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An entry from Religion in Turkey appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know? column on 18 December 2006.

[edit] Comments

[edit] 99.8?

99.8% is a very dubious number and is probably very much on the higher side. More than a result of a rigorous polling, it seems to originate from a comparison of the population of "officially recognized religious minorities" to the general population, including everyone else in the muslim community. Nevermind that these official minorities are underreported, it fails to account for foreign nationals living in Turkey, or members of unrecognized religious minorities (such as ethnic Turks of Protestant Christian faith or people of Yazidi faith), and it also fails to account for people of no religious affiliations, ie atheists. That figure being cited so often, and being just the same figure down to the decimal point for as long as I can remember, it is clear to me that it is more misleading than informative. An alternative to the sentence in the text could have been a something like "Although %99.8 of the citizens of Turkey are of muslim turkish ancestry, Turkey has no officially recognized state religion and the secularity of the government is protected by the constitution", but a start like "It is estimated that over 99% of turkish population ..." would be much more acceptable.

Well, I added "nominally". I have been trying for months to find an actual survey on this, but there are none. If I put in anything else that would also be a wild guess. These are the best figures that there are. If you ever find a good source or a survey (books etc are not good, because they all differ in their guess work), please bring it in. As for the foreigners, they do not quite fall under the scope of this article since they are not Turkish citizens are are considered temporary residents. Their inclusion in the statistics can skew the surveys since they can simply leave after five months. As for Yezidis. There are not many left in Turkey btw, so they wouldn't make up such a great number in any case. I will try to find more sources though.. Baristarim 16:43, 18 December 2006 (UTC)