Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/non-notable bible-division articles

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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 keep. John254 01:34, 22 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] non-notable bible-division articles (various)

This AFD covers several articles and potential future articles within a defined limit. Specifically, it covers all articles about non-notable divisions of the bible, such as chapters which are insignificant in and of themselves like Mark 12, as well as lectionary-based divisions.

The primary grounds for this AfD are WP:POVFORK, WP:NOT (not "an indiscriminate repository of information" and not "a how-to guide"), and violation of consensus (see Wikipedia:Bible verses and Wikipedia:Centralized_discussion/200_verses_of_Matthew). A previous instance of the latter (on the same issue as this) seems to have even lead to a rare rebuke by the arbitration committee against one of its own members.

I'm a member of the Bible Wikiproject and this appears to be a concern of other members.

This is not about the notability of the content of the chapters, but about the notability of the chapter as a chapter; one chapter may cover a couple of notable articles - Mark 12 covers the Ministry of Jesus, The Wicked Husbandmen, Lesson of the widow's mite, and Genealogy of Jesus, articles for example, but it is not itself significant.

It is also important to note that a small minority of divisions, such as Mark 16, Psalm 51, John 21, Psalm 23, Psalm 74, Psalm 104, and John 3:16, are notable in their own right, and therefore do not fall under this AfD.

An additional concern is that the 1-chapter-at-a-time articles are setting up a religious bias and risk of dispute, against the Jewish-lectionary articles. For example, the potential article Exodus 20 would be a POVFORK of Tetzaveh. Noach (parsha) is either a POVFORK of Noah, or a chapter from a "summarised bible" - the latter being a book, not an encyclopedia article.

1 Corinthians 14 has recently been subject to AFD on similar grounds. The result was to merge. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Clinkophonist (talk • contribs) 19:43, 17 February 2008

[edit] List of KNOWN Articles which would fall under this AFD

[edit] Comments/Discussion/Votes

  • Delete/Merge/Redirect/Transwiki (basically "not Keep") Clinkophonist (talk) 19:43, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
  • Keep this AfD is a guideline proposal disguised as an AfD. As far as I can tell, every tiny snippet of the bible will be proven to be notable under the general notability guideline. Each will have been the subject of multiple non-trivial mentions in reliable secondary sources. It's been around and read by millions annually for a couple thousand years. It has been studied and entire books written analyzing it. All parts of it. There are numerous books that do nothing but take each verse of the bible and analyze it, probably in every spoken language. This is an entire field of scholarly discipline. This AfD is rediculous. My briefest look for sources yields hundreds each, all would be considered reliable. Let's just take one at random; Vayeshev:
  • A Torah Commentary for Our Times - Page 91 by Harvey J. Fields
  • Frameworks by Matis Weinberg
  • The Linear Chumash - Page 224 by Pesach Goldberg, Bereishis Genesis
  • Truth in Numbers: Insights Into the Book of Bereshis - Page 44 by Reuven Wolfeld
  • Caesarea Under Roman Rule - Page 193 by Lee I. Levine
  • The Zohar =: Sefer Ha-Zohar - Page 155 by Daniel Chanan Matt
  • Encyclopedia of Jewish Medical Ethics: A Compilation of Jewish Medical Law ... - Page 633 by Avraham Steinberg
  • The Jewish Woman in Rabbinic Literature - Page 310 by Menachem M. Brayer
  • The Jewish Life Cycle: Rites of Passage from Biblical to Modern Times - Page 267 by Ivan G. Marcus
  • Restoration: Old Testament, Jewish, and Christian Perspectives - Page 234 by James M. Scott
  • A Commentary on Pseudo-Philo's Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum, with Latin ... - Page 745 by Howard Jacobson
  • Em Habanim Semeha: Restoration of Zion As a Response During the Holocaust - Page 120 by Yiśakhar Shelomoh Ṭaikhṭel, Pesach Schindler
    JERRY     talk contribs 22:50, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
    • Propose as guideline I never thought I'd consider a "Notability (Bible)" proposal, but this AfD seems to be the perfect rationale for it. -- RoninBK T C 10:54, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
  • Keep I checked several of the articles and think it is good that they are around since there are specific references to chapters. Lots of energy has been put into this articles and deleting them seems not appropriate. Neozoon —Preceding comment was added at 23:15, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
  • Keep and individually list Random selection of chapters like 1 Corinthians 13 gives sources. I suggest that the nom separate the Afd into individual ones so that we could judge each article by its merits and to avoid a trainwreck which this afd would likely be. --Lenticel (talk) 23:36, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
  • Keep: A random sampling of articles find every one of them well-written and well-sourced. I fail to see why they should be deleted based on any usual rationale for deletion. The nominator's reasons seem to be aimed at pumulgating a style guideline for how to organize biblical content, concerning which AfD is not place to do so -- take it to the relevent WikiProject to work out a consensus and then, if it ends up being different from how it currently is, merge them as needed. Which, I note, is not done through an AfD. —Quasirandom (talk) 00:15, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
  • Further comment: I note that the parshah articles are mainly not single-chapter portions, and so would seem to be outside the stated scope of this AfD. Furthermore, given the nearly two millenia of commentary on the weekly Torah readings, I'd say those are emphatically notable divisions of the Bible, to the point that if I were not saying Keep on administrative grounds, I'll call for a Strong Keep of those articles. —Quasirandom (talk) 22:15, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
  • Comment: On a random sample, I've yet to find a single article covered under this nomination that has an AfD notice. This would seem to be an invalid nomination. —Quasirandom (talk) 00:17, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
  • Keep: as per Jerry and Quasirandom; there are also too many articles to adequately consider in this one nomination. There should be no doubt that there exists plenty of sources on each article, so notability is not an issue. I didn't see the nom's signature at the top. It should be there. Noroton (talk) 03:10, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
To add to my comment: If the Bible WikiProject consensus can decide on a different organization of the material, then merges with redirects would help people find what they want, not deleted pages. Since so much Bible commentary and scholarship deals with specific chapters, or at least is organized by chapter, they seem to me like good boundaries for individual articles, although Bible WikiProject editors very likely have a better sense of that. If the nominated articles don't have AfD tags on them, how do BibleProject members know these articles are up for deletion? Noroton (talk) 03:23, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
  • Keep per Neozoon and others; these are indeed useful articles and mass deleting them all would be a true shame. Til Eulenspiegel (talk) 03:44, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
  • Keep and form and enforce the guidelines outside of this particular AfD process. AfDs should be based on existing, supported, consensus-backed policies guidelines, and have a definite scope in which articles are affected and which are not, all of them appropriately tagged and everyone editing them given a fair chance to participate in a discussion. We can't form a guideline through AfD discussion, much less one that may have a larger scope than even the nominator is aware of. By analogy, this AfD would be almost the same as amending CSD A7 to say "...or Bible book or section". We don't do that. So please, let's resolve notability consensus first and then bring articles that absolutely need to be taken through AfD through AfD, and merge the rest without invoking the Process. --wwwwolf (barks/growls) 13:17, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
  • Weak Keep - The content should probably be preserved, as most of it is probably acceptable. The organization into chapters, however, is and can be problematic. I was one of the editors on the talk page of the Bible project who agreed that it makes most sense to break up the content relating to books of the Bible not by chapters, which were arbitrarily placed in well after the books themselves were written, but rather by "story" contained in the books, where such is applicable. Clearly, with the Psalms and Proverbs, that would be a bit of a problem, but it makes more sense to break up the content into coherent stories than in almost randomly designated chapters. That would probably turn most of the existing pages into basically enhanced disambig pages, saying, in effect "Acts 56 contains the Acts of Zaphod, Acts of Trillian, and Acts of Vogon Prostetnic Jeltz stories," for instance, with most of the content on those related pages. Certain content relating explicitly to the chapter as a chapter might remain on the chapter page, but most of the rest of the content would be on the various "subpages" for the thematic stories, except in such cases where such is impossible. John Carter (talk) 16:50, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
  • In that case, the Bible project should work out its own style guidelines for how to organize Bible articles -- making sure that you have the full buy-in of the Judiasm project -- and then reorganize (not delete) existing material along those lines. Then, if in the future an article that goes against those guidelines is created, you can then merge the content following that guideline (again, not delete, because almost certainly every chapter in the Bible is notable on shere metric tonnage of commentary). —Quasirandom (talk) 18:14, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
  • Speedy Close This is not a proper AfD in many ways, not specifying just what pages are to be deleted, except by example, with the pages that are specified being of a great variety of different types an notability. As for the main issue, it is absurd to declare in advance thata bible chapter is not likely to be notable, given the amount of commentary that has been published over the centuries. If there are any particular pages here to which exception can be taken, let let be nominated separately. Incidentally, commentary on the bible has historically been done by chapters and verses for at least the last 4 or 5 centuries, so such a division is not irrational. DGG (talk) 20:00, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
  • Keep and split into topical articles. The amount of material in the field of Biblical interpretation is enormous. It is both serious scholarship and considered notable; these articles should definitely not be deleted. The Psalm articles can be kept at their current locations. --Eliyak T·C 01:02, 20 February 2008 (UTC)
  • Keep for now. Propose a guideline and let's debate that in a civil, centralized fashion. Bearian (talk) 20:33, 20 February 2008 (UTC)
  • Keep. Many of these articles are on texts which have their own literary integrity (John 20 and the Psalms are obvious examples). Plus, any given text in the bible could have scholarly articles written on them, thus making them notable. StAnselm (talk) 10:30, 21 February 2008 (UTC)
  • Comment - I am not convinced of the merit of summaries of New Testament chapters. Articles on particular parables, minracles, etc. might be appropriate, summarising scholarly discussion of them. There is a great deal of biblical commentary literature, but I am not sure WP ought to be competing with them. The division of the New Testament into chapters is only late medieval, but has become conventional. There is a problem over numbering Psalms as Christian tradition has split one of the early ones in two, so that all subsequent ones have alternative numbers. The Old Testament articles present a differnet problem in that the titles are in Hebrew (or possibly Yiddish), but I think we have to live with that. It may be that we have to have a parallel series of Christian articles on the Old Testament, and Jewish articles on the same text as Jewsih scriptures. However sicne we are both using the same holy book, this is difficult to avoid. On the whole I would say Keep and try to improve. Peterkingiron (talk) 00:27, 22 February 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.