Talk:Lectures of the Three Degrees in Craft Masonry

Freemasonry Low‑importance

This article is part of WikiProject Freemasonry, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Freemasonry articles on Wikipedia. If you would like to join us in our labors, please join the discussion and add your name to the list of participants. The "Top of the Trestleboard" section below can offer some ideas on where to start and what to do.FreemasonryWikipedia:WikiProject FreemasonryTemplate:WikiProject FreemasonryFreemasonry articles

Low

This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

◆ WikiProject Freemasonry's "Top of the Trestleboard":

Improve to Featured Article status
Add content to stubs…
Check recently changed articles for possible improvement, to remove vandalism, etc.
Requests
[Watch this list]
- Articles for all United Grand Lodge of England-recognized Grand Lodges (if notable)
Participate in articles listed for deletion
Need images
New Article to be created

Review

The article is informationally correct, but I think the article is not going to meet notability policies.

First, this is a system that is fairly limited in usage - UGLE may be large geographically, but it is still only one jurisdiction of many. There are variations even in the US, where every state has its own Grand Lodge(s). The lecture format still appears, but depending on how detailed this gets, it could vary substantially. That being said, development of ritual overall is important to general Masonic history, and that did develop in England. So I think this information should be worked into the main Freemasonry article.

Informationally, there's a few niggling items:

The article is ignoring printed exposures in favor of "official" printings. However, the first exposure was really pretty early on in the 1730s (IIRC), and the exposures were often purchased by members for their own use as a memory aid.
Ritual standardization - I'm not sure this push gained traction, and for that reason Emulation is only one of many possible systems that are still extant - Lewis Masonic publishes quite a few different ones. So how that all figures in is important, especially because it seems from this article that Emulation is not in use other than for demonstration purposes.
The immediate jump to Union also doesn't address the Moderns/Ancients differences in ritual for the time previous to that.

I get the impression that we're getting an "official history from the victors" that isn't quite in line with reality from other sources.

I think this does have potential for expansion, though, and I might rather see this reworked into a development of ritual article, where we can talk about Preston-Webb, translations, and so forth in a general sense rather than confined to one jurisdiction. MSJapan (talk) 17:41, 26 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]