Wikipedia:Peer review/List of sects in the Latter Day Saint movement/archive1

List of sects in the Latter Day Saint movement

 * This peer review discussion has been closed.

This peer review discussion has been closed. I've listed this article for peer review because I believe that this list has improved greatly over the last few months. An example of this work is that all listed churches now have verifiable citations, in order to allow for quick and easy removal of the “Fake” churches that get listed from time to time (see as example). After the work of a number of editors, I believe this list deserves to be elevated to a Featured list. I would like input on any necessary improvements. Thanks, --ARTEST4ECHO talk 17:24, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: This is an interesting list with lots of detail. It's certainly broad in coverage, and it might be comprehensive. However, the existing list does not conform to Manual of Style guidelines in several ways. Here are suggestions for improvement:


 * To avoid starting every list with "this is a list", editors have been moving recently toward a more natural and specific opening for lists. See for example List of Archbishops of Canterbury or List of Church of England dioceses.


 * Double-bolding is a no-no, per WP:MOSBOLD. Using bolding in the first line and then linking Latter Day Saint movement causes double bolding. If you rewrite the opening sentence, the problem there may go away. On the other hand, the double bolding, such as Church of Christ in the body of the tables should be eliminated. A straight link, Church of Christ, will produce ordinary bolding.


 * Bolding for emphasis is generally deprecated except in certain instances explained by WP:MOSBOLD. Phrases like "Before the schism" in the "Categorizing the churches" section should not be bolded. For emphasis, you can sometimes use italics.


 * The Manual of Style deprecates lists that can readily be rendered as prose. I believe the four bolded items in "Categorizing the churches" would work better as four paragraphs of prose. WP:MOS has details.


 * Much of the single bolding of text in the body of the tables violates the MOSBOLD guideline as well. In the "Notes" column of the Church of Christ table, for example, "Church of the Latter Day Saints" should not be bolded. The underlying reason for limiting bolding is that too much of it defeats its purpose, which is to attract attention.


 * Wikipedia heads and subheads use a telegraphic style as much as possible. Usually "a", "an", and "the" are not used as the first word of a head or subhead. Thus "The Church of Christ" would be better as "Church of Christ". Instead of using "churches" repeatedly, many of the heads and subheads could be truncated. For example, since a head says "Prairie Saint churches", there's no reason to repeat "churches" in the subheads; i.e., "Josephite churches" could be shortened to "Josephite" with no loss of meaning.

Lead
 * "Each of these still retains a following today—however small it may currently be in some cases—and all of their organizations have experienced further schisms of their own." - Generally, it's a good idea to replace words like "today" and "currently" with something more specific. It might be "as of 2010" or, if you don't want to have to change the number as each year goes by, you might say "in the 21st century".

Categorizing the churches
 * "Terms such as "Josephite" or "Brighamite", used by some Latter Day Saints as a moniker for the Community of Christ and Utah LDS churches respectively, are sometimes also used to distinguish groups of sects sharing a common ancestry and basic beliefs from others sharing a different provenance, with no offense intended by their use (as has been the case sometimes in the past, when these terms were often used in a pejorative sense)." - Too complex. This would be better if re-written as two separate sentences.

Rocky Mountain Saint churches
 * "Web site: lds.org." - Linking directly from the main text to external sources is a no-no. It's better to use an in-line citation to the source. Ditto for houseofaaron.org. later in the article. Ditto Web site: cofchrist.org. and any others in the main text. If you don't want to use in-line citations for these, they could appear in an "External links" section.

Mormon fundamentalist churches
 * "The community of Bountiful was split nearly in half, with about 700 people continue following Blackmore." - Doesn't quite make sense as written.

Josephite churches
 * Numbers with four or more digits need comma separators. I fixed a fair number of these in the upper sections, but I'm leaving the rest to you.

References
 * The three items at the top should be cited in the main text in order to be included in this section. If they are not directly cited, they should appear in a separate section(s), perhaps External links or Bibliography or Further reading.
 * Many of the citations are incomplete or malformed. Citations to Internet sources need author, title, publisher, date of publication, url, and date of most recent access, if these are known or can be found. Book citations have other requirements. WP:CIT might be helpful in sorting this out; I find the "cite" family of templates to be useful for some articles.
 * What makes sources like adherents.com or religiousfacts.com reliable per WP:RS?
 * The date formatting in the citations should be consistent. Since the article is U.S.-centric, m-d-y would be fine.

Images
 * Lists often include images. It shouldn't be hard to find some that would fit this list.

Other
 * The tools in the toolbox at the top of this review page find one dead url in the citations and one disambiguation problem.

I hope these suggestions prove helpful. If so, please consider reviewing another article, especially one from the PR backlog at WP:PR. That is where I found this one. Finetooth (talk) 04:07, 17 June 2010 (UTC)
 * I have begun to implement your review (I was offline all last week). However, I need some clarification.  What do you mean by "The Manual of Style deprecates lists that can readily be rendered as prose".  I simply do not understand what you mean.  I have read  [WP:MOS#Bulleted and numbered lists] and still don't get what you mean.  It's not that I disagree, I just don't understand.


 * If it looks possible to me to use straight prose rather than a bulleted or numbered list, I try it to see if I can do it. It could be done in this case by writing "The Latter Day Saint churches can be grouped into several divisions and subdivisions. In the tables below, 'Before the schism' refers to Joseph Smith's original church and those bodies that broke with him during his lifetime. 'Rocky Mountain Saint' churches, sometimes called 'Brighamite' or 'Mormon,' trace their leadership to Brigham Young. 'Prairie Saint' churches reject Young's leadership in favor of some other claimant. 'Independent' churches do not trace their doctrinal or priesthood lineage to any 19th-century Latter Day Saint faction but still hold Latter Day Saint beliefs. 'Self-originated' branches started independent of any Rocky Mountain or Prairie Saint organization."

All of the other information in this list can be deleted because it's repeated in the tables. Finetooth (talk) 18:52, 21 June 2010 (UTC)
 * I think I see what you’re saying. That it's better to write this out like you would say them rather then have lists.  However, I don't think I agree that this applies here.  I think the way it is now has much more information as to how these groups are divided up.  It took a great deal of back and forth to get a consensus on how to divide up the groups and the list helps people know where to put new groups as they are found.  I will however, put this section onto the talk page in order to get comments as I do value your input and the input of other.  I am the first to admit I may be wrong..--ARTEST4ECHO talk 19:13, 21 June 2010 (UTC)


 * As to "What makes sources like adherents.com or religiousfacts.com reliable per WP:RS"? I'm not sure how to answer this other than saying that when doing my own resurach into thes groups both adherents.com or religiousfacts.com apear as sources in independent books all the time. For example Adherents.com is used as a source by books published by university presses. Examples: Oxford University Press:,  . Cambridge University Press: . University of California Press: ,  . Harvard University Press: . University of Chicago Press: .  However, I don't know if that counts per WP:RS.  Any input on this matter would also be appreciated--ARTEST4ECHO talk 16:26, 21 June 2010 (UTC)


 * It may well be that the two sources I questioned are reliable. To some extent, it depends on what they are being used to support, and it depends on whether their content is generally considered neutral and reliable by editors outside of Wikipedia. From what you say above, these two would appear to be OK. I raised the question not because I especially doubted these particular two or, in fact, knew anything about them, but because some dot-coms are reliable, and others are not. Dot-coms published by advocacy groups or advertisers, for example, would not likely be reliable per WP:RS. On the other hand, http://www.weather.com/, the Weather Channel, does meet WP:RS guidelines. Hope this helps. Finetooth (talk) 19:08, 21 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes this helps alot, and thank you for your input. I am still working on implementing what you have suggested. There is alot to do.--ARTEST4ECHO talk 19:34, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

One other editor and I have implemented all but item #4 (The Manual of Style deprecates lists ....) and three questionable citations. I feel that all my concerns have been addressed other then #4 and those specific citations. However, these items are being discussed on Talk:List of sects in the Latter Day Saint movement. Therefore per Peer review/Request removal policy, I'm going to close this Peer review since “nominators of peer reviews can close discussions which they initiated if they feel their concerns have been addressed”

I thank you (Finetooth) for your help. This list has improved even more with your help.--ARTEST4ECHO talk 12:47, 23 June 2010 (UTC)