Talk:Orthodox Tewahedo

Anachronism
"Orthodox Christianity became the established church of the Axumite Kingdom under king Ezana in the 4th century..."

The Coptic/Alexandrian church wasn't in any sense Orthodox (uppercase "O") prior to the Council of Chalcedon. That's like calling 4th century France "Catholic" because it followed the leadership of Rome. These denominational distinctions didn't exist yet. There were just separate patriarchates in a loose communion prior to the various schisms. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kester Nethlo (talk • contribs) 16:34, 14 July 2016 (UTC)

The Orthodox Tewahedo page should NOT BE MERGED with the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church page or the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church page.
The Orthodox Tewahedo page should NOT BE MERGED with the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church page or the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church page. We (both scholars and Ethio-Eritreans) use the term "Orthodox Tewahedo" to refer to both churches at the same time as a collective name. 129.174.182.122 (talk) 00:13, 7 September 2019 (UTC)

Propose disambiguation page
I propose changing this article into a disambiguation page; see Content forking. Apparently this article was created as an effort to prevent POV-warring on the individual churches' articles, but that in itself suggests a POV fork, which is not allowed. It largely duplicates material from either article, but never properly credited them. I'm not sure what else would be covered here that isn't covered in the individual church articles -- the only alternative I can imagine, is to move the content about the churches' shared pre-autocephalic history (prior to 1959) to this article. However, that also implies placing their shared history from 1959-1993 in the Ethiopian Church's article. In any case I don't think we need information overlapping across three articles. -- Gyrofrog (talk) 17:01, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

Perhaps something like this:


 * Orthodox Tewahedo refers to two Oriental Orthodox denominations with shared beliefs, liturgy, and history:
 * Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church
 * Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church
 * The Orthodox Tewahedo biblical canon common to both churches

I suppose this will raise the question of which to list first; I simply used alphabetical order. -- Gyrofrog (talk) 19:14, 12 March 2020 (UTC)


 * I oppose the deletion and disambiguation of the Orthodox Tewahedo article, because Orthodox Tewahedo is the branch of Oriental Orthodoxy that these two denomination are a part of. I don't see this as a content fork, its more of an article that talks about the the tradition these churches come from. Think of it like this, the article for Baptists talks about the history of the branch's tradition rather than being disambiguation page that lists all the Baptist denominations, the article for Anglicans, and other Christian groups are categorized in a similar way as well. ItsLife1 (talk) 18:12, 16 February 2021 (UTC)


 * The edit summary when this article was created says, "created as an amalgamation of two article to stop POV warring". I'm sure the editor had good intentions, but it's still a POV fork. -- Gyrofrog (talk) 22:13, 16 February 2021 (UTC)
 * I support the proposed change. The article is clearly unnecessary. natemup (talk) 23:03, 22 August 2022 (UTC)

I still believe it's better to change this to a disambiguation page, for the reasons I've given. (Another option is to delete it outright, but I think it's better to be able to direct readers to one topic or another.) The only other person to have commented on this was blocked as a sockpuppet. -- Gyrofrog (talk) 14:55, 11 August 2022 (UTC)


 * It occurs to me now (or I'd forgotten that it occurred to me) that the article's creator might have intended to merge both Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church and Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church to this article, which is certainly another option (though I'm not personally inclined toward that).  In any case (and to which I've previously alluded), there's enough redundant content between the two articles that we don't need it again in a third (i.e. this one).  So, again, I lean toward making this a disambig. page.  Also, regarding a previous comment (albeit on behalf of a WP:3X user), I don't see anything in this article nor Oriental Orthodox Church suggesting that Orthodox Tewahedo is a "branch" of Oriental Orthodoxy – at least, not in a de jure sense.  That suggests WP:V / WP:SYNTH issues on top of everything else. -- Gyrofrog (talk) 15:28, 16 August 2022 (UTC)

I went ahead and changed this to a disambiguation page, for the above-given reasons. Again, this was originally a WP:POVFORK (if a well-intentioned one) and (apparently) an incomplete merge. We don't need to maintain the same information in three places; Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church was itself a copy-and-paste WP:CFORK of Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church before the same content was copy-and-pasted here. (I have since indicated the copying, as per WP:RIA, in all three pages' histories and on their respective talk pages.) -- Gyrofrog (talk) 14:04, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

I have modified this categorization as a disambiguation page. The creation of a disambiguation page has raised a flag because there are 395 incoming links to this page, mostly from Template:Books of the Bible, I suspect. In terms of disambiguation, "Orthodox Tewahedo" is not really ambiguous. I've left it as an article with categories: better categorization is welcome. Shhhnotsoloud (talk) 20:26, 1 September 2022 (UTC)


 * Argh... Yeah, I forgot to look at that, and by the time I thought about it you'd already edited the page. I'm looking at the history of that template now, and in the process, I noticed that there was already a Tewahedo Church disambig. page (to which the template used to link - and in which case, the issue you mention presumably existed before FWIW).  The way you've got this page now is still better than it was before - my main concern is the content fork across 3 different articles, and your version still resolves 1 of them (that being the POV fork).  But now I really don't see a need for both this page and Tewahedo Church.  I'd imagine merging that page to this one, whether this is a disambig. page or not. -- Gyrofrog (talk) 23:06, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
 * I hadn't noticed Tewahedo Church. I've taken the bold step of redirecting it to this page. Shhhnotsoloud (talk) 07:43, 2 September 2022 (UTC)