Wikipedia talk:Notability (local churches and other religious congregations)/Archive 1

message: WP:ORG, which I stole much of the original content from. And WP:CORP. Also WP:LOCAL Lurker oi! 12:29, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I feel that the best indicator of notability for churches would probably be within WP:LOCAL. It feels more applicable than Corp or Org. Canadian-Bacon   t c 08:46, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: See also WP:SCHOOLS, no reason why churches should be treated much differently to that.--Docg 18:31, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The one issue I see with WP:SCHOOLS relating to this is that points 2-4 seem inapplicable, I think we'd need to devise a different structure if we wanted to incorporate elements from it. Canadian-Bacon   t c 19:28, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It is also relevant that we keep all schools.--Docg 19:30, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm sorry can you explain that further, I don't quite understand what you mean. Canadian-Bacon   t c 19:32, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm a little concerned about treating religious organisations differently from how we might treat other local bodies. I'm not arguing for keeping all churches (merge most!), but if we create set of criteria for churches that is much tighter that that for schools, town halls, or other local bodies, we may be creating (or adding to) a systemic anti-religious bias. I've been concerned at the number of people who have been willing to vote to delete a church, simply because it is a church. I've had to fight to keep some patently obviously notable churches, whilst we keep every little school. Perhaps we need to try to develop criteria for local organisations, which would treat schools, churches, golfclubs and town halls in a similar manner. After all, schools are often a problem: they attract juvenile vandalism, defamations of teachers and other pupils. Churches may be written in a POV manner (so clean them up) but other than that, what harm would it do if we ended up with articles on thousands of churches? WP:NOT PAPER.--Docg 19:49, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I think the question here is independant sources. If the church is mentioned in an independant source than yes, it's obviously  notable for some reason or another. Otherwise I do agree with you. Canadian-Bacon   t c 20:43, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Hm, perhaps. But if a School had a website, and was, say, listed in a local directory or a education authority page so we could verify its existence, we'd keep it. If a Church has a website, and we can verify its existence from a listing or two, should the same criteria apply? --Docg 21:54, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I think the problem we risk running into their is with hoax churches. I could easily make a website dedicated to "The Church of The Last Pizza Pocket In The Back Of My Freezer". Though it may be a completely over-the-top example I think it still serves the point. I think the outside listing would be the key component of that. Just for verifiabilities sake and to avoid hoaxes. Canadian-Bacon   t c 21:58, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: We delete unverifiable articles. There's no need to discuss this concerning religious groups in particular. --Docg 00:55, 28 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Also worth a look at 

message: I really think we should make this a part of WP:LOCAL or maybe WP:ORG; otherwise, we'd be getting an overdose of overly-specific guidelines. (Radiant) 10:31, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Yup. And I suspect that will also help counter the suspicion of either a pro or anti religious bias.--Docg 10:48, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  While that is not unreasonable, at the moment we have church articles beings deleted despite being obviously notable. WP:ORG is too vague, and WP:LOCAL is not to establish notability. I think a specific guideline is needed for this reason. Raffles mk 18:30, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'd frame a guideline like this: "remove POV, keep verifiable information, if that leaves not much info - merge it somewhere, if it is longer leave the article." There ends the story - and we avoid subjective ideas of 'notability'. --Docg 19:22, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

text: We should NOT merge this— this sort of thing has been needed for a long time; while notability guidelines on individual types of shops, for example, would be ridiculous, churches, schools and shopping centres seem to be the community things that are always targeted for deletion, or are at least controversial. Anything else should fit under WP:ORG, but this should have its own guidelines. JROBBO 02:22, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It was a bad idea to redirect it to WP:LOCAL. I cannot see any evidence of a merge. The redirect destroyed all the work that had been done. Radiant, please undo the redirect and restore the proposed guideline. There was clearly no consensus to delete the guideline that was emerging. Even after it was removed in the redirect, it was cited several times in the numerous AfDs for churches. Edison 07:26, 23 December 2006 (UTC)

text: *I have neither redirected, nor deleted, this guideline. Check the history tab. >Radiant< 14:03, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Radiant is correct. He/she placed a template on the article Nov 29, 2006 saying "It has been suggested that this page or section be merged with Places of local interest. (Discuss)" Then on Dec 21, Doc glasgow placed a template on the article announcing it had been rejected, then on Dec 23, JYolkowski replaced the article with a redirect to another guideline, WP:LOCAL apparently without placing there any of the guidelines which had been developed here. Edison 20:42, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merge 

message: I think that a clear distinction needs to be made between church buildings and congregations.  Church buildings can be notable for the same reasons that any other building is: a historical event took place there, it is cloesly associated with a notable person, it is architecturally significant, or sheer age. (I, for one, think that ANY building anywhere in the world more than 1000 years old is notable, in North America the age for automatic notability drops to about 200 years.) Please note that a building can be notable, even if the congregation currently meeting in it is not.
A congregation can be notable for many factors, including notable worshipers or clergy (past or present), association with historical events, includng those of a religious nature, lareg size, or age. Given that we keep every school, and are very liberal in what other organizations we keep, to make the bar higher for churches (which the original form of this proposal does), is to insert a very severe sytemic anti-religious POV into wikipedia. Dsmdgold 21:02, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Comments 

message: Saying a church has to be a recognized denomination smacks of established state churches in Europe, the Orthodox Jewish denominatoin in Israel, Islamic faith in Moslem countries, or the State Church in China. If there is a rogue congregation of Pentecostal or Roman Catholic Christians in China who carry on their worship illegally, and there are reliable sources writing about them, they could deserve articles. If the First Church of Satan or the Wicca Coven opens in a storefront in Birmingham Alabama and the Sheriff arrests the leaders for being contrary to the community norms, it might deserve an article if it receives reliable independent coverage. But if 3 college students start the Church of the Friday Night Giant Bong in their apartment and it gets an article in the campus paper, does it get an article or does it fail the "belief in a supreme entity" requirement? I would delete the latter for lack of multiple independent sources. I would hesitate to delete a church article based on "complete bollocks." In the yellow pages of my town I see several "Independent Bible Churches" and "Independent Community Churches" which might profess no connection to a larger denomination. I suppose we would fall back on the "verifiable but still not notable" reason for deleting an article they created if they could not produce multiple independent sources. On the other hand, is a group of athiests got together every week to profess their philosophy and called themselves a congregation and received widespread attention and mutiple reliable and independent sources, they might make the cut. Edison 16:42, 29 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I think I tried to make clear that "recognised" did not equate to an established church. I think quite a few independent churches would be notable under what we have as guidelines at the moment, but I don't know how to phrase it. JROBBO 02:25, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Far too culturally specific. --Docg 21:45, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: "Recognized"

message: Feedback is requested on this (proposed) guideline about articles on "local" places, such as churches, historic buildings, malls, masts, neighbourhoods, parks, schools, stations, and streets. Please respond to its talk page rather than here. Thank you. (Radiant) 16:03, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Churches are different to just local places, as they can encompass so much more. That has already been made clear. Let's have a separate criterion for churches, as there are a lot more things that a church can be notable for (as I have already tried to work out). JROBBO 05:14, 23 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Wikipedia:Places of local interest]] 

message: I would like to add to criterium 3 : historical, architectural or artistic significance. JoJan 20:14, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Criteria for local churches 

message: The guidelines for schools are useful, I think, although I recognize there are differences. One thing which I believe needs mentioning is that different denominations have different forms of governance and widely differing sizes of congregations; the average Catholic church in the U.S., for instance, has 3 to 4,000 members, whereas average Baptist, Lutheran and Episcopal churches are about a tenth that size - the same standards can't be applied to all of them. Also, there is likely little doubt that cathedrals qualify for articles. But only the Catholic, Orthodox and Episcopal churches have cathedrals in the U.S. (to my knowledge; perhaps the AME churches do as well), due to their episcopal form of governance; should Baptist, Lutheran, Methodist and Presbyterian churches be penalized for having a congregational or presbyterian system? I think we can agree that they should not, and so there must be some allowance for a sizable number of congregations from each church. I'm not going to propose any set guidelines for notability, but I think that qualification can be based on five questions:
#Is the church affiliated with a denomination? I realize this may be controversial to some, but non-denominational churches can be more susceptible to dissolution when a founding minister retires, dies or relocates. Affiliation with a wider body establishes a greater likelihood of permanence. Certainly some non-denominational churches should qualify (see :Category:Megachurches for some examples), but they would need more substantial media coverage and likely a larger size.
#How old is the church? I think just about any church which has been around for 100 years (perhaps even 75) has a clearly established local presence and a substantial history - particularly if it has remained in the same building; there has probably been reasonable coverage in the local press.
#How many members does the church have? Again, I don't think setting a fixed number would be useful to our purposes (for several reasons), but larger congregations will tend to have had a greater influence on the region. As noted above, allowance should be made for the typical size of the denomination's churches.
#Has the church had a notable social or cultural impact? This can be established through various media sources, and will probably have resulted in a number of published articles.
#Is the church building architecturally significant or a landmark of some sort? Obviously churches on the National Register of Historic Places qualify (though it should be noted that some churches are part of NRHP-designated areas, and are not listed as separate entities), but there are also state and local designations such as California Historical Landmarks  or Chicago Landmarks . And an argument could be made that we should also try to recognize places which are reasonable candidates for such designations. (And we should also realize that churches sometimes avoid and resist such designations, even when they are deserved, in order to allow for rebuilding or enlarging their facilities - which can be a problem once landmark status is attached.)
We can agree, I think, that places such as St. Peter's Basilica, St Paul's Cathedral and Notre Dame de Paris represent one end of the spectrum, and that a brand new non-denominational congregation with 20 members, operating out of a storefront, is pretty clearly at the other end (and doesn't merit an article). The difficulty, of course, is finding and managing the middle ground. One way to approach the issue might be to encourage that potential contributors seek out the most deserving church for a new article (at least within its area and denomination). If there's another church in the same area and denomination which is both older and larger, it's probably more deserving. (And I'll add that age probably trumps size; a church that now has 80 members might have had 1500 at some point in the past, but a church that's 40 years old now has obviously never been any older than that.) MisfitToys 02:32, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Possible guidelines/factors for consideration

message: Many people, seeing "notability for churches", think of a building. The title of the page is reasonably clear, but I think this bears repeating in the first paragraph. Much of the discussion refers to buildings too, so it's clear that I'm not the only one who was confused at first. Not a big deal, since it's a passive proposal. --Alvestrand 06:30, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The term should be one which is faith and denomination independent. WP:CONG would seem to fit Christian and Jewish local religious bodies. Would that term also fit mosques? I do not want to create  Christian-only guideline. Edison 16:51, 23 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I changed the article to use "congregation" throughout. Also deleted one reference to architecture (showing that the confusion is persistent) and changed a couple of uses of "organization" that looked as if they had been left over from the cut'n'paste from WP:ORG. Better? --Alvestrand 02:15, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: A congregation may hire a noted architect to build an edifice which is famous for its architectural merit. An article could cite multiple reliable independent sources vouching for the architectural importance of their building, thereby gaining encyclopedic notability. It should be noted that at presentUnity Temple has an article, as a structure designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, but the congregation meeting there does not. On the other hand Crystal Cathedral is about the building (designed by Philip Johnson as well as the congregation meeting there. In many cases, a congregation is regarded as synonimous with the building where it meets. Edison 21:39, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: This (multiple subjects described inside one article) is a phenomenon common to many articles - see for instance the debates on the talk page of Mecca. I'd be happy with allowing an article like Crystal Cathedral to remain if it satisified EITHER of the criteria for the building or its congregation. --Alvestrand 23:02, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: WTF? You think we need a criteria for deciding whether we need to keep things like the Crystal Cathedral? This is ruleslawyering gone mad.--Docg 23:37, 27 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: What are you responding to? You have apparently read something into a comment which was not said. Did you see anyone debating whether we should keep "Crystal 'Cathedral'?" The discussion was about building vs congregation. Edison 00:42, 28 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proposal uses "Church" as a synonym for "Congregation". 

message: Reject. This proposal is ridiculous. Why do we need a double standard if we are not trying to keep churches off of Wikipedia. What is worse? Risking that Wikipedia has a liberal tilt or taking up more space on the Wikipedia servers. I don't know about you but I choose the latter. The chance that a persistent left-winged side of Wikipedia will be able to control the site under the use of a new notability guidline at the expense of every other Wikipedian is deeply disturbing. Their is much more at stake with this issue than with any other notability guidline as it cuts to the heart of our deepest beliefs. It seems like recently there have been many attacks on churchs with Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Bayside Community Church and sequential nominations and deletions, some deserving and some not. It is already being used in these nominations as justification. Do the benefits of a new guidline outway the cons? Not in a million years. It is ammuntion for those who want churches off of Wikipedia to attack them. Technology will make servers more and more cheap and there is more than enough Dark fiber in America to take care of future bandwith problems. The future of Wikipedia is at a turning point. Do we risk all the problems that come with a huge database and deal with it when we come to it or do we protect churches on Wikipedia. I don't know about you, but the latter choice seems like a no-brainer.--Jorfer 16:20, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I can't parse this diatribe. If there is no special guideline for congregations, the general guidelines for notability apply. All the congregation deletion proposals I've seen would be equally valid under the general guidelines. In my opinion. --Alvestrand 20:22, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Note: New Testament Baptist Church is a redirect to Dade Christian School, which has a section on the church. The school is linked from Hialeah, Florida; the only religious group mentioned in the place article is Santeria. Choose your examples wisely. --Alvestrand 06:52, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

text: Unless the congregations which have occupied the building have relocated elsewhere, I don't see any need to distinguish the congregations from the building in this instance. Even if they have relocated, the rest of their history (and perhaps any other buildings) might be covered here as well. The only question would seem to be if multiple congregations here had more than one notable building each in their history. MisfitToys 01:14, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: In my opinion, this article is solely about its building and what has happened there. It's hard to distinguish the congregation as such - and all of the references seem to talk about the building. --Alvestrand 06:18, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: There was the Jewish congregation, which had notable architects build the structure, then the African-American Baptist congregation, which had the notable musicians and civil rights speaker. The building seems notable, but the Baptist congregation also seems notable, and the effects are synergistic with respect to an article for it. Edison 07:35, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

text: I have no problem with the notability of that church whatsoever - however I think two articles on the congregation itself and the church building itself is unnecessary, unless there was so much information in the article that it was forced to split. The article could easily become a good or featured article with an expansion of what is there. However, sections in the article on the building and the congregation would be fine. JROBBO 08:57, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Censureship

message: Here's what I suggest we replace the existing proposal with (after some comments, of course). I've taken on board comments from before and deleted what people had asked for. JROBBO 08:08, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proposed replacement 

message: I am still very unhappy that the replacement goes back and forth between places of worship (church buildings) and groups of people that worship together (congregations). I think we'd be much better off if we split these 2 issues completely apart. Having them in the same document probably does no harm, but the criteria for the buildings should be distinct from the criteria for the groups of people.
Many buildings - Hagia Sofia, Nidarosdomen - have had multiple groups of people worshipping in them over the centuries; similarly, many congregations have worshipped in many different buildings.
Otherwise, I like this better than the old one. --Alvestrand 22:07, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Comments 

message: Here's an interesting case study for applying the criteria. Pilgrim Baptist Church. First, are we talking about the congregation or the building? Sometimes it just doesn't seem to be a meaningful difference. The building was designed as a Jewish synagogue by distinguished architects and arguably has a place in Wikipedia based on that. Chicago designated it a "landmark" in 1981, which would be a claim to notability.  In the 1920's it became a Baptist church, and deserves an article as the birthplace of gospel music, and for having notable composer Thomas A. Dorsey as choir director and noted singer Mahalia Jackson as a singer in the choir.  Then it has arguable notability as a site where Martin Luther King Jr. preached sermons as part of the U.S. civil rights struggle. It has a weaker claim to notability as "the pulse center of the Chicago Bronzeville black comunity." Its weakest claim to notability would be that it was in the news because the structure was largely destroyed by a fire, and they are trying to raise money to restore it, but this is the subject of the news articles cited in the article. It would benefit from better references. Edison 15:23, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Unless the congregations which have occupied the building have relocated elsewhere, I don't see any need to distinguish the congregations from the building in this instance. Even if they have relocated, the rest of their history (and perhaps any other buildings) might be covered here as well. The only question would seem to be if multiple congregations here had more than one notable building each in their history. MisfitToys 01:14, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: In my opinion, this article is solely about its building and what has happened there. It's hard to distinguish the congregation as such - and all of the references seem to talk about the building. --Alvestrand 06:18, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: There was the Jewish congregation, which had notable architects build the structure, then the African-American Baptist congregation, which had the notable musicians and civil rights speaker. The building seems notable, but the Baptist congregation also seems notable, and the effects are synergistic with respect to an article for it. Edison 07:35, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

text: I have no problem with the notability of that church whatsoever - however I think two articles on the congregation itself and the church building itself is unnecessary, unless there was so much information in the article that it was forced to split. The article could easily become a good or featured article with an expansion of what is there. However, sections in the article on the building and the congregation would be fine. JROBBO 08:57, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Case Study: [[Pilgrim Baptist Church]]

message: Is there any way we can archvie / clean up the discussion here and focus on discussing JROBBO's new draft? 99of9 03:31, 25 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: See Wikipedia:How to archive a talk page.  I'd leave the instruction creep section on the page, as I am sure we have no consensus over that issue.  GRBerry 04:07, 25 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Ok thanks, I'm happy to leave the currently active instruction creep section.  Does anyone mind if we do this? 99of9 23:51, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Cleaning up discussion of draft 1