Talk:Child sponsorship

Biased Criticism

Is anyone else bothered by the fact that the "critics" here only cite one source which happens to be a self-described leftist periodical? At minimum, can we reference the periodical name so people don't take the "criticism" at face value? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.197.250.234 (talk) 00:06, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

It's not even so much the bias of the source as that they are from 1982. Andreac (talk) 07:10, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

I am not sure what a "self-described leftist periodical" is or why that is a relevant label to apply in this case: evaluating the effectiveness of child sponsorship. I do know that the New Internationalist is an important resource for the humanitarian community. There is plenty of more up to date info including a NI sheet from 1989 at http://www.newint.org/issue194/simply.htm, A Christian Aid explanation at http://www.christianaid.org.uk/learn/goats/valueformoney.pdf (is this link right? I get 404 --BozMo talk 13:02, 14 July 2008 (UTC)), and an Evangelical Lutheran Church in America explanation at: http://archive.elca.org/hunger/whatwedo/sponsorship.html. I will try to look around for references. --Joel Mc (talk) 10:30, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

Ho hum. I wrote most of the paragraph and I work for a child sponsorship charity (but I was trying to be NPOV). The best reference for criticism is the text in the rough guide at the bottom of the page, which is by DFID (UK gov). Comments by charities which don't do child sponsorship seem almost certainly POV (e.g. our total admin costs are a lot lower than a prominent UK charity which says they don't do child sponsorship because of the admin costs). Also there is such a range of things called "child sponsorship" that much criticism misses the mark in many cases (sponsoring an orphan doesn't undermine the natural parents for example)... BUT criticism exists and is notable so we should include it. Indeed, the charity I work for includes a whole page of it on our website with our responses: http://www.soschildrensvillages.org.uk/sponsor-a-child/pros-and-cons/ --BozMo talk 12:47, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

Dictionary Definition?

This article is still nothing more than a dictdef. If this is all that can become of it I say transwiki to Wiktionary and delete it. James084 14:18, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

• This topic is not suitable for wiktionary. A dictionary defintion would merely state: "child sponsorship is sponsorship of chilren", which is self-evident. Kappa 17:25, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

As I have said before: Help fix it, then. You feel strongly about keeping a lot of inadequate stuff but you never really do anything about it. I agree that this article is developing due to Park3r showing the article some love. If you are not part of the solution you are part of the problem. James084 17:48, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

Someone with time could take the pros and cons from the Rough Guide listed and rework them in a WP context? --BozMo talk 12:58, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

Organization List

I've removed the external links and wikilinked the org names to bring into line with some of our policies and guidelines. But have some concerns about the section still - What's the criteria for being a "notable" child sponsorship organization here? Can we put more context around the names that shows why they're notable? I wonder if we shouldn't drop the list and use a category instead. -- SiobhanHansa 15:58, 16 August 2007 (UTC)

I'd be inclined to delete the red links on the presumption they are non-notable. --BozMo talk 10:13, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

I'd actually go a slightly different route and suggest we delete any that we don't have a stated reason for considering particularly notable. I understand the impulse to simply delete all the redlinks but I don't think our coverage of charitable organizations is good. We have dozens (or more!) of small and fairly obscure ones covered and some major or significant ones not(*). So if we actually have good reason to call out a notable organization that is redlinked I think it would be good to keep them in and encourage the creation of an article. Equally, I don't think simply having an article in Wikipedia is a good reason for listing on this page. We have categories to aid navigation to all our articles of a particular stripe - in that case I think it would be easier to maintain and cleaner for the article to point to the category. -- SiobhanHansa 13:00, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

*For instance, I just worked on the community foundations article where I found that the very first US community foundation (and also the fourth largest) didn't have an article, and neither did 3 of the other most well supported and most impactfull orgs. We had plenty of more minor ones with articles though.

I offered a while back to set up a small team of you me and Opentoppedbus to review all the charities and try to get the right ones in. I agree its a mess: with idenitical issues on Orphan and Military use of children plus many more. I also agree the "delete red link disallow ext link" is far from perfect. I just wonder who has the energy to do better? --BozMo talk 19:37, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

I vaguely recall. I was kind of distracted by off wiki stuff at the time, but I should have taken you up on that. Was Opentoppedbuss interested? Are you still interested? Anyway, back to Child sponsorship. I'm going to get drastic and just put a link to the category in the see also section and see what happens. I'm beginning to realize I kind of hate lists without context. -- SiobhanHansa 20:32, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

That's not a bad idea. On the charities thing I was also a bit taken out by being dramatically ill providing a photo for the Inferior vena cava filter article. I am prepared to have a go at least with the non-US ones but I am slightly conflicted by working for a large NGO SOS Children's Villages and would rather some sort of team approach for this reason. At present the pages are pretty rubbish. OTB did not reply. --BozMo talk 05:42, 18 August 2007 (UTC)

I should add the 35 UK entities offering child sponsorship mentioned I got off a small review website http://www.dontbuyicecream.com/ which isn't notable but is quite good and fairly independent. I have been in touch with the guy who runs it about correcting a few details on us. Not quite WP:RS sadly I think --BozMo talk 05:45, 18 August 2007 (UTC)

Is there a reason why Plan International is not included on this list. It is a charity which is focussed specifically on sponsorship and the Wikpedia page on it says it helps 1.5 million children. Are the organisations listed here all very much bigger than that? Their wiki pages don't seem to indicate that they are. Qlangley (talk) 11:48, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

I would argue for just removing the list altogether. It's not encyclopedic, and the criteria for inclusion just seem too fuzzy. Charities with distinctive programs can be mentioned in the text, as we already have in the history section. Thoughts on this? Vectro (talk) 06:18, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

References

Pretty much our only real references for this article are for the criticism of child sponsorship and those are opinion pieces from about 20 years ago. Is this criticism still valid and if so has it been restated more recently?

Also I removed a few other "references" that were simply examples of what individual organization's do. These aren't proper references for general assertions and talking about an individual org is undue weight unless we have some reliable independent sources to say they are leader organizations in the field.

A couple of the in article examples were looking a little spammy so I've removed them - they weren't by themselves adding anything other than pointing readers to articles on child sponsorship orgs - and we have a list section doing that. -- SiobhanHansa 15:01, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Certainly there are some contemporary references on the subject. 1982 and 1989? C'mon.142.36.61.58 (talk) 18:05, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

Unreferenced controversy

I removed what a prior author entered: "Child sponsorship grew in the 1990s, but in 1998 a series of Chicago Tribune articles revealed that the children allegedly being sponsored did not receive direct sponsorship."

There were no citations, and the supposed allegations almost certainly would have applied to one or a few organizations in particular that were being unscrupulous with donor funds, and no evidence is available to support the idea that misuse of funds intended to help children is widespread among the majority of child sponsorship organizations. Jaydge (talk) 07:30, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

Secular baptisms

In France, because of the country's traditions of civil religion, there are unusual ceremonies of secular baptisms, sometimes called republican baptisms. It could be maybe be mentioned in the article as a peculiar kind of child sponsorship. [1] ADM (talk) 04:56, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

Save the Children in 1931

The URL given as the source for this change does not appear to mention child sponsorship. The claim may be right though, is there another source? --BozMo talk 09:45, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

35 in the UK?

I can find 29 listed here [2] plus one mentioned as closed. Are some missing or is 35 wrong? The Don't Buy Icecream site doesn't seem to be maintained. --BozMo talk 19:09, 15 June 2012 (UTC)

Conflicting references on World Vision

Ref 4 states 3 million supporters and donors and half a million child sponsors Ref 6 states 4 million sponsored children? Anyway the "most prominent" sentence is thinkly disguised promo perhaps it should come out? --BozMo talk 21:26, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

Not History

Is there a better place for the block I just removed from the History section? Not sure. --BozMo talk 17:30, 8 August 2012 (UTC)

Proposed revert

The reference given here [3] for new content seems to be entirely about world vision rather than child sponsorship in general so I suspect it should be reverted. Anyone disagree? --BozMo talk 10:30, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

Done. --BozMo talk 08:31, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

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