Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Biblical curiosities

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The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. Interesting read, but fails WP:NOT#IINFO and WP:NOT#DIR. Dreadstar † 20:08, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Biblical curiosities

Biblical curiosities (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs) (delete) – (View log)

Intresting read, but I'm afraid it's unencyclopedic and falls under WP:NOT#indiscriminate. Delete. ~EdGl 23:38, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

  • Even so, it would still be a list of trivia and thus unacceptable. There's no real criterion for what qualifies as a "curiosity" -- for instance, is it a "curiosity" that two of the Psalms are exactly the same? Or that those tiny Mormon bibles that they hand out only have the New Testament, Psalms and Proverbs? Et cetera. Ten Pound Hammer and his otters • (Broken clamshells•Otter chirps) 23:54, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
  • (ec) Question: Do you mean "keep and rewrite" or "delete unless rewritten"? Also, could you explain how and why the article could become "fine" according to Wikipedia policies and guidelines? Thanks in advance for clarifying. ~EdGl 23:56, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
  • Delete. I don't think this page is salvageable. "Interesting" is a very subjective criterion, and there are about 1000 "interesting" verses that have been omitted. StAnselm (talk) 01:18, 4 April 2008 (UTC)
  • Delete. There are parts of this that might, if sourced, be acceptable as e.g. List of words derived from the Bible or List of translation controversies in the Bible, to cite a couple of examples that have some weight, but I'm not sure what to do with things like the various "shortest verse" entries. --Dhartung | Talk 01:49, 4 April 2008 (UTC)
  • Delete just random trivia.Doug Weller (talk) 11:07, 4 April 2008 (UTC)
  • Keep. My 1954 version of the Encyclopedia Americana contains a similar list. The King James Bible is such a widely circulated and studied text that hardly anything about it, even adventitious features like the shortest verse, is really "trivial". - Smerdis of Tlön (talk) 14:29, 4 April 2008 (UTC)
  • Merge to Bible errata and other articles relating to Biblical interpretation. Wikipedia does have a wide variety of topics related to the Bible, and nearly all of this information can be placed elsewhere. I agree that the stand-alone article, by itself, fails a variety of Wikipedia policies; the explanations for the curiosities are entirely unsourced (there's one source altogether); the premise of the article is that it contains "curiosities" (translation, "trivia") and that the passages are interesting for reasons that do not bear on religion or theology. The "in popular culture" loophole can't be used to bypass the trivia here, and yet a lot of these are parts of the Bible that don't get promoted in sermons, like Ezekiel 23:20. Although it fails the packaging test, the information should be preserved somewhere. I'm sure there's probably a Bible wiki where this would work, even if there's no place in the many Bible articles for it. Mandsford (talk) 15:17, 4 April 2008 (UTC)
  • Delete. Who decided they were interesting? Stifle (talk) 17:58, 4 April 2008 (UTC)
  • Transwiki to a Bible Commentary wiki. Looking at my hardcopy Bibles, and Bible study tools, I found 3 Bibles, Cruton's Concordance and one multi-volume Bible Commentary contain a page similar to this article.(That is out of roughly 100 volumes). Looking at my electronic Bible Study tools, I found two resources that contain a page similar to this article.(That is out of roughly 5,000 resources.) OTOH, most of the citations are found individually,as part of either a discussion on the topic, or an explanation of the verse. I'd like to suggest keeping it here, but doing so will result in an indiscriminate collection of semi-related items. (With a little bit of digging, I could make 5,000 additions to this page, all of which would be "curious", by some arbitrary definition of the term--- most of which would be the use of the verse as the title of a music group, book, movie, or play.)jonathon (talk) 19:17, 4 April 2008 (UTC)
  • Keep or merge to Bible errata per Mandsford. Tavix (talk) 21:18, 4 April 2008 (UTC)
Why merge to Bible errata? None of them are errors. Eye of a needle was removed from the Bible Errata page, on the grounds that nobody considers it to be an error.(Some Aramaic Primacy advocates do claim it is a mistranslation from the Aramaic, into the Greek.)jonathon (talk) 23:45, 4 April 2008 (UTC)
  • Delete. Sure, I would expect to find some of this in either a study Bible or a similar work - but not in an encyclopedia. "Interesting" (or "curious") is just far to subject a term - what I find interesting in the Bible is certainly not always what others find interesting. Pastordavid (talk) 19:56, 8 April 2008 (UTC)


The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.