Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Roman Catholic Church/1

Roman Catholic Church

Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • Watch article reassessment page

Result: Kept. GAR is not dispute resolution or the proper venue for continuation of the talk page disagreement which precipitated the GAR nomination. While there seems to be support for some trimming, the existing prose is not in such a state as to preclude GA status. Neutrality issues, if any, have not been sufficiently or adequately articulated. Please continue to work together to improve the article on its talk page. ЭLСОВВОLД _talk 14:16, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

Good article criteria 3-b is:

"it stays focused on the topic without going into unnecessary detail (see summary style)"

Summary Style says:

"When there is enough text in a given subtopic to merit its own article, that text can be summarized from the present article and a link provided to the more detailed article.... The length of a given Wikipedia article tends to grow as people add information to it. This cannot go on forever: very long articles would cause problems. So we must move information out of articles periodically."

Editors of Roman Catholic Church are refusing efforts to cut any detectable amounts of the largest section -- history-- even though

• 1. a new article was created just to cover this topic-- History of the Roman Catholic Church
• and 2. even with my good faith efforts to reduce this duplicate coverage-- the entire article still exceeded 155 KB when "Wikipedia:Article size" calls for articles to not exceed "30 to 50 KB of readable prose." While it is granted that a notable fraction of current 192 KB is footnotes and such, this 192 KB is still many times the best article size.

This violates Good article criteria 3-b

--Carlaude (talk) 14:14, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

• Keep. I think that this a bloody ridiculous nomination. --Malleus Fatuorum (talk) 15:03, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

• Speedy Keep a hugely WP:POINTY nomination from an editor with a long history of difficulty in collaborating. The main editor of the article is away on a long vacation, as Carlaude well knows, and the article has just had a very contentious FAC. This is an irrelevance. Carlaude admitted he had not even read the whole of the shortened history section when he substituted it! The editor who produced it, Karenacs, is very happy to discuss it first. The issue of the length of the section has been discussed at great length by many editors at FAC & the talk page. Personally I agree with some shortening, but like everything else about this article, careful discussion is needed. For the article length itself - see User:SandyGeorgia's comments on the FAC - pointed out previously to Carlaude - she cites several longer FACs, on much smaller topics. Johnbod (talk) 15:37, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

Where are you discussing it? Nowhere. Nor edited.

Sandy Georgia's comments are not relevant as they occurred before the History of the Roman Catholic Church page was made.

The "main editor" Johnbod refers too and most editors of the article have much difficulty in collaborating with others (unless you hold the Roman Catholic POV). Hence the article has failed the FAC a number of times. It is not just the length-- it is holding huge length without reason nor discussion nor compromise.

The article does not meet Good article criteria and they keep throwing up the excuse that they are trying (unsuccessfully) to make it meet Featured article criteria.--Carlaude (talk) 16:15, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

Good article criteria 4 is:

"It is neutral: it represents viewpoints fairly and without bias."

Note also the article is filled with bias.

• Nearly every paragraph begins with something like "The Catholic Church..."

Catholic Church and Catholicism is a term properly meaning "general" or "universal"—is described in the Oxford English Dictionary as follows:

• Church, (originally) whole body of Christians; ~, belonging to or in accord with (a) this, (b) the church before separation into Greek or Eastern and Latin or Western, (c) the Latin Church after that separation, (d) the part of the Latin Church that remained under the Roman obedience after the Reformation, (e) any church (as the Anglican) claiming continuity with (b)."

• The article says such Roman Catholic POV things (in the lead section) as

"With a 2,000 year history, the Church is the world's oldest and largest institution."

And then cites a Roman Catholic source only.

1. Few if any (non-Roman Catholic) church historian would claim 2,000 for the age of Roman Catholic Church-- this is either very bad scholarship or a claim to be the only church today that Christ did found.
2. Eastern Orthodox sees were founded decades earlier than the church at Rome and for the first 1000 years more Christians lived under Eastern Orthodoxy than the Western Patriarch.--Carlaude (talk) 15:46, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

• Comment. I supsect that Malleus is spot-on correct. The article has been vastly improved during the course of recent collaborations and FA nominations. I'll take a closer look this weekend. Majoreditor (talk) 17:12, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

• Keep. I support Carlaude's proposal to trim the history section of the article. Details can reside in the daughter articles on church history. However, that doesn't merit de-listing. Nor is GAR the forum to settle this matter. Content disputes like this are best handled through talk page discussions.

I am unimpressed with Carlaude's example of supposed POV-pushing. Eastern Orthodox sees (properly known as eparchies) split several hundred years ago into those which remained in the Orthodox communion and those which re-established communion with the Catholic Church. These Eastern Catholic churches legitimately trace their roots back to the first century. A good example is the patriarchate of Antioch; what started as a single church divided over time into five separate churches, three of which are currently part of the Catholic Church (Maronite, Melkite, Syriac).

While the have presented some correct facts I question their relevance. E.g. -- We date the beginning of the United States to 1776-- more importantly-- we do not date the beginning of the United States to the founding of the earliest states (or parts) of what is now part of the United States-- something like 1610 with Jamestown (as far as I recall). --Carlaude (talk) 21:44, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

Carlaude's assertion that it's POV for an article on the Catholic Church to refer to the church as "Catholic" is disturbing. Parsing a dictionary definition is original research; we don't do that here at Wikipedia. A better approach would be to produce reliable sources showing that the church and others use a different name.

You mean like this?

It is not clear what you found disturbing. The dictionary quote is right out of the lead of Catholicism. We don't post original research in articles. The Roman Catholic Church historically asserts it is the one true church. Are you going to claim that statement is also original research? --Carlaude (talk) 21:44, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

I also wonder about his claim that Oxford University Press is a "Roman Catholic source"; I seem to remember that Oxford severed its ties with the papists around 500 years ago :} Majoreditor (talk) 07:30, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

I am unimpressed with Majoreditor's strawman argument. The Roman Catholic source is of course the author Gerald O'Collins, Jesuit Father, and a professor of Christology at Rome's Pontifical Gregorian University. --Carlaude (talk) 21:44, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

• Speedy Keep - as per above concerns voiced by editors. I do agree that this seems to be more an issue of the editor going against WP:POINT rather than something being genuinely wrong with the article, which is very close to featured status, thanks to months of work and graft put in by numerous editors in the community over there. - Yorkshirian (talk) 12:17, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

  Yorkshirian (talk · contribs) is banned from Wikipedia for one year, effective July 14, by ArbCom decision for "a variety of unseemly conduct, including personal attacks, incivility and assumptions of bad faith; edit-warring; and attempts to use Wikipedia as a battleground along geographical, cultural, and ideological lines". SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:25, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

• Comment I see my name mentioned here. Below is the data on the readable prose size of this article, relative to the recommended guideline of a max 50KB readable prose and 10,000 words.

• Roman Catholic Church – readable prose size
  • End of Feb FAC: 43KB, 7165 words
  • End of Mar FAC: 56KB, 9266 words
  • End of Jun FAC: 74KB, 12077 words
  • Current size  : 77KB, 12555 words

The last time it was checked, the average FA size was 25KB readable prose. To my knowledge, of the 6615 featured articles, the only FAs longer than Roman Catholic Church are Ketuanan Melayu and Bob Dylan. Islam, a featured article, has 41 kB (6736 words) of readable prose. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 05:14, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

• Keep This is an excellently written article. It has gone through four FACs and each one has only made it better. Gary King (talk) 05:47, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

• Keep - While it certainly could be improved, I'll note that a Good Article isn't actually named "perfect article". Well qualified for GA status, even if it could use some trimming, etc. Ealdgyth - Talk 13:34, 19 July 2008 (UTC)