Talk:Raëlian beliefs and practices/GA1

GA Reassessment

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Starting GA reassessment as part of the GA Sweeps process. Jezhotwells (talk) 19:59, 16 February 2010 (UTC)

Checking against GA criteria

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GA review (see here for criteria)

1. It is reasonably well written.

   a (prose): b (MoS):

   The lead does not fully summarize the artcile as per WP:LEAD. I note that the last paragraph of the lead describes parades and baptism, but there is no expansion of this in the article. Y

   The prose is reasonably well written.

2. It is factually accurate and verifiable.

   a (references): b (citations to reliable sources): c (OR):

   I assume good faith for the off line sources

3. It is broad in its coverage.

   a (major aspects): b (focused):

   Apart from the mention of denial of Swiss residency to Vorilhon and a passing mention of "his approach to children and sexuality.", there is little discussion of the beliefs from an external point of view.

   Apart from a brief mention in the lead there is no mention of the practices, e.g. baptism and parades. Their belief of human cloning is mentioned, but no real expolration of whther this has been achieved.

4. It follows the neutral point of view policy.

   Fair representation without bias:

5. It is stable.

   No edit wars, etc.:

6. It is illustrated by images, where possible and appropriate.

   a (images are tagged and non-free images have fair use rationales): b (appropriate use with suitable captions):

   The image of the winter seminar is all very well, but it doesn't really explain anything about what these winter seminars are about.

7. Overall:

   Pass/Fail:

   I am not sure whether this artcile does anything more than rehash the contents of Raelian books. There is little independent sourced comment and little or nothing about the practices. I am placing this on hold to see if anyone is prepared to expand this. Major contributors and projects will be notified. Jezhotwells (talk) 20:23, 16 February 2010 (UTC)

   OK, the recent edits have addressed the problems that I found. Thanks for your work. GA status kept. Jezhotwells (talk) 00:58, 18 February 2010 (UTC)

Kmarinas86's response

Well I have remedied these concerns. My only problem is that by doing so, I have created a content fork WP:FORK. In fact, to address all concerns with the Raelian articles would require me to merge all of them into the same article, but that would be unreasonable. The nature of Raëlism, and perhaps also true of all social movements, is that neutrality requires every topic which receives criticism should do so in ample amounts. However, because such criticism can be directed at parts of an idea while ignoring the rest of it, it gives the premature sense that such criticism is founded on ignorance and misunderstanding. There is so much overlap between the articles, it was not clear to me that there was a straight up-and-down hierarchy.

From the "raelism" article, we have the "beliefs and pratices" article, and the "history of raelism" article. For the sake of analogy, I will call this the "raelian article trinity".

From the "history of raelism" article, I could conceivably connect the "embassy" and "cloning" articles.

From the "beliefs and practices" article, we have the "embassy", "cosmology", and "cloning" articles.

From the "cosmology" article, we have the "meditation" article.

It appears that "raelism", "raelian beliefs and practices", and "history of raelism" differ primarily in structure (i.e. "functional vs. thematic vs. chronological"). Apparently, a chronological structure is better for outlining a sense of time. A thematic structure apparently is better for contrasting those who hold certain views and practices tenable against those who hold them to be untenable. A functional structure seems to promote the greatest objectivity in an article, since it explicitly outlines the difference between groups (contrary to the "history of raelism" article") without assuming that ideas, actions, and controversy alone define the movement (contrary to the "raelian beliefs and practices" article). It appears that all of these structures may form by processing the raw facts. Due to their difference in structure, each would contain different implicit information, all of which must be balanced if GA status is to be maintained. The greatest objectivity would naturally result in duplicate information rearranged different presentation forms (among all of the articles). To rewrite it differently in separate articles forces the editor to reinterpret information, which ultimately leads to loss of objectivity. Such duplication is frowned at however. The immense flexibility of hypertext wiki has not yet been developed to adapt to needs of looking at the same raw facts organized in different ways, on the fly, that is, without laborious rearranging of the material.

There is no way to avoid the emergence of implicit information, especially when the prose is made to be coherent. As for this subject, I believe that if forked content must be excised, doing so in this article would render it as a non-GA, but excising the material in other articles such as the "embassy" article would render at least one of them a stub, making it little more than a definition.

Only the articles "Claude Vorilhon", "Brigitte Bosselier", and "Honorary Guides of the Raelian Movement" are sufficiently distinct from the main trinity of articles.

How are such concerns rectified?Kmarinas86 ^(6sin8karma) 03:42, 17 February 2010 (UTC)