Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Religion/Interfaith work group/Archive 2

Tagging Project
I have made it clear I am against a mass-tagging, but since it has happened, and John carter has made it clear he is not responsive to the many critics of the general process, I have joined the project - let's face it new members are needed, since there only appears to be one active one at present - to make the best of the process.

Beta tells me 3096 articles were tagged, and JC says he is going to go through them all to assess, check, and tidy them. I have some comments on this process, and will no doubt as more as we progress. I have made some edits myself. Johnbod (talk) 23:34, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Al-Khidr
Wikiproj Christianity banner retained - surely this is wrong? Workgroup banner still at top, above WP Islam, which is hardly justifiable. The number of articles where our banner can justify top spot is relatively low. Johnbod (talk) 23:34, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

First time converts
To clarify, I think it is clear that converts from no previous religion do not fall under this workgroup, only those who had at least some type of commitment, or even connection, with a different faith before conversion. Are we agreed on this? Johnbod (talk) 18:12, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Category:Culture heroes
Nothing to do with religion, like many of the mythological categories tagged. Johnbod (talk) 01:58, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

Totally undiscussed "renaming" of project
Did anyone notice that "Interfaith Work Group" conjures up a vastly different mental picture to "Inter-religion content task force"? This is by no means a "minor" change at all; it seems to stake an entirely different purpose now. More specifically: the old name describes ostensibly neutral editors, whose own background is irrelevant, working out compromise solutions for those articles whose content happens to cover more than one religion or faith. Now that the word "content" has been removed from the new title, it sounds more like some kind of Council made up of representatives of the major world faiths, each one "representing" his own faith, making joint "decisions" to apply to everyone else in wikipedia. Til Eulenspiegel (talk) 13:41, 22 February 2008 (UTC)


 * When in fact the "workgroup" has recently consisted entirely of John Carter, afaik! Johnbod (talk) 13:43, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

Mass-tagging
Lest we forget, here are all the categories that were tagged "on behalf of" this work group, without any notice here :

Category:Abrahamic religions; Category:Albigensian Crusade; Category:Anti-Buddhism; Category:Anti-Catholicism; Category:Anti-Christianity; Category:Anti-Defamation League; Category:Anti-Gnosticism; Category:Anti-Hinduism; Category:Anti-Islam activists; Category:Anti-Islam sentiment; Category:Anti-Jewish pogroms; Category:Anti-Judaism; Category:Anti-Protestantism; Category:Antisemitic attacks and incidents; Category:Antisemitic canards; Category:Antisemitic forgeries; Category:Antisemitic propaganda; Category:Antisemitic publications; Category:Antisemitism; Category:Blood libel; Category:British Israelism; Category:Buddhist converts to Catholicism; Category:Carbonari; Category:Catholic converts; Category:Catholic converts by religion; Category:Catholic ecumenical and interfaith relations; Category:Catholicism and Freemasonry; Category:Christian and Jewish interfaith topics; Category:Christian ecumenism; Category:Christian interfaith and secular relations; Category:Classical elements; Category:Comparative Buddhism; Category:Comparative mythology; Category:Concepts of Heaven; Category:Conversion of non-Muslim places of worship into mosques; Category:Conversion to Christianity; Category:Converts from Judaism to Anglicanism; Category:Converts from Judaism to Christianity; Category:Converts from Judaism to Islam; Category:Converts from Judaism to Roman Catholicism; Category:Conversion to Islam; Category:Converts to Anglicanism; Category:Converts to Buddhism; Category:Converts to Christian Science; Category:Converts to Christianity; Category:Converts to Eastern Orthodox Christianity; Category:Converts to Hinduism; Category:Converts to Islam; Category:Converts to Scientology; Category:Converts to Sikhism; Category:Converts to Zoroastrianism; Category:Creation myths; Category:Creation stories; Category:Criticism of Jehovah's Witnesses; Category:Criticism of Mormonism; Category:Crusade literature; Category:Crusades; Category:Crypto-Judaism; Category:Culture heroes; Category:Exilarchs; Category:Former Muslims; Category:Former Roman Catholics; Category:Groups who converted to Judaism; Category:Hell; Category:Hindu clan conversions to Islam; Category:Hinduism and other religions; Category:Interfaith Dialog; Category:Islam and antisemitism; Category:Islam and other religions; Category:Islamic and Jewish interfaith topics; Category:Jainism and other religions; Category:Jews and Judaism and pluralism; Category:Jewish tribes of Arabia; Category:Jews for Jesus; Category:Judeo-Christian topics; Category:Judeo-Islamic topics; Category:Life after death; Category:Lists of religious converts; Category:Metaphysical cosmology; Category:Monomyths; Category:Muhammad and the Jews; Category:Muslim converts to Catholicism; Category:Mythemes; Category:Mythological archetypes; Category:Mythological cosmologies; Category:National councils of churches; Category:Nazi antisemitic propaganda films; Category:People executed for refusing to convert to Islam; Category:People of the Albigensian Crusade; Category:Persecution of Bahá'ís; Category:Persecution of early Christians; Category:Pluralistic Jewish day schools; Category:Prophecy; Category:Regional councils of churches; Category:Reincarnation; Category:Reincarnation research; Category:Religious comparison; Category:Religious conversion; Category:Religious conversion in India; Category:Religious converts; Category:Religious cosmologies; Category:Religious discrimination; Category:Religious persecution; Category:Religious pluralism; Category:Sahaba; Category:Scholars of antisemitism; Category:Victims of Anti-Catholicism;

I think the question of what is intended to be accomplished by this tagging has not been discussed, certainly not here. Is there any point to it? If there is, are all these categories really appropriate? Tagging and project assessing for their own sake, by a workgroup that does nothing else, would seem not to be justified. The AN discussion is here - it will end up in Archive 128 maybe. I was rather surprised to see that John Carter has subsequently ordered another huge tagging effort on Indian Christianity, and seems to be spending his time on that area currently, despite repeated promises to work on this area. Johnbod (talk) 01:52, 23 February 2008 (UTC)


 * I have added to the template a link to comment here: "If you have any comments regarding the appropriateness or positioning of this template, please let us know at our talk page". I think it would be a good idea if all banners had such a note. Johnbod (talk) 02:11, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Here is a partial list of categories the tagging of which for this project was clearly erroneous. Category:Antisemitic attacks and incidents; Category:Antisemitic canards; Category:Antisemitic forgeries; Category:Antisemitic propaganda; Category:Antisemitic publications; Category:Antisemitism; Category:Nazi antisemitic propaganda films; Category:Scholars of antisemitism. Can anyone point out any more? The vast majority of articles in these categories plainly have nothing to do with interfaith matters; most of them have nothing to do with religion at all. Although this was pointed out to John Carter on another talk page, he removed the tag from only a very, very few of them. Is there any logistical way for the bot to retrace its steps and undo what it did when tagging those articles, or will it all have to be done by human editors? --Steven J. Anderson (talk) 04:22, 4 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Category:Anti-Defamation League is another; and Category:Classical elements, what's that doing there? --Steven J. Anderson (talk) 02:09, 9 March 2008 (UTC)
 * A de-tagging run can be requested, in the same way as a tagging one. All the categories selected fed into categories deemed (by JC) to be relevant.  Apart from the question of relevance - and I can see some "interfaith" relevance to Anti-Semitism categories - there is also the question of utility.  What is the point of the tagging, especially when no activity other than tagging and JC's assessments takes place here?  Johnbod (talk) 03:56, 9 March 2008 (UTC)

DeMatha Catholic High School?
Should we mention this school in this article? After all, I think it's the only Trinitarian High School in the U.S. and I think it's a big part of this since it's been doing so well... 68.55.235.179 (talk) 17:43, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

Changes to the WP:1.0 assessment scheme
As you may have heard, we at the Wikipedia 1.0 Editorial Team recently made some changes to the assessment scale, including the addition of a new level. The new description is available at WP:ASSESS.
 * The new C-Class represents articles that are beyond the basic Start-Class, but which need additional references or cleanup to meet the standards for B-Class.
 * The criteria for B-Class have been tightened up with the addition of a rubric, and are now more in line with the stricter standards already used at some projects.
 * A-Class article reviews will now need more than one person, as described here.

Each WikiProject should already have a new C-Class category at Category:C-Class_articles. If your project elects not to use the new level, you can simply delete your WikiProject's C-Class category and clarify any amendments on your project's assessment/discussion pages. The bot is already finding and listing C-Class articles.

Please leave a message with us if you have any queries regarding the introduction of the revised scheme. This scheme should allow the team to start producing offline selections for your project and the wider community within the next year. Thanks for using the Wikipedia 1.0 scheme! For the 1.0 Editorial Team, §hepBot  ( Disable )  21:01, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

Abrahamic religion
There is currently disagreement over the description of the term "Abrahamic religion(s)" as "post-modern" in the Abrahamic religion article. Discussion on the article talk page can be found here, here and here. Some discussion takes place on user talk pages here and here. Related concerns were raised on the fringe theory noticeboard here. Outside voices and feedback would be greatly appreciated. Vassyana (talk) 16:43, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia 0.7 articles have been selected for Interfaith
Wikipedia 0.7 is a collection of English Wikipedia articles due to be released on DVD, and available for free download, later this year. The Version 1.0 Editorial Team has made an automated selection of articles for Version 0.7.

We would like to ask you to review the articles selected from this project. These were chosen from the articles with this project's talk page tag, based on the rated importance and quality. If there are any specific articles that should be removed, please let us know at Wikipedia talk:Version 0.7. You can also nominate additional articles for release, following the procedure at Release Version Nominations.

A list of selected articles with cleanup tags, sorted by project, is available. The list is automatically updated each hour when it is loaded. Please try to fix any urgent problems in the selected articles. A team of copyeditors has agreed to help with copyediting requests, although you should try to fix simple issues on your own if possible.

We would also appreciate your help in identifying the version of each article that you think we should use, to help avoid vandalism or POV issues. These versions can be recorded at this project's subpage of User:SelectionBot/0.7. We are planning to release the selection for the holiday season, so we ask you to select the revisions before October 20. At that time, we will use an automatic process to identify which version of each article to release, if no version has been manually selected. Thanks! For the Wikipedia 1.0 Editorial team, SelectionBot 23:13, 15 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Do we have anything to say here? No. I suppose not. Johnbod (talk) 17:07, 16 September 2008 (UTC)