Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Matthew 2:16

This page is an archive of the discussion about the proposed deletion of the article below. This page is no longer live. Further comments should be made on the article's talk page rather than here so that this page is preserved as an historic record.
The result of the debate was keep. —Xezbeth 06:46, May 28, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Matthew 2:16

Do individual Bible verses need articles of their own? Crotalus horridus 02:35, 21 May 2005 (UTC) This also applies to Matthew 2:1 through Matthew 2:15.

• If verifiable and important things "don't need articles of their own", they can be merged into some larger unit without going through Vfd. However this material is lengthy and informative enough to need its own article. Keep. Kappa 02:46, 21 May 2005 (UTC)
• Delete, as per previous votes on bible passages, Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Exodus 30:23. Megan1967 02:47, 21 May 2005 (UTC)
  • I note that that one was simply a quote without any analysis. How about previous vote for deletion on Bible passages Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/John 20 ? Kappa 02:50, 21 May 2005 (UTC)
    • There are currently 16 different articles for the first 16 verses of Matt. 2. If these are all allowed to remain, this means that articles analyzing every single verse in the Bible would be allowed. That would easily be thousands of articles for Bible verses alone. And then people would be doing the same analyses on verses in the Koran, Book of Mormon, and so forth. This would cause havoc. That is why I think these should be deleted. Crotalus horridus 02:54, 21 May 2005 (UTC)
      • You failed to notice the 25 articles on the verses of Matthew 1 and the 18 completed ones on John 20. I guess the havoc they are creating is just a very quiet and hard to notice one. - SimonP 03:02, May 21, 2005 (UTC)
• Keep we just debated Bible verse last week at Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/John 20 and a few weeks before that at Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/John 20:16. Both of these discussions saw a fairly strong majority in favour of keeping them. - SimonP 03:02, May 21, 2005 (UTC)
• Merge into one article on the book of Matthew, or Matthew Chapter 2. This goes for every verse page. Harro5 03:58, May 21, 2005 (UTC)
• Keep Articles on individual verses of the Bible are quite acceptable. Much can be/has been written and said about individual verses, enough to create an article for many of them. Quite possible to create rich annotated articles for most passages in the New Testament. -- Decumanus 04:01, 2005 May 21 (UTC)
• Transwiki and Redirect. Isn't this part of the Wikipedia project just a verse-by-verse annotated copy of two public domain translations of the bible? Wikibooks takes annotated works. Leave the redirect as a interproject navigation aid for those who don't know of Wikibooks. The use of the exact same two references on so many verses gives me a copyvio scare, though. Unfocused 04:45, 21 May 2005 (UTC)
  • Both versions are in the public domain. -- Decumanus 05:45, 2005 May 21 (UTC)
    • Both versions of the bible, YES, both books used to annotate? NO. I think the annotations may be copyvio, not the bible verses. --Unfocused 18:59, 21 May 2005 (UTC)
      • Do you have any evidence to back up this accusation? -- Decumanus 07:06, 2005 May 22 (UTC)
        • There was no accusation. I said copyvio scare. I did not claim that there is a copyvio, but I am by nature cautious. When I next make a trip to the library, I will check to see if these titles are available to compare. --Unfocused 00:34, 23 May 2005 (UTC)
          • So in other words, as of right now you have no evidence for your statement "I think the annotations may be copyvio"? Have you asked the author of the articles if he ripped them off? -- Decumanus 00:43, 2005 May 23 (UTC)
• Extreme Keep, and I don't do "extreme keeps" often. Some of these articles on individual Bible verses are amazing -- they cite great works of scholarship and really understand the text well. Having articles on individual Bible verses or individual Ayat from the Qur'an would "cause havoc?" That's so wrongheaded that I don't even know where to start! Just a simple quote of a verse should be deleted, but if you read this article, you'll see that it deals with scholarship and really gives the reader an understanding of the context. Articles like these are what make Wikipedia great. --Zantastik 06:18, 21 May 2005 (UTC)
• Merge into Book of Matthew or delete. I see no point in individual articles for every Bible verse. — JIP | Talk 06:40, 21 May 2005 (UTC)
• Strong keep: scholarly commentary on a work of literature dominating Western civilization for the last couple of thousand years is a more valid subject than Pokemon monsters, fictional kings from Tolkien, or Klingon warships, all of which are much more likely to be forgotten and have lost any relevance to people a 100 years from now than the Bible. Uppland 07:31, 21 May 2005 (UTC)
• Keep informative and interesting. As long as the articles on individual verses have this level of information, I see absolutely no reason why they shouldn't be kept. There is too much for them all to be merged into articles on books, and most of the time too much even for articles on chapters. Articles go well beyond quotes. Wikipedia is not paper. -- Jonel 07:33, 21 May 2005 (UTC)
• Keep this article because it has a lot more scholarly information than many stubs out there. -dozenist 10:23, 21 May 2005 (UTC)
• Keep - Number of verses in the Bible 31,273 (depending on version) number of high schools in the US alone 24,600 (1996 figs). Relative cultural impacts of average Bible verse vs. average high school?? --Doc Glasgow 10:46, 21 May 2005 (UTC)
  • You've unbalanced your comparison. How about "average individual bible verse" versus "average high school"? Unfocused 00:38, 23 May 2005 (UTC)
• Keep this informative article. Wikipedia is not paper - I hope that we will get articles this good or better on all the verses of Bible, Qur'an, etc. --G Rutter 13:45, 21 May 2005 (UTC)
• Strong Keep per Zantastik. - Jersyko 14:12, May 21, 2005 (UTC)
• Keep- In my opinion, a complete article, as opposed to a simple reproduction of a verse in Bible, should qualify for a Keep. This applies to similar other works of same importance. I think that the possible number of articles arising out of this shall not deluge wikipedia, rather it will increase its worth. Verses in religious texts like the Bible and others comparable to the Bible are finte, say few thousand. On the other hand, just to take an example, there are 45000 asterioids in our solar system - out of which about 3000 merit attention. There are trillions of other celestial objects, and they are being discovered each day - an article on each one of the important discovery shall surely appear in wikipedia, but articles on Bible verses shall remain limited, as new verses cannot be invented or discovered. Please keep the article so that one who knows little about the significance of any particular verse of the Bible may come to wikipedia to understand the matter. --Bhadani 18:41, 21 May 2005 (UTC)
• Merge and redirect this article and the next two with Matthew 2:16-18. If the article expands a fair bit before end of VfD, change that to a keep. JYolkowski // talk 18:48, 21 May 2005 (UTC)
• Keep every bible verse article that has commentary. Klonimus 19:54, 21 May 2005 (UTC)
• Keep all verses of all notable holy books, for the same reason that we have Rambot articles. (I actually don't know that reason, but just assume it applies here too.) If I saw a reference to a Bible/Koran/Upanishad/whatever verse somewhere, I'd like to be able to look it up on WP and see not just one translation but many, as well as possibly commentary. Nickptar 01:27, 22 May 2005 (UTC)
• Abstain This is covered at Massacre of the Innocents, needless to say: if it had no such tag, it wouldn't have been encyclopedia-worthy. I look forward with pleasure to an entry on each of the 114 sayings in the Gospel of Thomas. And on for each chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses. --Wetman 01:34, 22 May 2005 (UTC)
• Delete --I agree with Crotalus, 165.247.89.80 01:57, 22 May 2005 (UTC)
• Keep-- individual bible passages with articles of this length do deserve to exist. freestylefrappe 02:04, May 22, 2005 (UTC)
• Delete-- There are multiple problems here. First, while the scholarship on the verse is fine by me, the article is lodged at a verse name, where it will never, ever be sought. This allows for someone with a POV interpretation of scriptures to use this, essentially, as reinforcement by being the only one to like to Matthew 2:16 instead of [[Book of Matthew]] 2:16. If there is a Wikigloss project, this belongs there, but not in name space. The scholarship should be at Massacre of the Innocents, and I have a sinking feeling that, in fact, it came from there as the product of an edit war. Regardless, it can't stay as it is. Geogre 02:48, 22 May 2005 (UTC)
  • But if you search for Book of Matthew, there are links to each of the chapters of the book, which in turn leads to links to the verses. Saying that it will never, ever be sought as simply Matthew 2:16 is dubious, but even assuming you are correct, a searcher could find the article in the way I've described. If someone uses it in a POV way, we should change what they write to make it NPOV, but the possibility of someone using it improperly is not a reason to delete this article in the first place. - Jersyko 15:17, May 22, 2005 (UTC)
• Delete -- Individual verses don't need articles. Each book already has one; if there's anything to be said, let it be said there. - Nunh-huh 04:54, 22 May 2005 (UTC)
• Keep: as per Jonel, et al. Dystopos 06:51, 22 May 2005 (UTC)
• Keep. This is a good article on a notable subject. Capitalistroadster 23:17, 22 May 2005 (UTC)
• Keep, looks like a good article. Christopher Parham 00:38, 2005 May 23 (UTC)
• Delete individual verses dont need separate articles. JamesBurns 10:01, 23 May 2005 (UTC)
• Merge the lot of them, individual verses dont need separate articles. Radiant_* 14:02, May 24, 2005 (UTC)

Keep. A famous book and verse. 24.4.127.164 11:20, 26 May 2005 (UTC)

• Keep, there seems enough material to warrant an article.--MarSch 14:02, 26 May 2005 (UTC)
• Keep Dsmdgold 09:54, May 27, 2005 (UTC)
• Strong Delete Nonencyclopedic. While I find a verse by verse analysis of the Bible helpful at times, Wikipedia is not the place for it. In this context, the Bible is just another work of literature. Would we include a sentence by sentence analysis of War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, or Great Expectations? Xcali 16:53, 27 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Votes casted as of Friday, May 27, 2005

• Keep 20
• Delete 11
• Merge into one article on the book of Matthew 4 to 6 (unclear what two users desire)
• Transwiki and Redirect 2
• Abstain 1

This page is now preserved as an archive of the debate and, like some other VfD subpages, is no longer 'live'. Subsequent comments on the issue, the deletion, or the decision-making process should be placed on the relevant 'live' pages. Please do not edit this page.