Wikipedia:Peer review/Atheism/archive1

Atheism
I'd like to help bring this article to featured status. Let us know where improvements can be made and what content is lacking. &mdash; BRIAN 0918 &bull; 2007-03-29 20:00Z

Apart from some recent disputes over the lead, which have now been practically resolved, the article is fine. It reads well, is thorough, contains very good images and is exceptionally well referenced. It only needs to be included in a few more categories, and it's ready.--Orthologist 21:52, 29 March 2007 (UTC)
 * I've added more categories, including the ones that contain Category:Atheism, and the ones that are used on the featured German Wikipedia article. &mdash; BRIAN 0918 &bull; 2007-03-30 03:19Z

A very well-done article

Overall I would say it is a very good article. It is well-referenced and makes a good read.

It is mostly about atheism from the point of view of Western religion and tends to overgeneralize when discussing Eastern religions. The article seems to have a limited awareness of the broad diversity of views that exist within Buddhism regarding theism. The notion of all Buddhists being atheists is uncritically accepted by the article, and while this is true for some Buddhists it is not true for all. There are in fact many Buddhist sects that place great importance on the role of various deities. Buddhism in Japan is not the same phenomenon as Buddhism at the mall in the United States.

There was also a lumping together of Hinduism with Buddhism that did not seem to appreciate the differences between them. Hinduism is a profoundly theistic religion, and while there are some atheistic schools, these are a very small minority. The point is that Hinduism is able to accept both theistic and atheistic conceptions as valid spiritual positions.

I rarely say this about Wikipedia articles, but I would say that the section on References is too long. I find specific citations in footnotes to be invaluable, but a long list of general texts that are not specifically cited in the article is less helpful than a short list of the ten best books on the subject to help the reader know what to buy at Amazon if they want to learn more. Can a short reading list be pruned from the forest of general articles? If an article appears in a footnote, does it also need to be cited in the References? Buddhipriya 03:24, 2 April 2007 (UTC)