Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Atheism

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[edit] Atheism

Extremely well written, many links and refences, very deserving of becoming featured. Hezzy 00:44, 24 May 2006 (UTC)

• Object -- the WP:LEAD is not a summary of the article. Jkelly 00:54, 24 May 2006 (UTC)
  • It is an accurate deffintion of "Atheism". I really see no other way to summarize an article about Atheism.Hezzy 01:00, 24 May 2006 (UTC)
    • The lead is what would need to appear on the main page, so it needs to be improved to a considerably higher quality for that. --W.marsh 01:21, 24 May 2006 (UTC)
    • The lead needs to summarize the article, not just introduce it. Per WP:LEAD. - Emt147 ^Burninate! 02:52, 24 May 2006 (UTC)

Object

Per above, per WP:WEASEL. Wrong section order (should open with history). - Emt147 ^Burninate! 01:05, 24 May 2006 (UTC)

• Strongly oppose above comment. Articles about words open with etymology, not history; history was in the correct placement originally. In fact, if the etymology section wasn't so learge, it would be in the lead. -Silence 23:49, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

• Object. On several grounds:
  • The lead section is inadequate.
  • The sections are not ordered properly.
  • The quotes are formatted awkwardly.
  • There are too many one-sentence paragraphs.

There is still a lot of work to be done, but this article in its current state is a very good start. RyanGerbil10 02:58, 24 May 2006 (UTC)

• Object. For similar reasons to above comments, though I have made some edits. Also, could someone more familiar with the article look at the "Atheism in India" section? Something isn't right there, but I'm not sure what. --Danaman5 23:13, 25 May 2006 (UTC)
• Object. "History" section should not come before "etymology", and very probably shouldn't come before "types and typologies" (which clarifies the definition(s) of atheism) either. It should also be expanded to at least three decent-sized paragraphs in length, and I see no reason not to add an image. A common problem I see is that articles have sections that are too bloated when there's no daughter article, and too short when there is a daughter article (as is the case for the "history" and "criticisms" section). Striking a balance is key: expand the "history" and "criticisms" section so they're informative and meaningful sections in their own right, not just brief introductions to a distinct article. Otherwise the article won't function as a self-contained piece, and will come across as unbalanced.
• Also: a giant section on ignosticism in this article is clearly unnecessary. Ignosticism is a quasi-noteworthy neologism that clearly only takes up such a large portion of the article because of Wikipedia's Internet-community-bias; there's no reason for a 7-paragraph section on ignosticism when there's no section on apatheism, for example, especially considering that ignosticism arguably isn't even a type of atheism, but of agnosticism—which brings us to the most serious bias in this article: the clear bias in favor of the definition of atheism as "lack of theism", accompanied by a bias against the more common definition of atheism as "denial of theism". This bias is reflected in the very article structure: it plain-facedly covers many different topics in great depth regardless of whether they are clearly related to every common definition of atheism or not, without acknowledging any possibility of dissent. Its terminology choice is also biased.
• One more recommendation: remove "atheism in philosophical naturalism" from the "types and typologies" section, and create a new section instead. This new section should cover the widespread philophies which are noted for being atheistic, such as nihilism, and the philosophical naturalism stuff can be a subsection thereof. If we cover atheism in various religions, we should do the same for various philosophies (and a section for atheism in politics wouldn't go amiss either, perhaps with a link to the atheist left and atheist right articles; though that could simply be mentioned in the "United States" regional section). Also, please, please deal with the stub sections. The only reason the TOC is currently so bloated is because of the overuse of sectioning where simple paragraph divisions would suffice. Also, the "see also" section is a bit bloated, and some of the entries seem strange (why babel fish?). I recommend stripping the "see also" section of all but the most important entries, and simply let people use Category:Atheism for the others. You may also want to consider focusing on linking to entries that aren't included in {{atheism}}. Lastly, this article is clearly a massive link farm: it has almost 70 external links (closer to 100 if you count the links in the "notes" and etc. sections, when I don't). You should probably cut it down to 15 at most; I've seen plenty of featured article candidates rejected for having even that many external links. -Silence 23:49, 25 May 2006 (UTC)
• Object. For many of the reasons above, but also for the format of the article in general. My feeling is that many of the pieces could be compressed, joined or presented in different ways. For example, there is a lot of data about the current state of atheism in different nations and regions (most of Distribution of Atheists and Atheism Studies, for example) that should be split off into a daughter subject (Distribution of Atheists) and/or compressed into something like a table so that things can be compared more easily. This is a complicated subject; don't be afraid to summarize and direct to a separate page - keeping all the data here just makes the page difficult to navigate (the TOC scares me, too!).Matt Deres 17:32, 28 May 2006 (UTC)