Talk:Bibles for America

Mechoir

Melchoir, I would question the 'Categories' assignment. Is there a better category such as Christianity: Bible (or :Bible distributors)? Although the Local Church uses this Recovery Version Bible heavily and it is--for whatever reason--associated with this group (although not exclusively), the BfA supporters and volunteers come from many varied Christian backgrounds, including Local Church members. Buried on their ways to donate page is the following statement:

Bibles for America (BfA) is a nonprofit organization funded solely by the contributions of individuals, which are tax-deductible according to Internal Revenue Code section 501(c)(3). An independent Board of Directors governs major financial decisions.

To best fulfill our mission, we allow no organizational or financial ties and accept only "no strings attached" contributions. All donations are appreciated and are used solely for the purpose of distributing Bibles and Christian literature.

The above quote is probably used for political / legal purposes related to retaining 501c3 status but in reality, I've witnessed a local church elder speak of doing a directed donation to advertize the Recovery Version to all of Longview, WA by which 200 replies expressing interest were received. The purpose was to find people to become local church members. While there may be some legal wall of seperation between BFA and LSM, to imply BFA is not more responsive to LSM leadership authority than to any other is spin. However, there may be some other appropriate category assignments. [K.F. 1/2/8]

—Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.139.212.224 (talk) 08:40, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

Their History, Programs, and BfA Affiliates pages also do not show any Local Church linkage; as such, wouldn't it seem less appropriate to use 'Category: Local Church' than one such as 'Category: Bible Distributors'? ECGtertius 00:09, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

Well, I had a hard time finding a good category for this one. Bible Society and the charities listed therein are generally poorly categorized, so they offer little guidance. (I've just become aware of other issues, such as the presence of two articles on the same topic...) We probably ought to create Category:Bible societies as a subcategory of Category:Bible and possibly also Category:Evangelical parachurch organisations and/or Category:Charities. The necessary steps ought to be at Wikipedia:Categorization. Do you want to tackle it, or shall I?

As a separate issue, it's fine for an article to be in lots of categories; for example, Gideons International is in both Category:Evangelical parachurch organisations and Category:History of Wisconsin. Today's featured article, Katie Holmes, is in about ten. So the question is, is Category:Local Church itself inappropriate? I made a snap judgement that BfA is relevant to the Local Church movement, so it's okay in the category. (Their website doesn't completely convince me.) Obviously you know more than I do, so if you think there's no connection, go ahead and take it out. Melchoir 02:41, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

Melchoir, thanks for the insight. I think I'll leave the new category creation up to you (I don't think I'm quite ready for such a major task...) as I haven't fully studied the Wikipedia Categorization yet!

I am taking the plunge and posting a fuller article on Bibles for America as my first full-length submission. Would you look it over and tell me if I missed anything significant as far as structure and format goes? I assume when a full-length article gets posted that the stub coding gets removed--I'll delete the stub but if you think this is still a stub then add it back in! TIA! ECGtertius 04:49, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

Done. As for this article, it needs more internal links and a bit of copyediting; I'll see to a couple of other minor issues. For example, the second category is redundant with the first... Melchoir 05:44, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

Redundant categories...reminds me of Zeal restructuring woes. <grin> If they are redundant is there a reason they are not combined under the more generic term?

By internal links do you mean links to other Wikipedia pages? Is there a rule on internal links relating to article relevancy? (I thought of internal-linking the various years and terms like Bible, volunteer, motorhome, etc. but wasn't sure where to draw the line on cluttering the page with internal links.)

You mention taking care of other minor issues--educate me, please!?! ECGtertius 06:07, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

Ahhh...I see--removing name from subcategory headings, and your selection of added internal links. ECGtertius 06:18, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

Ah, I misspoke, I guess. Bible societies is a subcategory of Evangelical parachurch organisations, so an article in the first doesn't need to be in the second. For internal links, there are two conflicting guidelines: Wikipedia:Build the web and Wikipedia:Only make links that are relevant to the context. Relevance is subjective, of course, and there's a movement against linking dates, but roughly speaking you should try to shoot for a density of links consistent with other articles. There's more to link here; I just haven't done it.

The only problem I have with the article as it stands is the placing of external links. It's important to use external sources to back up what the article is saying, but not to turn the article into a directory of its subject. There's some more on this at Wikipedia:External links; from what little I know about Zeal, it sounds like they had a different philosophy? Anyway, I'll try to fix those up a little. Melchoir 06:55, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the insight. I used the external links as verifying links to the statement--for instance, 'accurate translation' might be considered a subjective POV but the link on that term verifies there was a methodology and philosophy of translation, and not just a loose paraphrase or 'social' translation that sacrificed meaning for readability. I assumed linking in this way would avoid changes by any who might think it a POV without examining the sources, leading to 'change' battles...(we had that problem at Zeal also.) I like your link style of numbered note links better than the phrase links that I saw on other articles--I'll incorporate that in future articles.

Thanks for fixing the reference links--I missed changing them from plain URLS to linked phrases. ECGtertius 16:18, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

Merge proposal

Why is there a suggested merge with Recovery Version of the Bible? Does not make much sense. I would remove it but I can't/don't know how. Juubaa (talk) 00:55, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

It was proposed in October 2010 on that page by User:Ancos, who did a lot of cleaning up there. It should have been tagged on this article as well; I have only just done so. I guess the reason was that this article does not demonstrate notability, but a merge and redirect from this page may be a more useful result than deleting this page. As this organisation does not only distribute the Recovery Version but also other Living Stream Ministry literature, I'm changing the proposed merge target to that page. – Fayenatic (talk) 17:50, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

I'm confused why this article is being suggested to be merged with Living Stream Ministry. Bibles for America gives away Living Stream Ministry books, but they are two different entities. Josephwesley (talk) 23:28, 27 January 2012 (UTC)