Wikipedia:Centralized discussion/200 verses of Matthew

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 It has been suggested that this page or section be merged with Wikipedia:Centralized discussion/Verses of John 20. (Discuss)

The discussion was carried out on the talk page

The conclusions of the discussion are summarised below (and then disputed by SimonP).

The subject that was discussed, and the conclusions refer to, is in the second section below.

[edit] Conclusions

After debate, community consensus was that, taking into consideration Wikipedia:Don't include copies of primary sources, the vast majority of these articles should be merged (if any content proves relevant) and otherwise redirected to its parent chapter article, unless it can prove outstanding noteability on its own. A simple discussion of a verse does not make for an acceptable article, original research or not. --InShaneee 04:14, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

Of course since the this is about the eighth such discussion, and every other one ended up with the opposite conclusion, and since no one who actually works in this area decided to participate, these conclusions can safely be ignored. - SimonP 18:07, 29 January 2006 (UTC)
  • That is simply not true.
    1. Wikipedia:Bible verses shows support for the statement that all notable bible verses should have their own articles, and that a small or a vast minority of the verses are notable.
    2. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Individual Bible verses shows a large amount of support for merging, and hardly any opposition (and yes, plenty opposition to deleting, but we knew that).
    3. Wikipedia:Merge/Bible verses shows mainly argumentation, but nearly all of the arguments to keep separate were written by one person (incidentally, that would be SimonP) and a far greater number of editors suggested other issues.
    4. Wikipedia:Centralized discussion/Whole bible chapter text shows strong support for moving source text to wikisource, and merging short bible articles
    5. So does Wikipedia:Centralized discussion/Verses of John 20, as well as this page.
    6. Wikipedia:Don't include copies of primary sources is one of our oldest content guidelines, stemming from 2002. We even created a new wikiproject (WikiSource) to deal with that.
  • In other words, yes, consensus does support (1) moving bible source text to Wikisource, and (2) merging most bible articles. Most vocal dissent on almost all these discussions comes from a single person. Remember that merging does not lose content, it simply organizes content - and a one-man crusade against it simply isn't going anywhere. >Radiant< 23:09, 1 February 2006 (UTC)
I think you are misrepresenting these discussions. Consider Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Individual Bible verses, how does 31 keep votes to 21 merge votes indicate no opposition to a merger. That was clearly a debate between merging and keeping and keeping won. Or read the conclusions of Wikipedia:Merge/Bible verses. These were written by Doc Glasgow, who doesn't himself support these articles, and his view was that they should be done individually. This has been done recently and even the shortest and most stubby have been kept. You are leaving out the earliest debates completely. I made explicitly clear when I created the first verse article that many more were to come, and yet the first debate ended in a strong keep vote Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/John 20:16. Almost every debate since then has been an attempt by -Ril- to overturn that result by any means fair or foul. SimonP 00:47, 2 February 2006 (UTC)
Despite your best attempts to pin this on -Ril-, I'm still counting at least 20 merge votes to maybe 2 keep, which sounds pretty clear and NOT -Ril- centric to me. You can't discount the most current discussion just because it's not made up entirely of people who'd vote the way you'd like it to go. Accusations aside, procedure was followed here. --InShaneee 15:03, 2 February 2006 (UTC)
So what is your explanation for what happened to the 30+ keep votes that regularly appear at VfDs? This discussion is far smaller and far more skewed than those that have gone before it. Just because it is somewhat more recent does not make it more accurate. There are very real reasons to believe that this discussion is far less accurate a reflection on community consensus than the earlier ones. - SimonP 16:15, 2 February 2006 (UTC)
Merging is not the antithesis of keeping. Deletion is the antithesis of keeping, and on AFD both a 'keep' and 'merge' mean not to delete the information; keep doesn't imply an objection to merging. Consensus agrees with you that this information should not be deleted. Consensus also states that source text belongs in wikisource, and that this information is more comprehensive in merged form. >Radiant< 15:45, 2 February 2006 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Individual Bible verses was not a standard VfD. It was explictly designed and stated to be a vote on keeping versus merging, and keeping won by a significant margin. This was even with -Ril-'s usual get out the vote efforts. - SimonP 16:15, 2 February 2006 (UTC)
Actually if you read the comments associated with the "keep" votes, most of them are under the impression that it was a normal VfD. A large number of them said that there should be some sort of merge but VfD was the wrong place to propose it and it should be discussed at the apropriate place. I see very few votes or comments in opposed to merging the articles. Thryduulf 16:28, 2 February 2006 (UTC)
Exactly. You are wrongly assuming that people read lengthy instructions. It was not a very good move to put a merge request on AFD, because people would assume it was a deletion request, like everything else on AFD. You cannot infer from that vote (or indeed, from any of the other debates mentioned here) that there is large-scale opposition to merging those articles. More like the opposite. >Radiant< 16:35, 2 February 2006 (UTC)
Then what about Wikipedia:Merge/Bible verses, where the discussion was evenly divided and the conclusion rejected any specific policy. - SimonP 16:44, 2 February 2006 (UTC)
That's simply false. Chris Parham concludes that articles on Bible verses should demonstrate the individual notability of the verse, Doc concludes that stubs and bare-bones may be merged. Also, nearly all of the "keep separate" section was written by you, with far more people contributing to the other sections. And still, one page that is apparently less clear does not in any way invalidate the strong consensus for merging shown on those other pages. >Radiant< 17:20, 2 February 2006 (UTC)
The most important section of Wikipedia:Merge/Bible verses is the "Arguments against a specific policy on biblical verses", this was the most popular option by a considerable margin, and it is directly counter to exactly the sort of proposal that is being made here. - SimonP 17:33, 2 February 2006 (UTC)
By the way, since I was mentioned here, the vast majority of Simon's articles establish notability in the sense that they provide important information that we should keep. Merging is an option that I wouldn't necessarily oppose, though I think it's only a matter of time before such merges will need to be undone to keep pages at a reasonable length. But regarding this particular dispute, I'll note that throughout the six months of this dispute I am aware of no substantial attempt by any contributor to thoughtfully merge any of these articles, so I can see why Simon is opposed. -Ril-'s campaign is not one of content reorganization but of content removal, and describing it as if it falls under meta:Mergism is misleading. Christopher Parham (talk) 17:20, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
  • There is no specific policy on biblical verses, obviously, and nobody is proposing one. But you must realize that you do not WP:OWN those pages either. >Radiant< 01:52, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
    • I am quite aware these are not my articles, and I would actually relish some collaborators as this project in a long row to hoe on my own. However, I do strongly object to people who have never worked in this area, have no interest in working in this area, and have minimal knowledge of the subject at dictating how I must behave. - SimonP 05:23, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
      • You don't own the areas, either. This is a discussion about wikipedia policy, which the people in this discussion are all quite qualified to comment on. --InShaneee 08:11, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
        • Alright, here's a challenge. As you have said repeatedly there are a large group of Wikipedians who feel that a merged by chapter approach is best. I'm asking you to demonstrate this. There are still huge chunks of the New Testament that have not been touched. Take an untouched chapter, such as Luke 5, and create a single article of similar comprehensiveness to the by verse series for Matthew. Then we can compare the two approaches, and at the same time add constructively to the encyclopedia rather than wasting time and energy on sterile debate. I can cover a chapter in a couple of weeks work, so with twenty of you it should go very easily. No special expertise is needed, I certainly don't have a doctorate in Biblical studies. Simply a handful of trips to the local library should be enough. - SimonP 15:01, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
          • I don't need to prove anything, that's what I've been trying to say. That was the debate. Your proof is all there if you just take a look. Regardless, I have my own areas of interest on wikipedia, and, not even being a christian, this really isn't something I'm willing to get into. I'm just trying to get this policy written out as the discussion went. --InShaneee 23:59, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
  • Simon, nobody questions the quality of your bible content, and nobody wants to force you to write bible articles in any particular way. People are simply asking you to refrain from reverting good-faith reorganisation edits (such as merges) from other people (remember that a merge is not a loss of content, it is a reorganisation), and to not include the full source text (per WP:NOT). >Radiant< 00:27, 4 February 2006 (UTC)
Except that in this case it is. The total text in the bodies of the articles in Matthew 1, by far the shortest of the chapters, is over 8,500 words. This is without the references, images, source text, or introductions. 8,500 words is vastly larger than recommended article length, and every other chapter I have done is considerably longer, some up to twice as large. Moreover I've only scratched the surface on this subject. I've used no more than introductory texts, and have so far added coverage from only a handful of schools of interpretation. Each article will eventually be three or four times as long.
Everyone who has participated on either side in these debates knows that a full merger is ridiculous. What -Ril- has always insisted is that the length of the current pages is no concern, as 90% of the content is cruft that should simply be dumped. To him, and his allies a merger automatically implies the deletion of the vast bulk of the content. This has been demonstrated every time someone has started a merge. When -Ril- "merged" Matthew 1:7 and Matthew 1:8 the content wasn't moved anywhere, it was simply overwritten. The same is true of Aranda56's merges of Matthew 1:4 to Matthew 1:10, the content was simply dumped. If you actually read the comments on this discussion page, the calls are for redirecting, not merging and redirecting. This is a backdoor attempt at deletion since they have been rebuffed each and every time and article has actually been listed at AfD. - SimonP 01:21, 4 February 2006 (UTC)
  • Sorry, but that's a straw man again. Clearly a full merger is ridiculous (we'd have only a single article Bible if we did that). That doesn't mean that individual verses cannot be merged to some level. Taking as an example Matthew 1:4... the first paragraph is the same in any other verse of Matthew 1. The second and third paragraph are source text. And the sources cited are going to be the same for most verses as well. That leaves just two paragraphs about M1:4. I don't see how it is unfeasible to merge this. >Radiant< 01:41, 4 February 2006 (UTC)
  • Please reread what I wrote above. The 8,500 word figure does not include the source texts, introductory paragraph, references etc. That number counts just the two paragraphs of analysis. - SimonP 01:50, 4 February 2006 (UTC)
    • Straw man. Nobody is suggesting one 8500-word article. Nor is anyone suggesting 850 articles of ten words each. You're dodging the issue here. >Radiant< 11:37, 4 February 2006 (UTC)
    • So you agree with me that the conclusion InShaneee wrote calling for the vast majority of verses to be merged into the chapter pages is incorrect? - SimonP 13:58, 4 February 2006 (UTC)
      • No, I agree with you that we shouldn't merge all bible-related articles into Bible. Pages by chapter should be far more comprehensive than pages per verse. I don't buy the allegation that any chapter would have 8500 non-duplicated words excluding source text, unless you can substantiate that somehow. >Radiant< 14:12, 4 February 2006 (UTC)
      • Fortunately my numbers are quite easy to verify. Simply do what I did, take the body of the text of each verse article in Matthew 1, and the text of the Matthew 1 article itself, and copy it into your favourite word processor. Once you have all of them copied simply run the word count utility and you'll get the same number I did. Read through the text and you will see that there is virtually no duplication. (If you want a real shock do the same thing for Matthew 5, I just did and the text there adds up to more than 15,000 words.) I think your incredulity is perfect proof of why this discussion is so meaningless. You are an able and aware Wikipedian, but even you seem to have though that a stub like Matthew 1:4 is a typical example of a verse article, when it is actually about the shortest. You had no idea of just how large these articles are and what merging would entail. - SimonP 14:38, 4 February 2006 (UTC)
You are quite simply inaccurate about your claim that its difficult to merge. I have merged the articles corresponding to Matthew 1:1-17 here as an example of how easy it is, and how most of the content is duplication - you will note that by cutting out the two translations of the source text it becomes an even more reasonable size. I'm not sure exactly how big that article is, but it is already less than 32k, and would be even more reasonable without the source text. --Victim of signature fascism | help remove electoral corruption 11:32, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
  • Thank you Ril, that is a good example. >Radiant< 11:58, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
    • Except that it isn't, in that is by the shortest group of articles, and isn't even a whole chapter. Have you both thus accepted that mergers into full chapters are a bad idea, despite the seeming consensus on this page? Also -Ril- has dropped a large part of the information, deleting as much as he merged. For instance he has left out all of the dates and chronology that attempted to link the names to historical periods. The is no mention of Perez, and you abandon interpretations, such as Albright and Mann's for the brothers in Matthew 1:11. The table at Matthew 1:17 is gone This clearly puts lie to the notion that merging is not a form of deletion. It is also a random jumble of information. Rachab's position in the genealogy for some reason appears in a section named spelling. The organization of 1:1 is somehow found in a section named terminology. (-Ril- also seems to have introduced a pretty major error in this section) - SimonP 14:37, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
That would be the table that duplicates the much better (but less neat) one at Genealogy of Jesus, an article into which the entire example could be put, hence not requiring the table since that would add it twice?
No the table at Matthew 1:17 illustrates the failure of the 3x14 parallelism. Such tables are found in almost all reference works, and it is very difficult to understand the problem of that verse without it. - SimonP 15:56, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
I'm quite sure people are capable of counting.
As for organisation, we don't organise the Harry Potter article by the order in which events, narratives, and characters appear. This is an encyclopedia, we organise by subject and theme, not numerical sequence. Wikipedia is not paper, it isn't linear, its part of a web.
We do, actually, I don't know of a book or film where the plot summary in the Wikipedia article does not go in linear order. - SimonP 15:56, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
No we don't. While we do do plot summaries linearly, we don't do discussion of aspects of the plot linearly. We don't insist that Dursleys should be talked about before Voldemort, for example, even though this is the linear order. If plot summary was all these 200 verse articles were, then we could bin them straight away for being pov forks of Gospel of Matthew.
And, you know, maybe we should discuss every single detail and insignificant petty squabbling about words, such as maybe the 1,236,754th word in the Mahabarata was fesh rather than fosh, or maybe, you know, in that speech to the nation that George Bush does, maybe he meant to say Hello instead of Hi.
You've long stated that you believe the entire project to be cruft, so I am not surprised you don't object to deleting large chunks of it. However, even Radiant seems to agree that there is no consensus to simply delete content. - SimonP 15:56, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
You should actually check what I left out. It wasn't content, it was worthless fluff to all but people who are actually engaged directly in translating the bible, and even then it is extremely technical knowledge of past viewpoints, and not relevant to encyclopedia content.
As you have said repeatedly you view pretty much everything this series as "cruft" yet the community has repeatedly rejected this view. Just a few days ago Matthew 1:2 received only three votes in favour of deletion and 17 to keep or merge, yet you did not merge a single word of the content in that article. - SimonP 20:04, 6 February 2006 (UTC)
And as for linking names to historic periods, I'm quite sure that we don't need to patronise readers and pretend they have absolutely no knowledge and are totally incapable of clicking on the links.
What links are you referring to them clicking? The ones in the source texts you have spent several months trying to get rid of and still insist should be deleted? - SimonP 15:56, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
No, that would be the links in the table in the article to which the example could be merged - the article in question being Genealogy of Jesus.
This section of the text is essentially a list of names, and you don't believe that any information on these names or even links to the names are useful content? - SimonP 20:04, 6 February 2006 (UTC)
Example 2: a whole chapter (Matthew 3) --Victim of signature fascism | help remove electoral corruption 15:22, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
And that example is already 30kb long despite your omissions. Matthew 3 is again one of the shortest chapters, there are fewer verses in Matthew 3 than in any other chapter in Matthew. - SimonP 15:56, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
And that example has two whole copies of the source text, a load of pictures, and is still under 32kb. --Victim of signature fascism | help remove electoral corruption 16:06, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
And as I have said repeatedly I have only scratched the surface in these series. A quick look at the references and you will see that they are all introductory texts. There have been entire books written about many of these verses, and each of these articles could easily be three of four times longer. Yet even my basic summaries are already at the page size limit. - SimonP 20:04, 6 February 2006 (UTC)
As an example I went thtough another couple of books on the genealogy, and with only a few hours work managed to significantly exapnd all those articles. - SimonP 19:30, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
I'm sure I could equally scour the internet and several shoddy authors and find enough to fill out a huge article about Remembralls, but that still wouldn't make the information I added encyclopedic. --Victim of signature fascism | help remove electoral corruption 21:03, 17 February 2006 (UTC)
And I'm equally certain you could find virtually no sources on the subject in a university library or in peer reviewed journals. Sources which are encyclopedic, and the type I have been using. - SimonP 22:06, 17 February 2006 (UTC)
The anchor bible series isn't a peer reviewed journal. Its the work of religiously biased amateurs - specifically, in the ones you quote, Albright, an archaeologist, not an academically peer reviewed or acknowledged biblical scholar. I am sure, however, that several academics in the fields of sociology and (modern) english literature will have written about Harry Potter by now, and definitely that the Remembrall features in some of these writings. --Victim of signature fascism | help remove electoral corruption 22:42, 17 February 2006 (UTC)
Pardon, the AB isn't perfect, but its far from the "work of religiously biased amateurs." W.F. Albright, as our own article makes clear, was one of the most acclaimed Biblical scholars of his generation. - 23:13, 17 February 2006 (UTC)
Only from the point of view of conservative protestants. Biography articles on wikipedia have several pov problems, mainly caused by them not being watched much. For example Kenneth Kitchen was originally down as a biblical scholar, he isn't, he's an egyptologist and an evangelical christian, which combines to make him give amateur opinions on biblical matters. --Victim of signature fascism | There is no cabal 01:22, 22 February 2006 (UTC)
Ah yes, Johns Hopkins University, the Bob Jones of Maryland. - SimonP 01:53, 22 February 2006 (UTC)
So? He's a professor of biblical archaeology not biblical criticism. --Victim of signature fascism | There is no cabal 23:06, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

Just a thought how about transwiki to wikibooks. I was under the impression wikibooks is for, amongst other things, annotated texts/companion books/however you call them. Discordance 17:51, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

nevermind its already been suggested Discordance 17:54, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Summary of the issue(s)

Currently there are individual articles for every single one of the first 200 verses of the Gospel of Matthew, i.e 200 articles. Is this appropriate in Wikipedia?

  • do the articles merit existance individually
  • should they be merged to somewhere
    • And if so, where?
  • should they be deleted altogether

There has been much more generalised discussion and voting on the subject of bible verses in general, elsewhere. The only conclusions being that some bible verses are notable in their own right, e.g. John 3:16, and deserve articles of their own, but that others do not, and that most people thought that the number of notable verses was comparatively small, less than 500.

This discussion is specifically to address the following articles, and whether they should all continue to exist independantly as 200 individual articles:

This discussion is separate to the discussion of the verses of John 20 due to differing subject matter, and continuity amongst the verses in question, and also to avoid over generalising the discussion, and thus ensuring that the existance of these articles in particular is discussed.


[edit] Proper usage : Wikisource

This is an excellent example of a use for wikisource. There are two distinct elements to each verse that deserve detailed analysis and writing:

  • Various versions of the text; in Latin, English, and other languages
  • Various interpretations of the text; at present and throughout history; by different denominations; &c.

The encyclopedia articles can then limit themselves to an historical take on the book itself -- with detailed deep links to Wikisource source-text, translations, and commentaries. This could be a single, feature-length and -quality article for each book. Note that the images put to such good use in these articles could just as well be used to illustrate the relevant discussion pages on Wikisource. +sj + 09:21, 22 March 2006 (UTC)