Wikipedia:Peer review/Roman Catholic Mariology/archive1

Roman Catholic Mariology

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I've listed this article for peer review because…I think it would make a good candidate for Feature Article status.

In the interests of full disclosure: I did no editing work on this article whatsoever, I just came across it. I am not a practicing Catholic, but I was raised Catholic and I'm familiar with the doctrine and history discussed in the article. The article does focus on exploring the topic from what I would describe as traditional perspectives, tempered with some limited discussion of liberal views.

What I hope to get from peer review are some comments and questions from reviewers who are not familiar with the topic. I think the 'outsider' perspective would help me to tweak the article to improve an overall NPOV examination of the topic. Any and all suggestions that might help towards FA consideration would be greatly appreciated.

The topic might seem like an obscure one to non-Catholics, but Mariology has a key role in Catholic culture in European history and beyond.

Thanks, OttawaAC (talk) 03:18, 21 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Comments from Adjwilley

I had to read the second sentence three times to recognize that it wasn't a fragment. I think it may have some POV issues...perhaps if you moved the "believed" to the beginning of the sentence it would read better (i.e. "Because she is believed to be the Mother of God...").
2nd sentence of section "Mariology and Christology" may have similar POV issue, though I can't say I know what Christology is.
Many of the references could use page numbers and templates that show whether the reference is a book, article, speech, etc. #17 is the first one I noticed, but many have the same problem. Some links would also be nice.
References 61, 67, 77, appear to be using religious texts (bible in this case) as a primary source. 58 is also a religious text, but not really being used as a source. For example, the sentence before reference 61 says: "In Catholic teachings, Jesus Christ is the only mediator between God and man. (and the reference given is "1 Tim, 2,5.") The best solution would be to find a secondary source that makes the claim; if you're not an expert there, I would recommend either tagging it for somebody else, or putting some text in the citation itself that makes it obvious that 1 Tim is not a source but an illustration of the point.
The terms "Christians" and "Early Christians" are used loosely throughout the article, sometimes implying that Christian equals Catholic. For example:
- "The Catholic Church teaches that the Virgin Mary is mother of the Church and of all its members, namely all Christians"
- "Early Christians focused their piety at first more upon the martyrs around them" (how early? Peter and Paul, or post-Constantine Christians? Unfortunately I don't know the history very well.)

I'm not sure exactly how to fix this, but I'm sure there's a Wikipedia project Catholic manual of style somewhere that would address the issue.

There are numerous footnotes that look like they should be sources, but end up just further explaining the sentence, without a reference to some reliable source.

Anyway, I am pretty low on time here, and I didn't read the whole article, but these are some of the problems I found in a half hour. As for my background, I am not catholic, but have been editing on some articles related to Mormonism, one of which is listed below. I would greatly appreciate it if you would do a quick review of that one. -- Adjwilley (talk) 02:14, 25 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your comments Adj. They should be pretty easy to fix, e.g. a one sentence definition of Christology added to clarify it, etc. I think all those "explain it in the footnote" items should just be mostly deleted. I know where they came from: there was a very knowladgeable editor who is no longer on Wikipedia but used to write like that. They are probably correct, but should be trimmed. And of course more WP:Secondary sources should be added. The issue of Christian vs Early Christian is the only one that needs some work. We can probably explain that more, in that it mostly refers to the post Peter/Paul period. Cheers. History2007 (talk) 08:09, 25 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]