Talk:List of religious topics
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I predict that this list will soon be far too long to present it as one topic per line, and it will look like the list of mathematical topics. Michael Hardy 21:38 Mar 3, 2003 (UTC)
I have been adding entries to this page, but now I am wondering what use such an entry would have. There is little need or use for a huge list of every possible religious topic. Such a list would be enormous, an impossible to organize in a logical way that everyone could agree on. We should (and we do) have a list of all religions; this makes sense. We should (and do) have a list of philosophical topics. But this topic is so broad that virutally every topic in the universe could eventually be subsumed into this! Let's think about this; can we come up with a more specific and this useful topic? RK
It would list only Wikipedia articles, not all conceivable topics! There is also a list of mathematical topics, which has hundreds -- or maybe thousands? -- of entries, and a list of physics topics. Take a look at those. As it states at the top of the page, one reason why such a page is useful is that you can click on "Related Changes" and monitor editing of articles to which the page links; it's a "Recent Changes" list, but restricted to articles listed on this page. Michael Hardy 18:55 Mar 6, 2003 (UTC)
- This makes sense, but I have one concern: The list of important mathematicians is probably a lot more smaller than the list of important figures in religion. If we start adding names of famous Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist figures, this list is going to become huge. Although I can't be sure, I suspect the number of names will be much greater than the number of religous subjects and ideas. It seems to me that this will make this list less useful. What if this page dealt only with ideas, concepts, subjects, etc., but did not mention people by name, except for perhaps founders of faiths? A separate list could be made for all figures having to do with religion. RK
I recently (and naively!) tried to continue the task of organizing this list in some sort of hierarchy; there were already some nested lists for Christianity, Judaism, etc., so I started lists for Catholicism and Anglicanism, but quickly discovered the truth of RK's comment above: it's impossible! I would like to go ahead and rework this list in the fashion of the list of mathematical topics, with no sub-categories/nested-lists/hierarchy. Is this okay? Harris7 12:39, 23 Aug 2003 (UTC)
- We have a volunteer! -- IHCOYC 17:06, 23 Aug 2003 (UTC)
- Done; I decided on splitting it into 4 chunks, hope this is acceptable. I need to run a little edit macro against it this evening, adding an invisible Talk: link to every link, so the Related Changes will show recent changes to the Talk: page for every topic (assuming there is not an easier way to do this!). I'm not crazy about how it often splits link text at the end of the line; any suggestions on how to prevent this? Harris7 19:55, 23 Aug 2003 (UTC)
I favor a list of lists, in addition to the alphabetical lists of topics. This might be an economical way of preventing the topic list from getting too large. Then, if the list is named meaningfully enough, and related articles are more conveniently arranged there, the topic can be deleted from the alphabetical list. This would be especially appropriate for Christian denominations, for example. Right now, the existing lists are under the letter "L": not a particularly clear index. What do you think of arranging these lists (and additional ones), prior to the alphabetical headings, under the header "List of lists" and deleting duplicated topics? Mkmcconn 06:50, 5 Sep 2003 (UTC)
Would someone add "Apostolic_See" to the article? (There are at least two separately alphabetized sections, and I don't know where to add new stuff.) Also Breviary (if if qualifies--I have no idea what the rules are), although I didn't make that one.
[edit] technical issues
Why and how was the ability to edit individual sections of this article disabled? When the whole thing is edited, it is usually necessary (lately, anyway) to try to save it several times before getting a response other than "Sorry, we have a problem". Michael Hardy 00:56, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)
- I see that it is now possible to edit individual sections of this article again. Michael Hardy 22:46, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
[edit] The list
I just ran into this list and put a {{wikify}} tag on it since I'm not sure what it needs. The article is too large, articles usually don't link to talk pages with every entry, the layout is not standard for a list. All-in-all it is not really reader friendly. If nominated for AfD I suspect it would get a consensus to delete as being an unusable list. Bottom line, someone who knows some of the hitory here really needs to clean this up. Vegaswikian 22:11, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
- LISTS do have invisible links to talk pages for every link, in many cases. The reason is so that when you click on "related changes" you'll see those. Perhaps the most famous topics list on Wikipedia is the list of mathematics articles, which has followed that convention at least since 2002 (and maybe since 2001?). Michael Hardy 22:49, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Major reversion
I have put the list back to the way it was before this edit. Unfortunately there were probably some legitimate edits after that. I'll come back later and try to fix those.
The purpose of the invisible links to talk pages was to include talk pages when the user clicks on "related changes". If they are to be made visible, they should say "talk:this topic" rather than just "this topic" so the reader will know what they are. But if they're visible they just clutter things up. Obviously if the reader sees an article listed here and wants to comment on one of the talk pages, that's easy to do without making these links visible.
Many lists use this technique of invisible links to talk pages, including Wikipedia's most famous and most extensive of all topics lists, the list of mathematics articles, which has done this consistently at least since 2002 (and I suspect since 2001, although I haven't checked). Michael Hardy 23:06, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
