Talk:Major religious groups/Archive 1

message: As per Zain below, I would like to say that the Sikh population is far more than that reported on Wikipedia - I cannot find the numbers myself, not can I see how it can be calculated..
There were several problems on the page first the source of the statistics was not dedicated to finding statistics about relegions so there were many serious flaws in the statistics for example many big relegions which came in top 10 were simply missing like 
primal-indigenous               :               150 million
African Traditional & Diasporic :               95 million 
Juche                           :               19 million
and some figures were full of errors like figures of Sikhism didn't even match figure given on wikipedia itself on page of Sikhism
and was even less then total number of Sikhs in India Alone (19 million) which can be confirmed from variour sources like census data of india available of indian goverment website and which is even available on CIA world fact book on following link 
I believe that statiscis related articles on wikipedia which can attract bias should have special check mechanism to avoid such big and evident errors which can put harm to wikipedia's reputation.
Thanks
Zain 21:17, 22 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Untitled

message: Zain, I am going to ask you to defend your definition of major world religion with a population cut-off.  The 1% population approach is entirely arbitrary, and does not agree with standard views. Judaism is considered in almost every source as a "major religion," Shinto has been considered major for at least 100 years, and Sikhism and Baha'i usually are.  There are many ways of defining major religion, so I have modified as appropriate.  A discussion of major religions is here .
--Goodoldpolonius2 17:16, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Major Religion" and Major Changes 

message: First, I'll like  to welcome you here. and hope here kilobytes of debates won't happen :-D I'll talk to you about definition of 'major' laterz. which in my view is 'disputed' (No matter how much I hate this word, I come across  it :-( )
Secondly, All of the populations by religion are not estimated! Major Exemptions are like data from census. ‘Sample Population Surveys’ are only used where explicit data of census is not available, Population by religion computed in US or France are Examples of ‘Sample Population Surveys’.Example of other case is , which has official census report and by this you can see that how flawed was the statistics which were posted earlier. and for my wonders stats on the bbc page which you referred,  Hindu population was also flawed, because they offered an estimate, which was even below the well confirmed statistics of Indian census department. In India alone Hindus make 850 million people and there are tens of millions of them in Nepal, Bangladesh even in Pakistan, Indonesia. so the statistics which were refered earlier, were simply flawed. I don't think that big names like bbc will make such blunders by mistake, I think they are deeply biased. As we should present  factual things, I think that realities on these stats can be checked on Indian census department which can be found here . Just to give you a hint of level of flaw these stats have. Please visit here on BBC , which shows that there are 750 million Hindus in the world. this figure is 100 million less then the Hindus in India alone!!. So in stats related to religion we have to be very very careful. So the stats which I put were not single copy paste. I checked them thoroughly against many other sources on the net tried to find authentic sources like Indian census and then shortlist the sources I also checked CIA world fact book among many others. Old stats which were present on the page, before I edited it, I disagreed with them on solid statistical ground, you might see my arguments on disagreement with them, earlier in the page( that time it was population of Sikhs which was clearly flawed). In process of collection the stats from different sources I came across many pages on wikipedia which had information on population by religion. In Hinduism page the population of total Hindus was given as 1.05 billion. I decreased it to 890 million and provided authentic statistics from CIA world fact book and statistics from Page on India which in turn had statistics from Indian census. and used their(Editors of Hinduism ) own statement of ratio of world wide Hindu population to Hindu population in India, to compute worldwide Hindu population and no body disagreed.
I'll suggest you give close attention to the authentic data from Indian census to understand why I deleted those stats.
:With Regards
:Zain 01:13, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Reasons for removing recently purposed statistics 

message: I think as you didn’t remove (or asked to remove) my method of ‘major’ by ‘majority’ and I didn’t remove or edited your method of ‘major’ by classical (if that is the right word for it), this thing(as far as existence of these two is concerned), is settled for now. Now what’s major (by appearance, not by wording), left is that, which of them should come first. I believe 'Classically defnied' method should be moved later because of following reasons.
=== Similar approach used by ‘adherents.com’ ===
I will like to review your first post, in which you explained the reason of your changes. In that you referred me to the link , in this page population, was ‘main’ method which was used  to declare a religion ‘major’,I assumed ‘main’ because it came first and it had bolder headlines), is population, and 'classical method' is mentioned later, there might be several reasons for it which I don't know but the reason I know are mentioned later in this post. As you might have observed that that website is quite non-bias and quite comprehensive about religion data. So for them too putting population first, is preferred method on classical method first. 
::Zain, look at the title of the Adherents article, "Major Religions Ranked by Size" and the title of the chart: "Major Religions of the World Ranked by Number of Adherents" they are ALL major religions, right down to Scientology.  You are misreading the article.  Lets just eliminate the line entirely.  I originally kept the line just to make you happy anyway, since their seemed no justification for it.
=== Lesser acceptance by the readers ===
In addition to this, I believe most of the readers here will believe that ‘major by majority’ is less undisputed as compared to other methods. And Frankly speaking ,before you mentioned it, I even didn’t know about ‘major by classical definition’.
::Many things are major that are not in majority and classical lists are simply the religions everyone learns about, because they were/are important, rather than simple majority decisions.
=== Classical Method is based on ignorance rather facts ===
I believe that, a lot more ‘dispute’ will rise ,by giving the impression that, ‘major by classical definition’ is default method, of declaring a religion, ‘major religion’. You may see it by the statement you wrote in the article and I quote:
:”As the exposure of Westerners to other religions increased, five other religions were added “
Now as u can see that, main cause of excluding other religions, was merely there ignorance of their existence. So a classical definition has a lot to do with their ignorance, rather then ‘facts’. And I believe we should give ‘factual data’ more importance, rather then the data based on ignorance.
::More dispute will arise as the result of randomly dividing the list of "Major Religions" in half - why not make them all "Major Religions"? You have no ground to stand on in dividing the list.
==== ‘Hypothetical’ Example of Analogy with ‘Major countries’ ====
For example if we have an article about ‘world major countries’, a ‘classical definition’ will exclude the countries like USA and Canada among others, not because they are not known to us now, but because they were not known earlier. If such list is written ahead of other lists, in an article on ‘world major countries’ today, like list by population or other methods (I strongly believe other methods should be added in this article too), if ‘world major countries’ article is written, ‘classical methods’ will be removed or at least lowered then other methods.
::Classical in this case does not mean ancient, I describe how the list was arrived at through evolution. Look at the Adherents article.
==== Other possible problems ====
Now as u mentioned that, this ‘major’ definition had a lot to do with the lack of information about other religions, people in other parts too may like to put, their local ‘classical definition’ of ‘major’ religions on the top.
::Yes, yes, please do give other classical definitions.  That would be both interesting and enlightening. Just put in sources. --Goodoldpolonius2 07:26, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Order of methods 

message: I believe that, a lot more ‘dispute’ will rise ,by giving the impression that, ‘major by classical definition’ is default method, of declaring a religion, ‘major religion’. You may see it by the statement you wrote in the article and I quote:
:”As the exposure of Westerners to other religions increased, five other religions were added “
Now as u can see that, main cause of excluding other religions, was merely there ignorance of their existence. So a classical definition has a lot to do with their ignorance, rather then ‘facts’. And I believe we should give ‘factual data’ more importance, rather then the data based on ignorance.
::More dispute will arise as the result of randomly dividing the list of "Major Religions" in half - why not make them all "Major Religions"? You have no ground to stand on in dividing the list.
==== ‘Hypothetical’ Example of Analogy with ‘Major countries’ ====
For example if we have an article about ‘world major countries’, a ‘classical definition’ will exclude the countries like USA and Canada among others, not because they are not known to us now, but because they were not known earlier. If such list is written ahead of other lists, in an article on ‘world major countries’ today, like list by population or other methods (I strongly believe other methods should be added in this article too), if ‘world major countries’ article is written, ‘classical methods’ will be removed or at least lowered then other methods.
::Classical in this case does not mean ancient, I describe how the list was arrived at through evolution. Look at the Adherents article.
==== Other possible problems ====
Now as u mentioned that, this ‘major’ definition had a lot to do with the lack of information about other religions, people in other parts too may like to put, their local ‘classical definition’ of ‘major’ religions on the top.
::Yes, yes, please do give other classical definitions.  That would be both interesting and enlightening. Just put in sources. --Goodoldpolonius2 07:26, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Classical Method is based on ignorance rather facts 

message: Now as u mentioned that, this ‘major’ definition had a lot to do with the lack of information about other religions, people in other parts too may like to put, their local ‘classical definition’ of ‘major’ religions on the top.
::Yes, yes, please do give other classical definitions.  That would be both interesting and enlightening. Just put in sources. --Goodoldpolonius2 07:26, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Other possible problems 

message: I really really agree with you that, here we should not make population a ‘sole’ method of declaring a religion ‘major’. I am personally interested in finding ranking of religion by ‘GDP’, ’PPP’, ‘Education’, ‘military’ , ‘natural resources’ (oil, gold etc), ‘attachment to their religion’, ‘By Area’, ‘Crime rate’, ‘technology’, ’foreign policy strength’, any many others and of course an acceptable method of finding an aggregate method which will combine these and many others into a single ‘major’ religion ranking. But problem is that, data other then population is not available, by religion. If you have any links to other possible rankings of ‘major’ religions. I’ll be really happy if you let me know about them.
:with regards
:Zain 07:00, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proposal of other methods for new ‘Major’/’Minor’ rankings  

message: I believe that this discussion made this article more true fatully, and made it less disputed and made it more informative. Now people can see more ways how to see a religion 'major' or 'minor'. Listining to all sides and makeup their own minds which method of 'ranking' is more correct and acceptable to their own concepts. of course our job here is not to change what people 'Believe In' but to change 'What People' Know. Here what we are telling people that which methods are used to define 'major' religion. And what result it has on the place of a religion when 'If' that particular definition is used. I believe if we try to change people 'knowledge' rather then changing their 'believe'.We can solve our differences more objectively and even without any dispute!!!!(Yes I believe this). 
Now about the comment, on the refrence to the talk page which you made. Actually I believe if I see clearly that a significant number of users might get a picture a lot different, from a picture if they know a lot more information. I think its my job to provide them information in a more Clear manner. If a lot less readers are effected and scope of the difference which extra information might have is less. I believe in using a foot note or smaller steps.
SideNote: This Post I entered before your 0.1% method Of course u can make any definition like 10%, 0.1%, 0.01%, top 10, top20, top100 but just let me think about finding some more acceptable solution. And I believe I will be able to find.:-D
:With Regards
:Zain 07:51, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  This discussed improved the article a lot factually