Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Latter Day Saint movement/Archive 13

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Archive 13

Coordinates problem

I'm just a guy who monitors problems with coordinates, and I can't really figure out all the intricacies of the usage of {{LDS Temple}} and related templates; but the article The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Brazil popped up today in Category:Pages with malformed coordinate tags. Now, the article itself contains no coordinate tags whatsoever; but it for some reason is displaying the coordinates of the Belém Brazil Temple (and only that temple) in the title position, and I don't see anything wrong with the coordinates in the Belém temple's article. The only recent edit to the article was a minor tweak to the infobox by Dmm1169, and I can't see how that would have affected anything to do with coordinates. Can someone here figure out (1) why the article is inappropriately displaying the coordinates of the Belém temple and (2) where the supposedly malformed coordinate tags may exist in some template transcluded in the article? Deor (talk) 23:40, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

Pinging WOSlinker, who has been making a bunch of edits to work around a temporary bug in Module:Coordinates. Those edits may not longer be needed, or this change could be a result of changes made in the last 24 hours to fix the module. – Jonesey95 (talk) 00:37, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for bringing this up. Im seeing this issue with LDS in Argentina, LDS in Cape Verde, LDS in Ecuador, LDS in the Mariana Islands, LDS in the Philippines, LDS in Puerto Rico, LDS in South Korea, and LDS in Thailand where the coordinates for one of the countries temples is displayed above the infobox. The large majority of "LDS in _" pages with temples are not displaying it. Most, but not all of these temple are coordinates for recently dedicated temples. The Template pages has the command display=inline,title, but so does other temple templates that does not show in their respective "LDS in _" pages. Consequently, I'm not sure what's causing it. -- Dmm1169 (talk) 03:24, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

I thought it was the adding of "type:landmark" for a while, but seems to be the coords display=title param. I removed that from {{LDS Temple/Rio de Janeiro Brazil Temple}} and {{LDS Temple/Belém Brazil Temple}} and it fixed it. Title was added two days ago with this edit to LDS Temple/Belém Brazil Temple. -- WOSlinker (talk) 06:42, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

Thanks. One result of the fix, though, seems to be that no coordinates are displaying in Belém Brazil Temple, even in the infobox. Deor (talk) 14:03, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

WOSlinker, Deor, Jonesey95,

The issue is, Template:LDS Temple list2 also uses the coordinates function in its template.

I've conditioned the Template:Infobox LDS Temple to add coordinates above the infobox (although not the title) when there's no image - similar to what would be displayed in the infobox.

One other solution would require altering the coordinates to in templates to just the lat/long and form the coord template in Template:Infobox LDS Temple (with lat/long inserted). This will add the display=title,inline to all temples under one location. This will also mean initially making 300+ template changes. So I figure making the change to add it in page just above the infobox rather than the title would suffice for now. Dmm1169 (talk) 15:15, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

Maybe the display param just needs changing to display={{#ifeq:{{{format|}}}|Infobox LDS Temple|inline,title|inline}} but I haven't tested it. -- WOSlinker (talk) 16:09, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

Yes it works. Thanks! The only concern is that it may make this template too complex for the average editor. Dmm1169 (talk) 03:05, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

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BoM Prophets in both BoM people and BoM prophets subcat?

Some of the articles in Category:Book_of_Mormon_prophets like Alma the Elder are in its parent category Category:Book of Mormon people but most are not. Opinions?Naraht (talk) 22:27, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

I think they should be in one or the other! Rachel Helps (BYU) (talk) 16:16, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

So prophets should be onlyon the prophets page and then that page under people page.Naraht (talk) 16:46, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

Style of pages about BoM people and BoM Books

Hi, I work at the BYU library as their Wikipedian-in-residence. We've historically worked on pages related directly to our collections, but this school year I've decided that we should improve BoM character pages and book pages, many of which currently do not pass notability guidelines. I've been writing guidelines for writing and sourcing these pages for my students, and I have questions for anyone in this project about how we should write and organize BoM people and book pages. Normally, I would look to similar pages on Wikipedia to infer what good pages on sacred writ look like, but I haven't been able to find a Bible page about a Biblical person or book that I consider to be excellent (though I'm happy to be contradicted). I've instructed my students to cite secondary sources when writing summary sections, as a hedge around the Wikipedia policy of no original research.

• 1. Lineage sections (like in Zeniff) with an illustration like a family tree. Should we keep them?

This strikes me as helpful and noncontroversial. It's just information likely to appear in the text anyway, but in a more quickly read format. Thmazing (talk) 20:56, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

More or less agreed. I'm not particularly committed to retaining family tree illustrations, but I've seen them for figures described in written works of scripture, myth, etc., e.g. Yngling#The family tree, so I definitely don't think they're inappropriate or outright require removal. Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 21:14, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

Frankly even Zeniff's family tree is tiny compared to the one on Esau which has somewhere on the high side of 40 people in it. If Esau is OK, then pretty much any family tree should be fine. I do expect the large majority to simply be father-son-grandson, (Is Sariah the only BoM woman who would be part of a tree?)Naraht (talk) 22:28, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

Additionally, I'd simply shrug if I saw it for the Norse or Greek gods, so think that's quite ok.Naraht (talk) 19:20, 26 September 2023 (UTC)

• 2. Etymology sections. Tricky!! To retain NPOV, I'm planning that we'll remove most of them. If we retain some of the content, I think it should be presented with in-text attribution. But in some cases, I'm not sure if we need in-text attribution. For example, Aminadab is also the name of a person from the Bible. That seems relevant and obvious and I included it under "interpretation" on his page.

I'm in favor of keeping the information as the suppositions are well documented and of likely usefulness, but I agree that a section labeled "Etymology" is misleading. Moving to "Interpretation" seems reasonable. Thmazing (talk) 20:56, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

I think frankly the question here is what to do with some of Hugh Nibley's interpretations.Naraht (talk)

• 3. While working on the Aminadab page I came across information I termed "pedagogical application" from Religious Educator. I tried to make it clear that this is an approach to teaching from the BoM stories that is useful in a devotional teaching context (seminary and institute). I'm not sure if such a section belongs on Wikipedia, and I discussed the topic with several BoM scholars and some of my colleagues in the BYU Library (I'm not trying to strongarm anyone's opinion by citing these scholars--it's one way I'm trying to figure out scholarly consensus). Joseph Spencer's first impression was that an encyclopedia should focus on scholarship and not include devotional interpretations (fearing that a summary of devotional interpretations would easily exceed the scope of any page). However, Wikipedia is different from scholarly encyclopedias (and even then, scholarly encyclopedias include pages like "Job in Fiction"). For example, Miriam includes information about "Jewish folk-religious tradition" about the well that went dry when Miriam died. Michael Austin, a literary BoM scholar, suggested treating didactic approaches as another kind of commentary. My colleague Mike Hunter (formerly a subject librarian in our library in this subject), also mentioned that many people interested in scholarship about the Book of Mormon could also be interested in like, the traditional and lay interpretation of stories in the BoM. I and my students plan to focus on BoM scholarship in our research, but I still want to discuss this topic, since I think we will encounter more relevant articles from sources similar to Religious Educator. Is information about the official interpretation of a character, like from an LDS Sunday School manual, useful to us (or maybe it's original research?)? Are interpretations by institute and seminary teachers within the scope of a Wikipedia page, and if so, how should we organize it? Should we put it under "interpretation"?

That's frankly a situation that I'm not really sure exists elsewhere. On the one hand I'd call things like the Religious Educators primary sources, but that sort of implies non-belief in the Book of Mormon as Scripture. (On the other hand, a real push for Secondary Sources would end up with an article on the Brother of Jared not including the name). Any chance of getting a CoC or Strangite interpretation of some of these>Naraht (talk) 22:28, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

I'm sure that researching other religious traditions involves encountering the interpretations of religious writers in the course of things. This has been mentioned on the WikiProject Christianity board: "Wikipedia relies on similar sources for its coverage of Catholicism, Hinduism, and many other major world religions."

In my own contributions to Book of Mormon pages, like Abish (Book of Mormon), I've included didactic approaches as a kind of commentary. Pedagogical readings do qualify, I think, as interpretations, since they are examples of an author arguing what a text means. For example on the Abish page, "Camille S. Williams reads Ammon as a metaphor for the Book of Mormon with the Lamanite queen and Abish symbolizing responsive readers" is an example of a pedagogical or didactic reading of the text, insofar as it interprets Abish's role in the narrative as a model for how hypothetical students ought to behave, but an encyclopedia noting that according to an author a text means X doesn't equate to Wikipedia telling its readers they ought to do X. Interpretations with a mind toward pedagogy may, depending on how they are framed or articulated, themselves be simply a more specific genre of a literary/philosophical interpretation of the text, albeit one cued into different streams of thought and literature than those of the fields of philosophy or literary studies.

I would only consider Religious Educator a primary source in the way theoretically everything, including Wikipedia itself, is a primary source. Religious Educator is a primary source for how its contributors articulate various topics, but it is a secondary source for the topics themselves.

I would say that information about the official interpretation of a Book of Mormon figure or place or topic would be original research if cited directly from a Sunday School manual but would be valid content if cited from a secondary source (for example, a Religious Educator article that mentions what a Latter-day Saint apostle or manual has said about Alma or Moroni, etc.). I added something like that on the page for Zenock, which cited a Religious Educator article to state that "Orson Pratt, an apostle in the early Latter Day Saint movement and in the LDS Church, expressed his belief that additional prophecies from Zenock were contained in additional ancient plates hidden in the hill Cumorah to someday be recovered and revealed by the will of God", and I included that content in a section about the Latter Day Saint movement's reception of the Zenock figure from the Book of Mormon. If I had cited Orson Pratt's own writing directly, I think that would've been original research; but citing it from a secondary source is appropriate research. Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 00:11, 26 September 2023 (UTC)

Naraht we do have the Encyclopedia of the Book of Mormon published by the Community of Christ (was called RLDS then). We will try to include information from it when it's relevant to the page. Hydrangeans (she/her), you have a pretty strict rule about original research, but you also make a very good point. I will be thinking about it. Rachel Helps (BYU) (talk) 16:08, 26 September 2023 (UTC)

• 4. Should pages about books of the BoM have a chapter-by-chapter summary? This is a common thing to include in Biblical encyclopedias.

While there may be a *few* things where BoM books and Bible books are treated differently (Issues with Translations), that isn't a place where they should differ.Naraht (talk) 22:28, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

I'm sure that we'll have more questions. I'm curious to hear others' opinions on these topics. Rachel Helps (BYU) (talk) 16:41, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

• And an apologies for the number of times I used frankly in the responses to this.Naraht (talk) 19:22, 26 September 2023 (UTC)

Articles with multiple identically named BoM people

I think I've seen more, but the article on Coriantumr is a particular mess. Any article about multiple people who just share a name needs to be split, and if one or more of them isn't notable, then it should simply be deleted. As far as I can tell, the three men named Coriantumr would be equivalent to having a French King, an Egyptian General and a Chinese Emperor from different centuries all named Fred in the same article.Naraht (talk) 15:03, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

I have a student working on that page. It does seem like there should be a disambiguation page and separate pages for each person, but only if they pass notability criteria? Do we have preferences for parenthetical disambiguations in their titles? Rachel Helps (BYU) (talk) 15:56, 28 September 2023 (UTC)

One possibility is prince vs. dissenter vs. something else. But another option, is if they are in different Books of the BoM, to have that Coriantumr (Book of Ether), etc., then each can be evaluated separately. However, I don't think scientific commentary on the beheading of Shiz belongs here, only in Shiz.

Additionally, Helaman is a multiple people in the BoM* article.Naraht (talk) 15:28, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

Appropriateness of File:Book_of_Mormon_Lands_and_Sites2.jpg

I'm sort of uncomfortable with File:Book_of_Mormon_Lands_and_Sites2.jpg being on pages. From the notes of the user who uploaded it in 2007, they personally created the map, but later edits removed a watermark. If the user created it, it is *one* interpretation of the Limited Geography model, but with no attribution at all. It may belong on Limited geography model, but even there, the image goes far beyond what is discussed in the text.Naraht (talk) 18:35, 24 October 2023 (UTC)

No, I don't think so. It appears to be mostly one editor's opinion, not a representation of scholarly consensus. The description page does not state where they got the data for the map. Plus the creator is blocked for sockpuppetry NW1223<Howl at me•My hunts> 20:28, 24 October 2023 (UTC)

Definitely not a representation of scholarly consensus. There's a number of groups that speculate actual locations for Book of Mormon events. There's a group of people in the LDS Church that believe that the Book of Mormon took place in Central America. I know of another group that puts their reasoning that it took place much further north in the central US (Mississippi River Valley). In any case, this is all speculation from what I can tell. I don't know of any official position of location of event by the LDS Church other than where the plates claimed to be buried (near Palmyra, New York). Anything else I believe is anyone's guess. Thanks - Dmm1169 (talk) 03:52, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

Which is why it *may* belong in the Limited geography model#Mesoamerican_setting section. I *think* the burial place of Zelph I believe qualifies in addition to Hill Cumorah, but that gets tricky.Naraht (talk) 04:50, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

Latter Day Saints or Latter-day Saints?

Hello!

A user (DisneyMetalhead) boldly moved a large number of pages from the Latter Day Saints spelling to Latter-day Saints. However, my understanding is that the first spelling is for topic related to the Latter Day Saint movement as a whole, and the second spelling to the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. All the moved pages were about the larger movement.

Can someone of the project explain where the difference in spelling comes from, before this degenerates in a page-move war? Place Clichy (talk) 18:12, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

All of the edits I had made were intended to be in regards to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Any of the additional sects and churches that branched off, do use the spelling "Latter Day Saints". I wasn't trying to cause a problem, but to be helpful.--DisneyMetalhead (talk) 18:36, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

Correct, Place Clichy, if the article is about the broader Latter Day Saint movement, the spelling should be Latter Day Saint.....moving them to Latter-day Saint would be incorrect. ChristensenMJ (talk) 20:05, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

Thanks ChristensenMJ! I know there is a Wikipedia naming convention, but would you care to explain to someone completely foreign to the subject how this came to be? This sounds as strange as the Hyphen War. Place Clichy (talk) 20:11, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

Place Clichy, I don't know if this will come out right, but we'll try....As DisneyMetalhead alludes to, use of Latter Day Saint represents both the original, and then any of the denominations, which have origin in the movement founded by Joseph Smith or trace its roots to that origin. When Smith was killed, there was a succession crisis, which was really the beginning of having different denominations or branches, which trace their roots to Smith's original church, begin to develop or evolve, as leaders or views what Smith intended, etc. cropped up. Since it is by far the largest denomination in the movement, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which began using the hyphen in about 1851, gets most of the awareness and many aren't aware of the distinction. Those in the movement began using the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in 1838, under Smith's direction, prior to his death 6 years later. ChristensenMJ (talk) 20:26, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

Essentially, the hyphen indicates the main/primary Latter-day Saint church. The usage of the non-hyphen is a term used by various sects that broke off of what was originally established. I believe however that some of the articles pertain exclusively to the Latter-day Saints, and so in that instance -- shouldn't the correct spelling be used? Just thoughts.--DisneyMetalhead (talk) 23:12, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

Articles specific to the big Latter-day Saints Church seem to use (LDS Church) as a disambiguator instead of (Latter Day Saints). That's what naming convention WP:NCLDS says, and is also prominently mentioned on some of the pages you moved: Temple (Latter Day Saints) vs. Temple (LDS Church), Priesthood (Latter Day Saints) vs. Priesthood (LDS Church), Seventy (Latter Day Saints) vs. Seventy (LDS Church) etc.

Re: your comment that "the spelling for the movement should also be "Latter-day Saint" movement", as this is a break from current conventions I think you should first discuss at Talk:Latter Day Saint movement about changing the title of the main page, using the process described at WP:Requested moves § Requesting controversial and potentially controversial moves. If the consensus of editors agrees with you, then the main page should be moved, and you will probably have to largely rewrite WP:Naming conventions (Latter Day Saints). I can't say if that will be successful, but you won't reach anything without first establishing that consensus. Place Clichy (talk) 00:42, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

Saying the non-hyphen use is done only by those that broke off from what was originally established isn't accurate...what was originally established didn't actually include the hyphen....the hyphen was not used by those who followed Brigham Young west to the Salt Lake Valley until the 1850s. It also has an implication at the heart of the succession crisis - with each of the other denominations having their own view of who really broke off....it appropriately honors the belief of others and doesn't have the feeling of being presumptuous to see only the LDS Church as clearly what was originally established and all the rest of them are just wrong.... ChristensenMJ (talk) 02:02, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

Totally agree that the spelling for the movement should not be Latter-day Saint movement....it's not just a break from current conventions, it's not founded in fact and history from what Joseph Smith founded and then evolved over time. ChristensenMJ (talk) 02:04, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

@ChristensenMJ: I wasn't implying "right vs wrong" as you indicated. I simply was saying that if an article is purely centered around The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, wouldn't it make sense to have the spelling as such. Didn't realize that many of the various spin-off sects were also included on the stated articles, as I indicated in my original response to User:Place Clichy. Cheers m8!--DisneyMetalhead (talk) 02:00, 7 November 2023 (UTC)