[WikiEN-l] A course in walled gardens?

Fri Jun 30 14:18:27 UTC 2006

Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
> 
> Now to my mind if there are no sources outside the movement we ought
> to be very wary about covering the subject at all.

Being wary is always a good thing, but I doubt there's consensus for a 
blanket prohibition on such topics; this is essentially the definition 
of [[WP:CRUFT]], and we've all seen _that_ debate before.

Some obscure topics, especially religious ones, are very hard for anyone 
to study in depth without forming an opinion for or against them, or at 
least being seen as having one.  Often this is compounded by an "if 
you're not with us you're against us" mentality on one or both sides of 
the debate.  Thus, there are few if any generally accepted neutral 
secondary sources, and the best a tertiary source like Wikipedia can do 
is balance the arguments from both sides.

Given that the authorship of ACIM seems like a very typical example of 
such a topic, I'm in fact quite positively surprised by the quality of 
the article in question.

> added a section to [[forgiveness]] detailing ACIM's view of the
> concept which was larger than the section devoted to Bhuddism and
> about the same size as the one for Islam.

That certainly seems like a case of undue weight.  If the concept is 
that important to ACIM, the proper place for expanding on it is in the 
ACIM article (or, indeed, in a subarticle thereof).  We can even provide 
a link to it from the forgiveness article, for those who are interested.

> Back to the article on the court case: I'd say it's a footnote to the
> book unless it's been covered extensively in the mainstream media,
> discussed in the Harvard Law Review as a ground-breaking case, cited
> as precedent in other cases or whatever.  The only cited source we
> have in that section is from the Foundation for A Course In Miracles,
> which was one of the parties to the dispute.  I am minded to merge.

I've looked into this a bit, being the one who closed the first AfD.  As 
I wrote in my closing summary, there were several opinions in favor of 
merging, but also some good arguments for keeping the articles separate. 
  I thus chose to close the debate as "keep", with the understanding 
that the option to merge was still open if anyone chose to do that.

One argument worth considering is that apparently the authorship section 
was originally deliberately split from the main ACIM article in order to 
keep the main article of reasonable length.  One might reasonably argue 
that this gives the authorship debate undue weight, but merging it in 
its entirety back into main article would give it even _more_ undue 
weight.  This strategy of splitting long sections on obscure subtopics 
into separate articles is one that has served us well, and as long as 
the sub-articles are well written and neutral, they do us little harm.

Of course, if one managed to condense the entire sub-article into one or 
two paragraphs that said everything that needed to be said about the 
subject, things would be different.  I personally tend to take an "I 
believe it when I see it" approach to such plans, not because I'd be 
particularly skeptical about them, but simply because their success 
depends on so many factors that it's hard to predict in advance.  But 
it's definitely not something I'd oppose, if someone can pull it off 
without throwing away encyclopedic information in the process.

The court case does seem notable to me; it may not be a landmark case, 
but it's certainly unusual.  We probably should have an article on it in 
some form, if only to link from [[Wikipedia:Unusual articles]].

-- 
Ilmari Karonen