hello, we have computers. Scrolling is nothing. Since it is organized, the problem is moot. The real problem is looking for something in the first place and finding it's not there, and then looking some more, and then thinking, oh, it must be at such-n-such particular link. Wake up, people. Think reasonably and organisationally. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.72.95.21 (talk • contribs) 22:25, 26 December 2006


 * "quite obvious"? Well, obviously not, given the previous three comments; it depends entirely on why a given person might look up Santa Claus on Wikipedia. And if it really was obvious, the previous poster would have been able to give a reason.  "Scrolling is nothing" is not a reason; heck, you could put all of wikipedia on one page and just do a screen search.  For someone who ends their comment with "Think reasonably and organisationally," I would have expected more than handwaving.  But obviously someone went ahead and did merge the two articles, so some useful work is lost for no real purpose.  There's more than enough work to do on wikipedia than to focus on doing a merge of questionable value.  What a waste. (And, no, I did not contribute to the page; I am merely someone who actually did find it useful.  But why pay attention to end users, when someone has declared a wikinorm which apparently overrides that sort of consideration?) Ratufa 23:38, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

St. Nicholas was real?
What's the source on this? I've heard that there was actually never a historical person named St. Nicholas as a bishop. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Abdul Muhib (talk • contribs) 01:29, 25 November 2006
 * You're just hearing things. What's your source that there was no bishop? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.72.95.21 (talk • contribs) 22:27, 26 December 2006

What he said