Talk:Gen. 2:17

Gen. 2:17 was listed on VFD on October 12.

The result of the debate was to not delete the page.

• Gen. 2:17. Do we need articles on all of the verses of the Bible? RickK 22:54, 11 Nov 2003 (UTC)
  • mv applicable info to original sin; delete reddi
  • Agreed, covered by original sin and Fall of man (Unification Church); delete Dieter Simon 23:19, 11 Nov 2003 (UTC)
  • Keep. Editors who feel the need to understand every verse may be rare, but being the largest 'pedia calls for letting specialized areas like this grow -- unless they become such an economic burden that they need to be rolled out until the Bible-students are ready to support their own server. Note that it is easy to keep a master list of this subject (against the roll-out contingency) since an exhaustive index system is built into the article titles. --Jerzy 23:49, 2003 Nov 11 (UTC)
  • Keep. Explanations of key Bible verses might be useful, although it might be better merged into a single article. An example would be the John 3:16 (I think that's the right one) thing we keep seeing. Daniel Quinlan 00:23, Nov 12, 2003 (UTC)
    • I agree with Daniel Quinlan, but this needs to be done with delicacy and moderation -- it runs a huge risk of getting into articles on hundreds of Bible verses, and getting ridiculous. --Daniel C. Boyer 19:33, 14 Nov 2003 (UTC)
  • I'm coming down decisively on ambivalence about this article. On one hand, I feel there are several verses from the Bible that deserve attention due to their effect on Western Civilization (e.g., "Thou shall not suffer a witch to live"), some for their contribution to debunking the Bible as an authority (e.g., there are two consecutive verses in Proverbs that contradict one another) & some known for stylistic or literary value (such as the shortest verse in the KJV -- "Jesus wept"). On the other hand, perhaps it would be better to create a new article -- Important verses from the Bible -- & hope the trolls soon tire of blanking it. -- llywrch 00:53, 12 Nov 2003 (UTC)
    • I concur with your new article suggestion, and hope similar ones are produced for Qur'an, Shruti etc. That way I can fake having read these noble works, which would save me lots of time. -- Finlay McWalter 01:22, 12 Nov 2003 (UTC)
      • Agreed, but in the meantime I would vote Keep, on the theory that every single line of the Bible should not have a separate entry, only the lines that merit some discussion and analysis, which could make this group of entries interesting. I don't know why the abbreviation "Gen." is used rather than "Genesis". Tempshill 01:38, 12 Nov 2003 (UTC)
  • Keep. Wiki is not paper. - Arthur George Carrick
  • Delete. If the quote is important to a certain subject add it there, but delete this. I can just imagine when someone decides to create a bot and add every line from the Bible as a seperate article... Maximus Rex 02:23, 12 Nov 2003 (UTC)
    • Fine if they do. If it's not a public domain translation, we build a bot to delete it, taking advantage of the time stamps to find them. If it is PD, they've done the digitization work for us, and it's far easier for us to build a bot to assemble the verses back into a complete GDL edition of the Bible than to digitize one ourselves. Maybe that belongs on an FTP or Web server rather than a Wiki one, and it provides a good source for pulling quotes or all the kinds noted above, not to mention quotes of the dirty parts. And do bear in mind, as WP grows, a work that size will eventually be an insignificant load on the system. --Jerzy
      • If you want the Bible here it is. Maximus Rex 03:29, 12 Nov 2003 (UTC)
    • Lest anyone think from your choice of that wording over "If anyone wants..." that we are personalizing this, i'll both point out that this is not about personal preferences, and underline their irrelevance by offering an otherwise irrelevant detail: i have no personal interest in WP religious commentary. Also, my point was not about having a whole Bible on WP, but that it any problem of inadvertantly encouraging someone to put it there is insignificant. And by the way, there are people who can never have enough Bibles with different translations, just as there are people who don't want a translation, they want "the real Bible" (meaning in one real case the English translation called the King James Version). --Jerzy 17:23, 2003 Nov 13 (UTC)
  • Wikipedia is not original source text. RickK 03:49, 12 Nov 2003 (UTC)
    • This is far from being about "having the Bible on WP" as "original source text". WP is not an almanac either, but as has been pointed out, we have gotten onto WP close to the whole of an almanac of the statistics of (what, tens of thousands of?) inhabited places of the US (lightly dressed up with boiler-plate verbiage). As has been pointed out, nearly all those articles are worthless crap at this point, but they are great stubs, and though it will take time, WP is headed toward being the kind of resource that will be the natural place to turn when you want to know, e.g., how much bigger the adjacent town is, or why your own town's grade school is named after Joe Blow. I am not advocating loading each Bible verse as a page consisting of its text, but it is not a crazy idea to have it there as the same kind of framework we have for towns: there are people who randomly choose a verse, or a pair of otherwise unrelated verses, daily or weekly, for divination or meditation. There are also people who take an interest in a particular verse they recall or encounter in some other way, and find possible contexts to put it in, using (1) the footnotes in (1a) many ordinary Bibles or in (1b) the Oxford Annotated Bible (a valuable half-kilo home reference for anyone living in a Westernized culture), or (2) a concordance, or (3) commentary on it or its chapter in something like the many-volumed Interpreter's Bible. Some of them would welcome a way to easily find a commentary, or multiple commentaries, on a single verse, and some of them would consider it an act of religious charity to edit their own commentary into WP. IMO the thrust of much of the desire to delete this article is the POV that knowledge of verse-level Biblical commentary is not knowledge in the same sense as, e.g., knowledge of the POV political commentary that we welcome when it's in its proper place. No one is interested in everything that's on WP, but it is an especially invidious POV to move toward a policy that anything (or anything about religion, since only in religion, poliitcs, and sexuality is it so utterly hopeless to accurately weed out the utter nonsense), that virtually none of our current editors are interested in, is not worth knowing. It's true that a lot of Biblical commentary is utter nonsense, but so is a lot of radical political commentary. What they have in common with each other (but not with, say flat earth and hollow earth and the Necronomicon of Abdul al Hazarad) is that, for each flavor of political and religious commentary, small but substantial numbers of people do invest them with real importance in their own life and/or thought. How the radical-political and the verse-level-Biblical commentaries differ is that one's interested constituency is at least well represented here (perhaps over-represented, which BTW should make us grateful rather than resentful), while the other is under-represented here and must rely on True Scholars [wink], like me and many of you, to resist the POV that their peculiar minority interest needn't treated differently from utter nonsense. --Jerzy 19:19, 2003 Nov 13 (UTC)
  • Delete, as RickK said. However, feel free to move analysis to other relevant Wikipedia articles. The only verse that could possibly qualify for its own page is John 3:16 because of its importance to Christianity, and for the rainbow wig guy holding up the sign at baseball games (inside joke for Americans). Fuzheado 07:19, 12 Nov 2003 (UTC)
    • see here for more about the wig guy. Maximus Rex 07:22, 12 Nov 2003 (UTC)
  • Move to Genesis 2:17 (Bible verse) or some other better naming convention and keep the gen redirecting to it. It's not primarily source text, it's primarily discussion of the significance of the source text and its uses, as in Fall of man. I don't advocate adding any we don't actively reference in other articles, though. I suppose that if we end up with lots of religious work analysis we can copy them all to a religion Wiki and give it a 50,000 article start. JamesDay 08:01, 12 Nov 2003 (UTC)
    • This comes very close to the borderline of what I don't think Wikipedia is good at: very detailed analysis of primary sources on which not many good secondary sources are available. I'm tempted to say this is more something for a specialized text on Biblical criticism than for a general encyclopedia article, which should instead discuss, say, Genesis or List of important verses in Genesis in a wider and more verifiable context. --Delirium 11:57, Nov 12, 2003 (UTC)
    • I'm happy to have these here and let them grow to the point where they merit another wiki. If they don't grow that far, they are harmless; if they do, we've given a nice new project a start. JamesDay 19:02, 13 Nov 2003 (UTC)
  • Moved to better title and redirected to original sin. The redirect at Gen. 2:17 is not very useful so could be deleted, but I think the new redirect at Genesis 2:17 is worth keeping. Angela 14:51, 12 Nov 2003 (UTC)
    • One criterion that seemed to get lost in all of the discussion would be "How many articles link to this title?" I just did a quick look, & was amazed that the only page that links to Gen. 2:17 or Genesis 2:17 themselves is this one. Many of us (& I'll include myself) have gotten distracted over a topic to argue over, rather than if the material is actually useful to anyone. Let's consider this in the future. -- llywrch 01:22, 16 Nov 2003 (UTC)
  • Keep as redirect. Standard abbreviation for that book.Martin 19:43, 12 Nov 2003 (UTC)
  • As a redirect non-harmful. Andre Engels 11:39, 13 Nov 2003 (UTC)
  • Keep. A better naming convention, and a header page along the lines of Bible verses with discussion are needed, though. There are many full texts of the bible on the net, and there is no need to duplicate those, and there are also several full verse by verse commentaries - but they are mainly of historical interest only (because they are out of copyright and hence don't take account of modern scholarship). I endorse the notion that we should treat other important sacred books in the same way. Theologians and religious experts will not consult Wiki for information about why Genesis 2:17 is important, but a lay person encountering a reference to it might well want to know what the disputes about it are, and what its historical significance has been. Vigilance about POV will be needed, though - and a recollection that (a) being anti-religious is just as much a POV as being pro and (b) the real arguments will be between different religious groupings. seglea 22:51, 13 Nov 2003 (UTC)
  • In principle I see no problem with having articles on sections of creative works as long as we are prepared to apply the rule consistently towards all major works, religious and secular, written, cinema, or television. mydogategodshat 02:10, 14 Nov 2003 (UTC)

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the decision not to delete this page (now a redirect) was taken at this point.