Talk:Paganism (contemporary)

Page protected...

... for one week because of this kind of edit warring. Removal of material like this needs justifying here on the article talk page. Kim Dent-Brown ^(Talk) 12:49, 19 January 2013 (UTC)

Generalization

Introduction is full of unreferenced generalisations. Could some references be provided for claims that are made in the text, or should we perhaps rewrite the introduction.Perunova straža (talk) 12:13, 11 March 2013 (UTC)?

It does need some restructuring (which is actually part of what I was planing to do this week), but the lead does not need to be citation heavy. Everything in the lead should be supported by cited information in the body (as former only summarizes the latter). Controversial statements are one of the few cases that require redundant citations in the lead — to prevent inadvertent vandalism or censorship.
—Sowlos 17:09, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

Glad to hear that you'll be doing revision of the lead. The thing is some of the claims made in the lead (i.e. third and fourth paragraph of the lead) are unreferenced generalizations, unlike first two paragraphs that are both well written, avoid generalization and are referenced. Perhaps we should ditch the last two paragraphs alltogether, or heavily edit them? Perunova straža (talk) 21:33, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

I was thinking about it, but I avoid removing whole paragraphs without taking time to add back. Providing well cited statements that either contradicts the removed content or describes it more properly helps prevent POV-reverts.

I just pulled most of it and reworked the rest a little. However, if you still want to remove the rest, I will not object.

It will not look much better until the whole article is overhauled, as it is (should be) based on the body.
—Sowlos 22:43, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

I'll wait until you've done with editing, so I wouldn't meddle in your work. Your revisions, so far, are just the things I would've done. As far generalizations go claims such as "Of the various days for celebration among Pagans, the most common are seasonally based festivals of the Wheel of the Year." do require at least some reference. Providing reference that proves the negative might be hard, since I don't think any author would waste time with writing a paper that proves that this or that polytheistic religion never even heard of "Wheel of the Year". Perunova straža (talk) 08:17, 12 March 2013 (UTC)

Do not worry about meddling. My work has moved to the article body for now. I am prioritizing my tasks. (Improve the body to improve the summary.) If you think you think you can make it better, do so. :) However, whenever you are unsure, you can always make proposals and discuss them here.

As far generalizations go...
Agreed. I would normally refer to the main article for the topic (Wheel of the Year in this case), but it is light on references. I cleaned much of it up a while ago, but it still needs more attention. The problem, in part, is the sparse number of academic works focusing solely on Pagan celebrations.

—Sowlos 13:51, 12 March 2013 (UTC)

Moved without discussion

On 8 December 2012, Seonookim (talk · contribs) moved Paganism (contemporary) to Contemporary Paganism. "Is right term, does not use commas"

I noticed only after realizing that the archive pages and settings for MiszaBot have been broken for months. (I fixed them.) The problem is there was no discussion. "Contemporary Paganism" may be very similar to "Paganism (contemporary)", but there are grammatical differences. The move should been put to discussion first.
—Sowlos 23:20, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

I agree with the issue you've raised. However, since we are talking about terms that have no definition, we might let this slide by.Perunova straža (talk) 14:21, 12 March 2013 (UTC)

Obviously it has, but that is part of why it bothers me. Slight wording shifts done while no one is looking feels like an insidious form of POV pushing.

My understanding was that the article was named Paganism (contemporary), because it is common for modern pagans to simply call themselves "Pagan". Parenthetical expansions follow in article titles as a means of disambiguating terms with multiple uses. "Contemporary Paganism" may be very similar, but it doesn't carry the exact same connotation. That can facilitate alternate terminology creep if favour of those who have moved this page to "Neopaganism" without discussion on several occasions. Based on this article's history, it meets the guidelines to be treated as controversial. This is why I think discussion should have been sought and why I am considering reverting the move.
—Sowlos 15:25, 12 March 2013 (UTC)

Although I personally prefer the title of "Contemporary Paganism", I agree with your revert Sowlos. Midnightblueowl (talk) 16:41, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

It is done. One of the admins over looking WP:RM/TR made the necessary changes. In anyone would like to move this article, please seek consensus first.

For future reference, for those unfamiliar with the pipe trick, typing "[[page name (foobar)|]]" into an edit-area will return "[[page name (foobar)|page name]]" when you save.
—Sowlos 14:52, 14 March 2013 (UTC)

Current state

I just finished cleaning up much of the article's citations (a very long and painstaking process). It is nice to see someone (or some-few) tried using short footnotes. They are very good for large articles, but there are templates for this. {{Sfn}} is specifically designed to be simple and self-organizing. Manually labelling each source, then tying references to them is unnecessary and error-prone (a fact exemplified by the number of the broken links).

In my working through the entire article, I found a few other issues I would like to highlight.

• A lot of the documents listed in the bibliography were not referred to by any in-line citations. They were taking up a lot of space and giving the illusion that the article was better sourced than it really was. However, many of them are good sources for the topic and should be worked back into the article, so rather than simply removing them, I have included them at the bottom if this post for everyone's benefit. A few in-line citations referred to items in the Further reading section, so they are in there too.
• A large amount of the cited content in the article is nothing more than quotes and "researcher x observes y". This is much better than the weasel words and over-generalization that abounded in the past, but now the article is slowly heading towards WP:QUOTEFARM. And, that is not better. Remember: "Wikipedia is not a list or repository of loosely associated topics such as quotations." Many of the in-text attributions are also problematic under WP:SAY.
• There are also a few Embedded citations, something that should very much be avoided.