Talk:Faith Wiki

Great idea. Check out World Scripture, edited by Andrew Wilson, dean of en:Unification Theological Seminary. The Unification Encyclopedia Project is also interested in wiki-publishing the great scriptures of the world in full, such as the Koran, the Bible, the New Testament, etc. Ed Poor 15:49, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

• Then get them to come to Wikisource, where this is already being done. Uncle G 11:37, 2005 Jun 27 (UTC)

The problem with most religious projects is that they are written from the viewpoint of a member, clergy, theologian, etc. of that faith. Being a collaborative project this would be done with a minimum of bias.

"Why should meta-wiki host Faith-Wiki" is unclear to me. Meta promotes collaboration between Wikimedia projects, not hosts contents. Meta is not an encyclopedia nor an archive of primary sources. Perhaps you would enjoy developing a book or a cource on Wikibooks (or Wikiversity). --Aphaia | Translate Election | ++ 04:40, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Concern about NPOV issues

Adding my voice to the concerns listed above, I have some serious issues regarding NPOV issues with a wiki of this sort. All kinds of problems have already occured when trying to classify different philosophical and religious viewpoints on Wikipedia. In short, I would like to see detailed "charter" descriptions on how NPOV issues will be dealt with.

Also, I would like to see addressed specifically why this can't already be accomplished through Wikipedia (as a sort of faith-based encylopedia that simply ties in existing Wikipedia articles about faith and faith practices). Based on what I've seen, this could either be a "wikibook" (I know... Wikibooks is often abused in this regard but there are similar efforts over there for other projects like this), or a sub-section of Wikipedia (as described). We don't want to see another Wikispecies debacle, but I still see that there is value in gathering together under one area a table of contents and themeatic gathering of faith-based knowledge. My strong preference would be to do it within Wikipedia, and try to do cross-language efforts as well. Roberth 07:54, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia is much too small for world beliefs.

A book in Wikibooks, or Wikiversity? You might not understand the size of this undertaking. It would shadow what we presently have in Wikipedia with the information on Roman Catholosism alone. It is definately no small project!

For Wikipedia to encompass all faiths and beliefs, it would be absolutely huge. There have been more texts written on religion than any other subject. The amount of possible information would be absolutely astounding. The diversity of beliefs is astounding if you think of how many ways Christianity can be broken down, then Catholosism (for instance) has hundreds if not thousands of variants (not including personal beliefs). Try to picture how many variants of athiesm there are.

The amount of knowledge that this would open up to the world can not even be estimated. Wikipedia is good but if people listed and discussed every form of widget including sizes, colours, date of manufacture, etc. it would soon become bogged down in information. Wikipedia is a beginning but world beliefs are much to diverse for it to work effectively.

What we would be doing is giving humanity, our children and grandchildren a way of understanding who they are and who their neighbour is. In it's own way it would be promoting peace which can only come through understanding and accepting other people.

By the way, I am not a religious zealot. I am just someone who believes that people should be given free access to knowledge. What more important knowledge is there?

--Sean A. Turvey U.E. 22:14, Jun 24, 2005 (UTC)

We already have this

Wikisource takes all of the (public domain and GFDL) religious texts that anyone has to offer, at Wikisource:Religious texts, and already has the Book of Mormon, various translations of the Bible, and the Qur'an, amongst others, with lots of space for many more. Wikibooks takes books on religions (Wikibooks:Religion), religious study guides (such as Wikibooks:Bible Topics and Wikibooks:The Gospel of John), annotated versions of religious texts (Wikibooks:Annotated texts bookshelf), and so forth. Rather than forking a new project, please contribute to the existing projects. Uncle G 11:37, 2005 Jun 27 (UTC)

People rarely look past their own nose to see what other people believe.

This goes much further than religious texts. You are thinking much to small. People just do not see past their own beliefs to understand how huge this project would be. Yes, the texts would be a big part of it but only as a foundation. You mentioned the Book of Mormon. There are at least 30 different major offshoots of the Morman Faith all using the book as a basis for their beliefs. As an Universalist Unitarian we look at many different texts to form our religion.

The majority of information out there has never even been written down, or is in languages that few people understand anymore. Each American Indian tribe had it's own beliefs on how the earth was formed etc. Many of those tribes are no longer around. Their were countless pagan religions around when Christianity pushed them out of the scene but we only see a very limited number of them. The list is huge. Voodoo beliefs are seldom written because a large percentage of the followers are illiterate. There are as many voodoo beliefs as there are priests as they all teach their own version.

Think of something that you believe in yet other people in your church (maybe even your own spouse) would debate you on. Though personal beliefs are very far up the tree, you can figure on everyone in the world believing something different than you. At 6 billion people and counting we would only get a very small glimpse of the world but it would be enough to understand how varied beliefs can be. In one of his books Douglas Adams has character tortured by showing to them exactly how small they are in the universe, I think that if this project ever gets off the ground it is possible that it could have a huge effect by showing people just how limited they are with their own beliefs.

Weak rationale for a new wiki

Some responses:

A book in Wikibooks, or Wikiversity? You might not understand the size of this undertaking. It would shadow what we presently have in Wikipedia with the information on Roman Catholosism alone. It is definately no small project!

Nor is Wikipedia. Try following the links from and to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Catholic_Church

For Wikipedia to encompass all faiths and beliefs, it would be absolutely huge.

610,000 articles pretty much meets my definition of "absolutely huge." The English Wikipedia is the largest encyclopedia in history, with more than 7 times as many articles and about 4 times as many words as, for example, the Encyclopaedia Britannica. If you can manage to add a 10th of that, I'll be impressed.

Catholosism (for instance) has hundreds if not thousands of variants (not including personal beliefs). Try to picture how many variants of athiesm there are.

If their existence can be documented and they are not purely personal in nature, they belong in Wikipedia. If they cannot, then I doubt Wikimedia would want to play a role in promoting these belief systems.

Wikipedia is a beginning but world beliefs are much to diverse for it to work effectively.

Please try to back up this claim by enumerating articles which would not be included in Wikipedia, but which would be included in this "Faith Wiki." Then we can discuss whether that claim is true, and if it is, whether Wikimedia wants to provide hosting for such articles.

The majority of information out there has never even been written down, or is in languages that few people understand anymore. Each American Indian tribe had it's own beliefs on how the earth was formed etc. Many of those tribes are no longer around.

We document various mythologies already, some of them extinct. Start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Mythology_by_culture

Or, for Native American mythologies in particular: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Native_American_mythology

If it cannot be documented on the basis of reliable sources, what do you want to do? Original research into extinct mythologies? If research has any place in Wikimedia, I believe it should be in a scholarly framework like Wikiversity.

Think of something that you believe in yet other people in your church (maybe even your own spouse) would debate you on. Though personal beliefs are very far up the tree, you can figure on everyone in the world believing something different than you. At 6 billion people and counting we would only get a very small glimpse of the world but it would be enough to understand how varied beliefs can be.

I do not consider it useful to collect highly personal beliefs that are not shared by a substantial number of individuals, as that would make quality control, neutrality and verification impossible: "I believe that Earth was created by banana slugs 5 years ago."

Wikimedia already provides you with a framework for adding the *useful* and *verifiable* information about faiths that exists. Please share rational arguments why this framework is not sufficient.

--Eloquence 05:53, 28 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Where are the technical issues/different editing philosophies?

I'm not suggesting that a stand-alone wiki regarding Faith wouldn't be useful, but again I ask why not put this as a section of Wikipedia?

The different Wikimedia projects (at least those that have been quite successful) each have a very different editing philosophy and to some degree technical requirements that truly require them to be seperate projects. This is not just an orginzational things, but actual changes in the MediaWiki code that need separate maintainence in order to achieve the goals of the project. Notablely WikiNews, which has a separate license requirement (PD, vs. GFDL for the rest of Media Wiki), or Wikibooks that has a sub-module philosophy that is substantially different than Wikipedia articles. Wikicommons is more multimedia, and Wikiquote is a compendium of quotes.

An example of a project that has "seeding" from another project is Wikijunior. I would offer to suggest that this WikiFaith proposal is something more along those lines as you can still gather content, provide links to already existing content (there really is already a tremendous amount on Wikipedia as well as Wikicommons, as pointed out above). If this could be a runaway hit as the proposer is suggesting, it would be relatively trivial to export that data set and move it to another main Wikimedia portal.

I also see little, if any, new editing requirements or organization philosophies that don't already exist with current Wikimedia projects. I am assuming that the goal is to gather GFDL'd (or other copyleft content) Faith-based content and put it together under one organizational framework. What is new? Yes, faith and religious philosophy discussions can take up a large section of any library, and deserve a separate 100's level category under the Dewey Decimal system (and other knowledge classification systems), but that doesn't mean you need a whole separate library! That is essentially what you are suggesting, and I don't buy it. What new editing approaches are going to required?

And even your simplistic classification system is going to give you heartburn. My own personal faith preference (I'm not shy about this, I happen to be LDS, or a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) tends to give even people within the faith heartburn over how to classify this religious movement compared to other religious faiths, or what even counts as an LDS philosophy. And this is cut and dried compared to other religous philosophes like the Church of the Sub-Genius or UFO cults (or for that matter any new religous movement founded after about 1500).

As for Wikipedia being too small to contain a compendium of Faith-based articles, I would like to see some hard facts for this. As in a number of articles for this Wiki proposal compared to articles in the mainstream Wikipedia.

For that matter, I would also like to see a "sample front page" for what you as the proposer would like to see if this project were given a green light. This is not as easy to do as it seems. Link to existing Wikimedia content, or even external links if necessary. Provide an example of a well-written article that would be unique to WikiFaith, and not necessarily found on Wikipedia. Roberth 11:02, 28 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I appologise for my ignorance!

I did not realise that wikipedia could be split in such a manner. You may be right. I will look into this very soon. I have also discovered that Religion-Wiki is smaller in scope than what I had in mind but it is very new and I do have a chance at advancing my dream.

--Sean A. Turvey U.E. 15:24, Jun 28, 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia

I think wikipedia and its wikiprojects are enoguh for this. What would wikifaith add???

Wikisinglesubjectpedia?

I feel very hesitant about the idea of a Wikimedia wiki that's about a single subject. To be sure, faith is an important part of many, many lives, and a lot of what's in Wikipedia now could use a solid touch-up. Of course. But dedicating time and resources to a single subject like this seems like a waste of time that could be used to making Wikipedia better.

If you have NPOV information to add on a faith-based topic, there's Wikipedia. If you have some public domain original texts, there's Wikisource. I don't see what Faithwiki could provide that couldn't fit into the existing projects. And that's to say nothing about a potential snowball effect (Wikidairy, anybody?), which is unlikely but interesting to think about. Lord Bob 09:13, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

I agree. Andre (talk) 17:01, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

So do I. Dan100 18:42, 19 August 2005 (UTC)

The Black Hole of POV; You can't escape it.

I think that wiki cities would be the best place, in my understanding of wiki media projects, for this project, and the main reason is because there are allready POV issue precedents, for instance, the two Star Trek Wikicities, one for the formal cannon Star Trek Universe POV, and one for the much larger non-cannon POV.

Let me put it to you this way. I have the equivalent knowledge of several Doctorate Degrees in Religion, including Comparative World Religions and World Religious History. And by way of example, Catholicism is (By any reasonable review of the factual information, history, etc.) A Fascist, Misogynist, Anti-intellectual, War/Death Cult, based loosely on the figure of Y'Shua Ben Yeoseph, but politicized and mixed flagrantly with elements of Zoroastrianism, and Roman Paganism. Thats not POV, its the facts, as I know them.

Doesn't make for a very fair exploration of Catholicism from the Catholics point of view, though does it?

Religion is inherantly POV. You can't escape it, you can't deny it, and trying to make an exploration of religion outside of POV only leads very rapidly to the Athiests conclusion that Religion is in general civilizations trash, and ought not to be bothered with at all.

Inherantly, the best approximation of non-POV for World Religions is the inclusion of multiple POVs, with lines clearly delineated in terms of which POV is being explored where. For instance, The Catholic POV and the Historians POV on Catholicsm should be well insulated in some senses from each other, so that there isn't an outcome of a flame war, and so that each side gets to represent its POV fairly.

Including a "Faiths" batch of articles in Wikimedia or WikiPedia or even WikiBooks would compromise the No POV policy of Wiki.

Furthermore, i think that it is important to include POV diclaimers, so that people know that the said WikiCity documents the factual information OF POVs.

This in a sense, is the only rational way around the problem; To openly state at the beginning that the information is POV, and that this is an exception to the general Wiki Standard.

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