Talk:Seung Sahn

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Good article Seung Sahn has been listed as one of the good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can delist it, or ask for a reassessment.
January 25, 2008 Good article nominee Listed
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[edit] Tone of Article and Matter Relevant to Scandal

The article is OK, but it reads almost as if written by a follower--defintely seems to lack a NPOV. As documented many places, including Rick Fields's excellent book, How the Swans Came to the Lake (2nd Edition), Seung Sahn had sexual relationships with many women who were followers of his. One such was Soeng Hyang. This caused tension in his community, as well as resulting in many followers of his leaving. Despite this, he never relinquished his position, and websites produced by the Kwan Um school and other sources with links to him do not, to my knowledge, mention any of this.

I do not wish to diminish any good Seung Sahn or any of his organizations may have done. Nevertheless, I think it is very important for the public to be able to make informed decisions regarding religious figures and organizations, especially in this day and age. Moreover, materials on Seung Sahn's behavior are publicly available and have been for a long time. Thus, I think that adding them is a matter of balance. Ironically, the Wikipedia article on Soeng Hyang does in fact mention the affair Seung Sahn had with her.

Thus, with all this in mind, I have edited the article to add a short section, "Controversy" on this issue. Once more, I do not intend to cast aspersions about Seung Sahn, but to make sure there is balanced information in the article. Turmarion 03:48, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, where did it go? I found that relevant. 67.36.180.141 (talk) —Preceding comment was added at 18:50, 7 December 2007 (UTC)


GA review (see here for criteria)

While the article is reasonable well written, I think it should be reformatted to make the entire thing flow better and make it more visually appealing. The main thrust of the article is this person’s biography, yet the entirety of the information is set in subheadings. Alternatively, the biography could be placed under one large heading (with expansion to the material in the subheadings, of course) and items related to his teaching style and criticism of his methods could be made separate headings. I think the article has a lot of potential, but just isn’t quite there yet. In that respect, I’m putting the article on hold for a little while to see if improvements can be made. If so, I’ll review the article again, and if not, I will change it to a fail.

  1. It is reasonably well written.
    a (prose): b (MoS):
  2. It is factually accurate and verifiable.
    a (references): b (citations to reliable sources): c (OR):
  3. It is broad in its coverage.
    a (major aspects): b (focused):
  4. It follows the neutral point of view policy.
    Fair representation without bias:
    There have been some questions raised on the talk page as to NPOV. In checking the edit history, I cannot tell if these concerns have effectively been addressed.
  5. It is stable.
    No edit wars etc.:
    there has been a lot of activity over the past two dozen days, so I can’t speak to stability, though the article seemed stable before the recent edit frenzy. I don’t think it’s enough to warrant fail since all the edits were made by the nominator, but it is something to be cognizant of.
  6. It is illustrated by images, where possible and appropriate.
    a (images are tagged and non-free images have fair use rationales): b (appropriate use with suitable captions):
  7. Overall:
    Pass/Fail:

jackturner3 (talk) 21:46, 24 January 2008 (UTC)