Wikipedia:Peer review/Alcohol in the Bible/archive1

Alcohol in the Bible

This article has GA status, and I'd like to see it get to FA. If you would, please provide your thoughts on what is needed to improve its quality. (FYI, this article is originally a fork from Christianity and alcohol, which I've also been working on and which was growing overly long.) --Flex (talk/contribs) 19:16, 2 July 2007 (UTC)

Comments by Konstable

In a couple of places your footnotes become extremely cluttered ([8][12][14][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43] is the longest line of footnotes I have seen in my life!) Also your actual referencing does not always use the WP:CIT templates - I'm not sure if these are used for the Bible, but for other books you should definitely use {{cite book}} for other books. What I would do is rename your current References section to a Notes section to keep all the footnotes. These footnotes would just be in a short format (just giving the author name, publication year and page number for books) and bunching together all the ones that need to be long lists of multiple sources. Then a separate References section to fully detail the individual references using the {{cite book}} and other appropriate templates. What I'm referring to is something like the referencing style used in the Islam or Demosthenes articles.

When referring to "One author has analyzed..." you should really just mention his name - as I'm assuming this is just a citation of his table rather than something that is widely used.

Ideally you should try to provide a See also section, and then perhaps External Links and Further Reading sections.

The image you use on top of the page is the same one used in the closely related article Christianity and alcohol, it is not a big deal but I think it would be better to use different images for these too pages - just to avoid some confusion.

--Konstable 11:49, 7 July 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the valuable feedback, Konstable! A few questions for clarification:

The long list of footnotes are there to give a variety of sources for a controversial (in a few people's minds, anyway) claim about mainstream opinion on a subject. Are you suggesting that I should remove some of these notes or condense them into a single note (as is the custom in some books, and as is done in most places in Islam)? I didn't see any guidelines on how to handle multiple notes on the same item, and this is the style that is used in some places (e.g., some journal articles and books, as well as Demosthenes and a few places in Islam), though admittedly, I haven't ever seen a list that long either.

As for using the cite templates, which references are you thinking of? I tried to be diligent about using a template on the first reference of every work and then just using the author's name (with the title of the work, if I had more than one work by that person), and I don't see any exceptions to this rule. (Of course, this pattern would change if I convert to a Notes/References format as you suggest.)

As for the additional sections, since WP:GTL says that "See also" links should not be duplications of links from the text, I haven't included any. Do you think I should include something like Islam and alcohol (it's a redirect to a small section of a larger article; better would be Alcohol in the Qur'an, but that doesn't exist)? I didn't provide any ELs or FRs as unassociated resources because I have incorporated as a reference everything that I have found to provide a unique resource (I believe that is the preferred approach, according to WP:EL). --Flex (talk/contribs) 17:09, 7 July 2007 (UTC)

Sorry for delayed response, got caught up in a couple of other things.

• In regards to the cite templates: yes you are correct here, my mistake.
• In regards to the notes: I am suggesting that you use the footnotes as footnotes rather than individual references. So for example in your many interpreters suggest[54][58][61][123] you could replace all that with one footnote in the Notes section which says something more like: see: Henry, Clarke, Rayburn and Seesemann p. 164 (maybe discuss what each one contains if you need/want to) and then in a separate References section below it list the full references for the books of these guys. (Actually some other people at WP:FAC might ask for page numbers for all of them, though not sure how critical this may be).
• With See also I think is nice to have the section there even if it is very small - if only to invite other people to put links there in the future.--Konstable 09:52, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

Comments by Savidan

If you have an ultimate run at FA in mind, I would suggest that it should be possible to make the tables exhaustive (i.e. no "etc."). With the bible reference resources available online today, this should be possible and may take less time than you think.

I would also suggest that you look into how these hebrew words related to alcohol have fared in various translations of the bible, for example, whether wine metaphors have been replaced with non-alcoholic metaphors.

One last thing. Every element of the table in the biblical references section should be represented in some following subsection (it's ok if two or more similar rows are combined into one subsection). For example, "Use accepted as normal part of culture" seems to be the biggest element of that table but has no accompanying subsection. How did the bible represent it as a normal part of culture? What kind of culture? Etc. Savidan 18:24, 13 July 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments, Savidan! (Sorry for the delay in getting back to you. I was taking a short wikibreak.) As far as the exhaustive tables, there are a lot of references that would be listed. That seems to me like the kind of thing that should be included as an external link (cf. WP:EL#What_should_be_linked #3), and indeed, that very information is already available in the lexicons that are linked in those tables. Do you think I need more than this?

Regarding different translations: I want to stick to reliable sources on this point, and I haven't been able to turn up any, except that K. Gentry (among others) claims there is near universal agreement among translators on these words, while prohibitionists such as Gentry's opponent S. Reynolds argue that translators (and entire translation committees) are biased by their "indulgence in alcohol."[1]

I see your point on the table entries. I reproduced that table from the source cited which has a different organization, and while I don't think an entire subsection is necessarily needed for each entry, several of them do bear further explanation. Thanks again! --Flex (talk/contribs) 19:10, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

Well, does it exist somewhere else that can be externally linked to? If so, why not link to the search result with "[linkhere More...]? And if you are only selecting the ones to list in the table, what method are you using to determine are important enough to be listed? Is it objective?

Of course I would never ask you to go beyond what is already published, but I find it hard to believe that there isn't something written about this. There are 100s and 100s of books on how the bible has been altered in translation; you'd probably have to look through the index/use google books.

Like I said, not all of them need further explanation, but if one use is the most common reference to alcohol, that does. Also, have you looked into books like "what would jesus eat" and that whole genre? I believe they would touch on the subject of the article. Savidan 16:39, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

Well, the complete list of verses is given in the links to lexicons already provided. I could duplicate the link in the verses column with "More..." or "etc." as the link text. As far as which verses are listed, I thought that I had listed the first verse from each book (which I think is objective but gives a decent sampling of its use across authors and time periods), but now I see that I did that in some places but in others listed the verses referenced by Easton's Bible Dictionary. I'll change them all to the former [Update: this is done.].

I'm still not convinced that this article is the place to examine how wine metaphors have been translated in various editions of the Bible (though, I'll note that the lexigraphy section does list/discuss the variety of meanings the words can take on, and translators generally follow the lexicographers). The more literal translations (e.g., NASB, ESV, KJV, and even NIV) stick to their sources pretty well. For instance, the Psalms use "yayin" metaphorically and literally, but the translation doesn't differ significantly between the literal translations (e.g., the NAS and the NIV) and the less literal ones (e.g., The Message, CEV, NLT, etc.). Moreover, I've read a considerable amount on this subject, but I know of no disagreement other than the accusations of bias by some prohibitionists, as I mentioned above. I know of no published or widely available translation that adopts a prohibitionist position on the matter, and indeed Gentry says in his debate with prohibitionist Reynolds (who was on the NIV translation committee) that the latter "must dispute every major English translation of scripture."[2] This seems to confirm my suspicion that there is not much to discuss here. If you can point me to some sources that say differently, I'll be happy to read them and try to incorporate them.

I have not looked into What Would Jesus Eat? and similar books. I have stuck mainly to academic sources and prominent figures' sermons and popular articles. In looking at two reviews of and the Amazon page for What Would Jesus Eat?, it sounds like the author adopts a fairly standard moderationist position. According to the Kansas Historical Society, Charles Sheldon (d. 1946), the originator of the What Would Jesus Do? ethic, was a fairly standard abstentionist.[3] In short, I feel like these works don't add anything new to what is already stated and sourced in the article. Your thoughts?--Flex (talk/contribs) 14:06, 2 August 2007 (UTC)