Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Judaism/Prospectus

Potential problems with page

As the person who created this page, I acknowledge that it probably contains at least a few at least occasional problems.

• 1) Several articles have titles whose titles are rather clearly broader than the scope of the actual articles. "Archaeology", although I haven't checked, is probably more accurately entitled "Jewish archaeology" or something similar. Any checking to see if the contents of such articles really relates to such broad titles is more than welcome, and definitely encourage.
• 2) Several articles may have titles which are the less commonly used variations on the spelling of a given name, for instance. I myself am not expert enough to know that in most cases.
• 3) Some articles in these books might also be related to individual topics of a similar or identical common title. Some of the tractates identified as such, for instance, may well be found on dab pages or content to be under a different title, and I would welcome cleanup of such.
• 4) There are almost certainly others, because I'm a human and I make mistakes. Anyone wishing to thoroughly review the list, in part or whole, for any errors I might have made is more than welcome to do so. John Carter (talk) 19:49, 3 March 2013 (UTC)

John, I started fixing some redlinks in the first section. I don't mind going back to try to focus some of the links otherwise. (I guess you mean things like replacing Marriage with Jewish views on marriage.) StevenJ81 (talk) 16:36, 4 March 2013 (UTC)

• Note that WP:JE has an index of articles from the multi-volume Jewish Encyclopedia of 1906, which has had some work put in to try to turn red-links blue. This may be a useful resource for tracking down redirects on your list that can be turned blue (eg to articles that we already have, perhaps under different spellings). -- now having done a few: actually, just using our own search box works well enough, at least for a very good number of the red links.

It might be worth running a similar script to try to examine those 1906 JE articles for length, and/or to try to break down our completeness by broad subject area. Jheald (talk) 12:46, 5 March 2013 (UTC)

• Jheald, with all due appreciation to what you're doing: Before you go too fast on this, I think we need to stop and make sure we are pointing these articles to Jewish topics, not general topics. Take, for example, Apologetics and polemics

1. Yes, you can split it into Apologetics and Polemics
2. But then the first, at least, should really direct to Apologetics#Judaism
3. And what about the article Jewish polemics and apologetics in the Middle Ages? It might be that this is really the proper target for this link.

My point is simply that we want to make sure these links go to the right places for Judaism-related topics. StevenJ81 (talk) 16:09, 5 March 2013 (UTC)

That sort of relevance check is going (eventually) to need to be done for all the blue links anyway. There's no particular advantage in keeping Apologetics and polemics as a red link rather than two blue links. Jheald (talk) 16:11, 5 March 2013 (UTC)

I agree. But I wonder if it isn't worthwhile at least making a quick, immediate check of the blue links to see if they have any obvious Jewish content that we can point the link to. StevenJ81 (talk) 17:47, 5 March 2013 (UTC)

First pass

(Cross-posted from WT:JEW)

I have now made a first pass through the list, turning as many red-links to blue as I could with simple redirects. This should make the remaining red-links rather more manageable, so easier to see where our coverage could be extended.

A couple of further general bits of work on the list that I'd envisage would be to identify and mark entries that point to dab pages, and identify and highlight entries that point to pages that haven't got tags for either WikiProject Judaism or WikiProject Jewish History -- it should be possible to write scripts to do both of these reasonable efficiently.

Of the remaining red-links,

• Some are topics we are genuinely missing. In particular, as well as a few missing bios, quite a lot of the red-links appear to be liturgical topics, especially particular prayers and well-known songs/hymns; also some halachic principles.
• A few are topics where we have redirects under another spelling, but I left the link red because I thought there was a possibility of a proper free-standing article. (eg: shouldn't every tractate of the Mishnah at least have a stub article? At the moment quite a few are silent redirects to the corresponding Order).
• Some other red-links are what seemed to me rather generic English-language phrases, so I didn't make a redirect even though we may have a relevant article. (eg: Evening service [1] -> Maariv; Water-drawing festival [2] -> Simchat Beit HaShoeivah). Probably these phrases need dab pages, which in turn would point to the relevant content. (Some creativity may be required because dab pages shouldn't really only have one blue link on them).
• Some red-links may be mis-spellings. John Carter has done a great job, but a few of the topics I wasn't able to identify at answers.com [3]. This might in some cases be due to mis-spellings, because there were a few spellings in the list, including some clear typos, that were different to the spellings of the article entries at answers.com. I also didn't check every entry there, so it is possible that some of the redirects (now blue-links) that I created may have been from mis-spellings. Most however were from alternate capitalizations or genuine alternate spellings, both of which seem reasonable.

Anyway, I hope this has cleared the field a bit of some of the more obvious red-links, which are now blue by redirect. Jheald (talk) 16:09, 7 March 2013 (UTC)