Talk:Baljit Singh (Sant Mat)

Image

The image I used of Sant Baljit Singh has gone away and I have not yet been able to get one that qualifies to beyond fair use. I am working on it but it is likely that Sant Baljit Singh's people will never make an image available; and personal photography of the Master is forbidden as a rule. You can visit his [official web site] to see what he looks like. Sevadar 20:14, 10 December 2006 (UTC).

Article

This article has a rather strange history. I wrote the original article out of a desire to communicate facts about a new spiritual teacher I met in the summer of 2005. I thought the article was fact-based and did a pretty good job explaining who Sant Baljit Singh is based on the available info and I indicated some questions surrounding what he is doing such as changes to the organization (Know Thyself As Soul Foundation) he inherited. Soon after, I received a communication from the group in India expressing that large portions of the article were inappropriate in the sense of "revealing too much internal information" and/or violating their copyright. I did not see anything inappropriate, but submitted the article for removal using the AfD tag out of respect. I figured the wikipedia community could be the better judge. If something was wrong, they could remove it.

Most of the comments in the AfD were for keeping the article. At that point a Wikipedia admin took the AfD tag off the article. Shortly thereafter User:Kevin Kells, a representative of Sant Baljit Singh's organization, deleted most of the article without explanation. In the AfD, he stated the desire to edit the page, but did not do that, he just chainsawed the original article down to nothing. He also apparently deleted all of the documentation sited as the documentation is gone (as of Feb 2006) from editionnaam.net site (which was hosting the documentary details).

The upshot is that by removing the documentation he was able to short-circuit the article. I could revert it easily enough but because the underlying documentation was removed, the footnotes have been rendered invalid. If you are looking for information on Sant Baljit Singh it is still possible to go back in the history to my original article, as it was fact-based and the references did exist at one time and are real enough. The original materials may be available from KTSI on request. But they are no longer online, so that is unfortunate. Sevadar 13:24, 19 February 2006 (UTC)Sevadar.

Real, factual information?

Who is Mr. Singh? What was his name before he became a disciple of Mr. Thakar Singh? Where was he born? Etc. In other words: Is there any information on this person that is in any way substantiated by some independent media or is everything that is written here straight out of the publicity department of his organisation? If not, this article should be deleted. --Bernardoni (talk) 01:35, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

On the contrary

Mr Singh's disciples attempts to remove all information about the person of their guru should be exposed in the article —Preceding unsigned comment added by Teegeedee (talk • contribs) 14:27, 12 January 2010 (UTC)

Naming

Because the followers of Sant Kirpal Singh split over the issue of his succession, all (possible) successors are NOT undisputed - this goes for Thakar as well as for his own successor, Baljit.

This issue must be named in the article. Strictly speaking, the 'Sant' attribute should be removed.

--Teegeedee (talk) 14:54, 12 January 2010 (UTC)

I wholeheartedly agree. It is also not acceptable (see note above) that the followers of any kind of person remove encyclopedic information. If this kind of POV vandalism is allowed to continue, Wikipedia is degraded to a mere propaganda instrument. --Bernardoni (talk) 14:31, 28 January 2010 (UTC)