Wikipedia:WikiProject Christianity/General Forum

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This page is being created to allow easier discussion of ideas and proposals which might be of interest to all the projects relating to Christianity. For specific matters relating to individual articles and issues, please use the relevant project's or work group's talk page.

Contents

[edit] Christianity awards

I'm not sure if any of you have noticed, but the Military history project has a series of "graded" awards available to their members, as can be seen at Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Awards. I think that we might have benefit from setting up the same sort of graded system. Given that our scope is rather different, we'd probably use different symbols, though. Would anyone objects to creating awards based on the "classes" of angel-themed awards, perhaps differing in terms of wing counts? I know it's only a vague idea, but it's the best one I can think of so far. John Carter (talk) 18:12, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

Angel theme with wing counts... I guess it is a good idea! -- TinuCherian (Wanna Talk?) - 04:16, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] New work groups and/or portals

Are there any particular new work groups or portals any of you would like to see? We currently have one such proposal for a Protestantism portal. John Carter (talk) 18:12, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

  1. Work group for Early Christianity. Many stubs (or dumps from Eastons Bible dictionary/11th edition of Encyclopedia Brittanica/Catholic Encyclopedia) in this area, would combat a systemic bias of the wiki.
  2. Work group for Christian denominations. Many stubs in this area, and denominations are relatively important topics. GRBerry 18:29, 21 May 2008 (UTC)
    Do you mean , a workgroup in name of each major denomination ? -- TinuCherian (Wanna Talk?) - 04:14, 22 May 2008 (UTC)
    No, I mean a single work group to make sure that we have a B-class or better article on every denomination. There are too many low quality articles, stubs, and non-articles out there, e.g. Christian Israelite Church, Christian Connection, Christian Catholic Church of Switzerland, Christian Catholic Apostolic Church, and Russian True Orthodox Church are all denominational articles that I've touched in the past couple days and the work group could work on. I'm sure there are plenty of completly omitted denominations from non-Western countries; but obviously I can't link to the articles on them. GRBerry 14:25, 22 May 2008 (UTC)
    Agreed with GRBerry. Granted, in several cases, there might not be that much information easily available, or possibly much to say about the subject. This is particularly true of some of the pentecostal "denominations", some of which are basically only a single church, like the Crystal Cathedral. But if there is interest in separate groups for each major denomination, I wouldn't have any objections to seeing them started. John Carter (talk) 15:37, 22 May 2008 (UTC)
  3. A work group for Christian theology would also be nice, but we'll probably have to go looking for expert editors. GRBerry 18:33, 21 May 2008 (UTC)
    • Given wikipedia's past experience with theological "experts", I am a little hesitant. However, I would be willing to help get this one of the ground. Pastordavid (talk) 19:35, 21 May 2008 (UTC)
      Yeah, I meant "go looking for expert editors" in the sense of going outside Wikipedia to recruit actual experts from seminaries and the like. That makes this idea a real stretch. GRBerry 19:51, 21 May 2008 (UTC)
      I threw this together as a starting place. Check it out, make suggestions on the talk page, or feel free to make changes. I tried to set it up to address the specific needs of this area. Pastordavid (talk) 20:13, 21 May 2008 (UTC)
  4. In general, we have an abundance of stubs and poorly sourced articles floating around - especially in terms of contemporary church life (for example, glance through some of these). Some sort of noticeboard/clearing house to find and evaluate sources - whether print or external links - would be helpful. We need a whole lot less "I know this to be true ..." and a whole lot more "X says that...". Pastordavid (talk) 19:35, 21 May 2008 (UTC)
    • I agree regarding the stubs and poorly sourced articles. That's one of the reasons I started putting the "Todo" lists on the top of every related project's talk page, hoping that doing so might get some attention to the weak articles. Regarding evaluating of sources, oh, that would be interesting, because we've not only got to deal with sources that are reliable in general, or not fringe, but also which might be reliable as statements of the opinions of a fringe group. Regarding the denominations, we do need a lot of help in that area. I'm putting together a list of denominations of various religions now, and it's huge, with even 14 Jehovah's Witnesses denominations. Many of these have nothing at all yet. Some of them, I think, may not merit much because of either their minimal size or brief lifespan, but many of the others do. Regarding the theology work group, I think that would probably work best as a joint subproject with WikiProject Philosophy. I can set up the Christianity banner to do "double duty" and assess for the Philosophy project as well if requested. I do think a lot more emphasis to that subject, particularly considering how important many of the points are to the various churches, would be extremely valuable. John Carter (talk) 20:37, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Portals

Suggested new portals include

  • Portal:Protestantism
  • Portal:Christian Theology

I can well understand that some people would question the possible proliferation of portals. My best reason for thinking they would be useful is a statement I saw some time ago which indicated that, for the Video Games project anyway, their portal got more hits than anything else in the project. I think that might hold true for some groups within Christianity as well. If I'm right in that, then there would be use for separate portals for many of the extant groups.

[edit] Collaboration?

One of the reasons why I think there may not have been a particularly successful collaboration for Christianity in general in the past is because many times the most important topics are covered by more than one article, and we have generally thought of collaborations as being basically single-article affairs. But Pastordavid's comments about the numerous Baptism articles suggested to me the possibility that maybe whjat we might try to do is collaborate on a topic of relevance to all of Christianity, like maybe baptism, and try to get input from as many projects and individuals as possible on the articles relating to that topic, if not to any particular article. Any opinions on whether such a collaboration might work? John Carter (talk) 16:31, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] WikiBooks and other sister projects

I have noticed that there are absolutely zero books in Wikibooks relating to Christianity in any way. Considering the rather less limited nature of that site, maybe it would be one of the better places to try to generate content on some of the harder subjects which may not really fit as encyclopedia articles. Also, from what little I can see, i think Wikiquote could probably use some help as well in the Christianity content. If any of you are interested in maybe helping in these areas, please indicate as much below. I would be willing to help as I can, which really ain't necessarily much, unfortunately, in either effort. If we were to start one or more WikiBooks on Chrsitianity, which topics do the rest of you think would be the best ones to write about? John Carter (talk) 15:01, 3 June 2008 (UTC)