Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Saints/Archive2

Archive 1

Archive 2

Archive 3

Archive 4

Archive 5

Articles for the Wikipedia 1.0 project

The following discussions are an archived debate. Please do not modify it.

Tagging talk pages and assessing articles

Wikipedia Assessments within AWB. Click on the image to see it in better resolution

Hi. If you still have work to do tagging talk pages and assessing articles, my AWB plugin might be of interest to you.

The plugin has two main modes of operation:

• Tagging talk pages, great for high-speed tagging
• Assessments mode, for reviewing articles (pictured)

As of the current version, WikiProjects with simple "generic" templates are supported by the plugin without the need for any special programatic support by me. I've had a look at your project's template and you seem to qualify.

For more information see:

• About the plugin
• About support for "generic" WikiProject templates
• User guide
• About AWB (AutoWikiBrowser)

Hope that helps. If you have any questions or find any bugs please let me know on the plugin's talk page. --Kingboyk 14:50, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

The following discussions are an archived debate. Please do not modify it.

Assessment

Hi all! I am working on assessment for all the unassessed saints pages within the project and have run into some difficulty with the "importance" measure, as I've described above. I wanted to check in and let everyone know the criteria I'm working with, so we can keep track of the process. I am currently evaluating "importance" based on the likelihood of someone looking up the article directly, as is briefly suggested in the assessment guidelines. I am therefore sort of ignoring the scale labels, as I feel they lack a great deal of flexibility. They go from "not really important, why's this guy even here?" to "well, could be important, but no one's ever heard about him," to "important, but only within the field of hagiography," to "Jesus Christ, Superstar." There are a lot of saints who are not necessarily "top importance," but who are certainly known outside hagiography (e.g. Clare of Assisi); there are also plenty of little-known, local saints who most certainly belong in the Saints project, though the current "low" assessment states that they are "not particularly notable or significant even within the field of Saints" (e.g. Winefride).

I've remodeled the assessments to be more like this: "Low" importance individuals are largely local saints and early saints about whom we know very little. "Mid" would be for those who are not quite major patrons or hugely popular saints, but who are not totally obscure either. "High" importance individuals are major patrons, saints frequently observed in art history. "Top" would ideally be apostles and major Biblical figures, Doctors of the Church, highly influential Popes, etc. I suspect the difference between all these tiers could get rather political and messy if anyone ever really cared about it (and indeed, one editor over at Columba has already asserted the belief that Columba is of top importance), so we will need to take care with how we view and communicate "ranking" (as ever).

To be perfectly honest, the whole ranking thing feels extremely subjective and potentially sort of unhelpful, which is perhaps why I'm in here every two days asking for validation. I can see why we need a system like this, but... Well, anyway, this is what I'm working with so far. Comments and critique?--TurabianNights 00:58, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

People need to understand that the importance scale is nothing more than a way of prioritizing tasks, not a moral judgment on the saint. We're writing an encyclopedia here, not compiling hagiographies for the faithful. We should therefore pay the most attention to those articles that an encyclopedia user is most likely to want to look up. The articles that should get the most attention are those of the highest importance rating, but with the lower quality ratings.

There's no way of enforcing this of course, but it's a useful guideline. Anyone who wants to help with the project but whose interest isn't focused in any particular direction can simply start with articles of "Top" importance but below "GA" quality. TCC (talk) (contribs) 01:07, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

PS -- considered in that way, Columba may well be of Top importance, if the article on him gets very heavy traffic. It's too bad we don't have stats available; it ought to be possible to do this quantitatively. TCC (talk) (contribs) 01:08, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

It really would be a tremendous help to have stats, wouldn't it? I'm currently using a combination of guessing, Googling, and seeing how many Wikipages link to that particular page. Is Augustine more important to the project than Clare of Assisi? According to this astonishing conjectural hagiographic Magic 8 Ball, yes! What's harder is determining the relative importance of non-Western saints. The project says "topics which may seem obscure to a Western audience — but which are of high notability in other places — should still be highly rated," but I find it very difficult to gauge how much these saints would be looked up on English Wikipedia. I try to assign the major patron saint(s) of every country as "high," as well as the "firsts" - first indigeneous South American saint, first Chinese saint, etc. - but in the end it's just difficult to tell.--TurabianNights 04:26, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

At the risk of stirring up a bees nest, may I suggest using religion as a guideline? Consulting the Calendar of saints for the various denominations can give relative levels of importance. For example, "High" importance could correspond to saints that appear on a general calendar, while commemorations or local celebrations of a saint would rate "Mid" importance. I would not suggest, however, demoting popular saints simply because they do not meet this criteria. As it is now, the skew is towards "Low" importance. That doesn't bode well for this project. Bwpach 20:01, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

• We have yet to have a disagreement on assessment. I think the bigger problem is the number of articles not currently assesed. --evrik 20:15, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

Evrik, could you possibly adopt the standard indent style?

I think such disagreement as we have is occuring on individual saints' pages. The original poster mentioned a disagreement in Columba; there may be others that the project as such has no cognizance of.

There are two possible sets of criteria on importance: it may either reflect the status of the saint at large, or it may reflect the importance of a saint within the community where he is venerated. Sometimes these will overlap, as would be the case for Saint Nicholas. (Which, I'm now just noticing, has a horrible intro. Santa Claus and St. Nicholas are distinct figures, whatever the origin of the former.) Sometimes they will not, as with some of the more recent Roman Catholic saints who are not widely known but who may be very important to a broad population of Catholics. Personally, I see no reason why we cannot use both criteria simultaneously -- at least provisionally, until we see if this yields us far too many high importance saints to be practical. TCC (talk) (contribs) 22:16, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

The following discussions are an archived debate. Please do not modify it.

A Question of Notability

I just joined the project today and am eager to start putting the WikiProject banner on relevant talk pages. I am a bit stumped as to the workings of the Assessment system, though. "Low" importance is listed as: Subject is not particularly notable or significant even within the field of Saints, and may have been included primarily to achieve comprehensive coverage of another topic. Saints Jerome and Junipero Serra were both listed as "low" importance, but I can't imagine these two were included "primarily to achieve comprehensive coverage of another topic." Do they not at least qualify for "mid" importance: Subject contributes to the total subject of the Saints WikiProject. Subject may not necessarily be famous ?

I ask only because I need to rate all the new banner recipients, and if Jerome is low-importance, I shudder to think what poor Gerald of Mayo will be. Any advice?--TurabianNights 17:55, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

I've gone ahead and started adding various English, Cornish and Irish saints to the Wikiproject, ranking both importance and article status. I'm basing my rankings more on the idea of "the probability of the average reader of Wikipedia needing to look up the article (and thus the immediate need to have a suitably well-written article on it)", which is expressed in the paragraph above the explanations of the rankings. I feel this is certainly a more useful measure than the rather vague "not particularly notable or significant even within the field of Saints" - notability is a Wikipedia virtue, and I doubt we really have many pages on saints who are truly insignificant or unremarkable. I've thus placed most local saints in the "low" category (e.g. Benignus of Armagh), since the chances of their being looked up specifically are rather low. Was it okay to redefine "low" like this? It seems useful to me, but I'd love to have some input from more established project members.--TurabianNights 23:07, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

The following discussions are an archived debate. Please do not modify it.

Assessment of articles?

I'm trying to go through the various remains saints, beati, and venerati articles in the old Catholic Encyclopedia. It would really help if someone were to perhaps assess them, as I am really not very comfortable with doing so myself. Thank you. John Carter 21:15, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

• See reply on your usertalk page. Pastordavid 16:30, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

The following discussions are an archived debate. Please do not modify it.

Top and High importance Saints articles

In copying the criteria for inclusion in the Saints portal from elsewhere, I found that one of the criteria for inclusion might be Top- or High-importance articles. Right now, we don't have many of these, and given the comparatively few articles that are GA or better, I have no doubt that it will be a factor for at least some of the candidates. I would greatly appreciate it if any members were to indicate somewhere which articles they believe qualify as either top or high importance. I would be even more grateful if we could have articles nominated for inclusion on the portal by members of the Orthodox, Catholic, Anglican, and other Protestant denominations which recognize saints, so that we would have the most representative sampling. Please see the current nominations at Portal:Saints/Selected biography, Portal:Saints/Selected article, Portal:Saints/Selected picture. Thank you. John Carter 19:49, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

I am not a member of the project—I was until someone removed my name from the list and I thought that life is too short to get too worried about this little Wikipedian battle—but I lurk here now and again and would like to add an atheist’s perspective to the admirablly ecumenical post above. (I am not unbiased, of course, I will reveal clearly my Italophilia!) Francis of Assisi seems to be an obvious candidate. Not only is his particular spirituality impressive even to those of us who tend to reject the spirit on principle, and not only is his charisma in popular culture impressive and attested—from The Little Flowers up to the Rosselini movie (if you haven’t seen it do: I promise that it will not compromise your faith!)—but also the institutional need to capture his tradition is of historical interest. Secondly Carlo Borromeo. To us humanists he—quite unlike his relative Federico—seems fantastically repulsive: some explication of his sanctity would be of great interest. Thirdly a charismatic medieval preacher: Bernardino of Siena, say, or Vincent Ferrer. A Billy Graham/Rolling Stones figure, but more interesting. (Think of the excitement if one of those two were to appear in your town tomorrow.) Finally someone totally obscure—Rita of Cascia, for instance. Someone whose existence would have been long forgotten had not the church happily have found (possibly dubious) reasons to prolong its memory. —Ian Spackman 17:55, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Borromeo and Francis are added. Bernardino, Vincent, and Rita are all just Start-class articles, and I am very hesitant to include articles which aren't at least B-class. However, I will attempt to find analogous individuals to these three and include them. John Carter 18:23, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

I think the key qualification for "top" importance saints (and this is noted in the current assessment guide) is clear notability outside the "saints" field; or, to put it another way - notability in the secular world. I would imagine this category would remain pretty slim. Some I would be sure to include in here: the twelve apostles, the most influential of the church's doctors, etc. Not every Pope/Patriarch belongs here - most would be high-mid (and even a couple of low), only the most influential.

"High" importance is a little muddier. I would say it this way - extremely notable within the field of saints; known but not necessarily notable in the secular world. I would put the majority of national patron saints in here. My rule of thumb: it's always better to start too low. A discussion can happen on the talk page, and a saint easily be moved up the scale; but it is often difficult to "downgrade" a saint that started too high.

FYI, importance, as I understand it, is independent of quality. You can have a stub-class article that is top importance; or a featured article that is of very low importance. Please don't make importance an issue of article quality. Hope that helps. I'll be glad to help with rating importance. If you want to keep on trucking with quality ratings, I will focus my energy/time on importance ratings. -- Pastordavid 18:32, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

I acknowledge importance is independent of quality. However, right now, there look to be at least 20 top-importance biography articles, not including high-importance, so we can try to include articles which are at least of a given quality standard within that category. The same conditions may not apply to the regular articles, though, as I don't think there are that many of them. I also think that a slighly clearer definition of the scope of the project might be in order. Right now, I get the impression that the project deals with biographies and, as it were, saint classification articles (Doctor of the Church, Equal-to-apostles, lists of saints recognized in various churches, and suchlike). But are things like the Acts of Andrew included or not? I would think so, but can't be entirely sure, particularly with the more dubious works of that type. I will continue to go through the assessments (generally based on other existing assessments or things like inclusion of a stub template) to try to find more articles of high quality, but would welcome any help in determining the importance aspect, particularly on the higher quality articles, to help make selection for the portal easier. PS: I see now Charles Borromeo only qualifies as mid-importance, and that he will likely be removed from the biography list when the assessments are completed and we can see better the quality and importance of other candidates. John Carter 19:27, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

The following discussions are an archived debate. Please do not modify it.

Scope of Project

I know that this project deals with articles relating to the lives of Saints. However, does it also deal with articles relating to the works of those individuals or not? Someone has just created, evidently, a page on De Viris Illustribus (Jerome), and I am curious as to whether this work by a saint would qualify for inclusion. On the basis of that decision, I would know whether articles like The City of God qualify as well. I would also greatly appreciate information from the rest of you as to whether articles like Utopia (book), and other presumably non-religious, works by saints fall within the scope of this project as well. John Carter 16:00, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

My vote, for now, is no. We can start adding things later -- but that is a huge collection of writings to consider. I think there is enough on our plate already. -- Pastordavid 16:37, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Good enough. Just wanted to know so I could know what to include on the article list. John Carter 18:37, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

Key articles for Wikipedia 1.0

Hello! We at the Work via WikiProjects team for Wikipedia 1.0 would like you to identify the "key articles" from your project that should be included in a small CD release due to their importance, regardless of quality. We will use that information to assess which articles should be nominated for Version 0.5 and later versions. Hopefully it will help you identify which articles are the most important for the project to work on. As well, please add to the Saints WikiProject article table any articles of high quality. If you are interested in developing a worklist such as this one (new) for your WikiProject, or having a bot generate a worklist like this one automatically for you, please contact us. Please feel free to post your suggestions right here. Thanks! Walkerma 04:31, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

As the importance categories haven't been populated yet, I've quickly drafted my own list of articles of high importance (important for varying reasons) in order to start a discussion. Please take a look at it and feel free to make amendments and additions and discuss your reasoning here. --Spondoolicks 11:41, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for responding. I'm sorry I missed the fact that you had already started using the bot - you hadn't when I set up the table a couple of weeks earlier! I'm adding a link to your bot table from the above listing. I also notice several points of confusion about importance - by all means contact me on my talk page if you want help, I was partly involved in setting this up. Generally low-importance is kept for more specialised articles like Early life of Saint Frederick (maybe interesting to a person studying saints, but too specialised for most readers), and top-importance is reserved for REALLY major people like Saint Paul. In practice, though, only specialists in the field (such as yourselves) can make the call - there may well be saints that might be regarded as little-known => low importance. Thanks again, Walkerma 21:09, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

By the way, I am a great admirer of both St Magnus and Aidan of Lindisfarne (I'm a Northumbrian). Could you tag those as articles for this project? Thanks! Walkerma 21:20, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Assessment

I have been assessing the importance level of saints articles, and have put together some notes (I thought it might be a bit too long for this talk page). It would be helpful to me if those with an interest could check them out and reply. -- Pastordavid 02:43, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Charles I of England FAR

Charles I of England has been nominated for a featured article review. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. Please leave your comments and help us to return the article to featured quality. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, articles are moved onto the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Remove" the article from featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Reviewers' concerns are here. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:06, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

Bishop Henry

Article about Bishop Henry has been largely rewritten. It had previously GA status from WikiProject Saints. It targets FA now (sometime in the future) so all review help and other assistance is appreciated. --Drieakko 15:15, 26 June 2007 (UTC)

I have added this article as a proposed collaboration for our project. Pastordavid 14:47, 27 June 2007 (UTC)

Article has now been updated and almost fully referenced after help from User:Pastordavid and peer review by User:The Psychless. --Drieakko 05:02, 5 July 2007 (UTC)

Nominated now for FAC: Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Bishop Henry. --Drieakko 07:40, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

Passed! Thanks for all who helped to get it through. --Drieakko 13:28, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

Request for Peer review

I am seeking peer review of a recently created article. Please see Wikipedia:Peer review/Calendar of saints (Anglican Church of Southern Africa)/archive1. Thank you. John Carter 15:46, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

New peer review of Saint Patrick

Hello. I've opened a new peer review request for Saint Patrick. It's at Wikipedia:Peer review/Saint Patrick/archive2. Any and all comments will be much appreciated. Thanks! Angus McLellan (Talk) 09:19, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

New saints added to GA list

The following have been guided to GA in the last few months and have been added to the project GA list:

• Dunstan
• Edmund the Martyr
• Edward the Martyr
• Thomas Cranmer

--SECisek 22:38, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

Featured Article Nomination

I thought you might like to know that Liturgical calendar (Lutheran), an article within the scope of this WikiProject, is now a Featured Articel Candidate. Please express your opinion. -- jackturner3 (talk) 20:13, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Assessment

I just wanted to let this project know that Wikipedia:WikiProject Saints/Assessment is not working correctly . When you click any of the links to view the pages nothing is there . Bewareofdog 00:14, 17 March 2008 (UTC)

Bernard of Clairvaux

Bernard of Clairvaux needs a review before a GA nomination. Take a look, please. -- Secisek (talk) 20:16, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

Help request: Martin Luther King, Jr.

Hello, I would like to request some help with this article, which is under the scope of this project. I fully sourced it over the past week, and I would like to help it get to GA or FA status. It would be great if any editors from this project could look it over, possibly do some copyediting, and give some feedback in the peer review. Thanks, GaryColemanFan (talk) 23:33, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

Changes to the WP:1.0 assessment scheme

As you may have heard, we at the Wikipedia 1.0 Editorial Team recently made some changes to the assessment scale, including the addition of a new level. The new description is available at WP:ASSESS.

• The new C-Class represents articles that are beyond the basic Start-Class, but which need additional references or cleanup to meet the standards for B-Class.
• The criteria for B-Class have been tightened up with the addition of a rubric, and are now more in line with the stricter standards already used at some projects.
• A-Class article reviews will now need more than one person, as described here.

Each WikiProject should already have a new C-Class category at Category:C-Class_articles. If your project elects not to use the new level, you can simply delete your WikiProject's C-Class category and clarify any amendments on your project's assessment/discussion pages. The bot is already finding and listing C-Class articles.

Please leave a message with us if you have any queries regarding the introduction of the revised scheme. This scheme should allow the team to start producing offline selections for your project and the wider community within the next year. Thanks for using the Wikipedia 1.0 scheme! For the 1.0 Editorial Team, §hepBot (Disable) 21:22, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia 0.7 articles have been selected for Saints

Wikipedia 0.7 is a collection of English Wikipedia articles due to be released on DVD, and available for free download, later this year. The Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team has made an automated selection of articles for Version 0.7.

We would like to ask you to review the articles selected from this project. These were chosen from the articles with this project's talk page tag, based on the rated importance and quality. If there are any specific articles that should be removed, please let us know at Wikipedia talk:Version 0.7. You can also nominate additional articles for release, following the procedure at Wikipedia:Release Version Nominations.

A list of selected articles with cleanup tags, sorted by project, is available. The list is automatically updated each hour when it is loaded. Please try to fix any urgent problems in the selected articles. A team of copyeditors has agreed to help with copyediting requests, although you should try to fix simple issues on your own if possible.

We would also appreciate your help in identifying the version of each article that you think we should use, to help avoid vandalism or POV issues. These versions can be recorded at this project's subpage of User:SelectionBot/0.7. We are planning to release the selection for the holiday season, so we ask you to select the revisions before October 20. At that time, we will use an automatic process to identify which version of each article to release, if no version has been manually selected. Thanks! For the Wikipedia 1.0 Editorial team, SelectionBot 23:11, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

Edward the Martyr

There has been work going on at Edward the Martyr to meet concerns raised by a good article reviewer. Would it be possible for someone(s) from this project to take a look at the article and see whether it is suitably, err, hagiographic must be the word. I've tried to add something on the origins of the cult, but hagiography isn't really my thing. And I really don't like that orthodox icon. It seems utterly bizarre in an article on an 10th century English king. Does anyone have any ideas for a more felicitous alternative? Very many thanks in advance, Angus McLellan (Talk) 00:44, 10 November 2008 (UTC)