Talk:Jews
Older discussions may be found at Talk:Jew/Archive 1, Talk:Jew/Archive 2 and Talk:Jew/Archive 3
Ethnicity box
That thing is a HIDEOUS EYESORE, as well as taking up a ridiculous amount of space at the top of the article. Can anything be done to make this thing less obnoxious? - David Gerard 11:56, 6 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- I agree fully, why is this "box" necessary at all??? All the information is stated clearly in the article and it actually creates the mis-impression that the small "sub groups" are more important than they are in reality, when they are basically totally irrelevant in the greater scheme of things in many ways. IZAK 12:46, 6 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- This sort of thing can be put into a table in the body of the article - David Gerard 13:03, 6 Jun 2004 (UTC)
This is standard under Wikipedia:WikiProject Ethnic Groups. This one ends up being uncommonly large, because the picture on Jews is so complicated. I would strongly suggest that it be edited down rather than removed. If people think it is, in general, a bad idea, it should probably be taken up in the relevant WikiProject. For whatever it is worth, this is about the 25th article it has been added to over the course of about three months, and to the best of my knowledge the first where anyone has objected to it. -- Jmabel 05:48, Jun 8, 2004 (UTC)
- The data is useful and relevant - the presentation is problematic in this article because it's a huge burnt-orange blob at the top of the article taking up too much width. I suggest that in this particular article it could be presented otherwise, e.g. as a section, with an HTML comment in the text explaining why this was done - David Gerard 11:07, 8 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- I think that is reasonable, since this article doesn't follow Wikipedia:WikiProject Ethnic Groups at all. By the way, it might be worth someone having a look at Wikipedia:WikiProject Ethnic Groups and Wikipedia:WikiProject Ethnic Groups Template: I suspect there would be a lot of relevant ideas for extending and improving the present article. -- Jmabel 16:46, Jun 8, 2004 (UTC)
- Jmabel:Since YOU are the creator of Wikipedia:WikiProject Ethnic Groups it would seem that you have your own "axe to grind" in your unrelenting drive to eventually squeeze this article on Jew into YOUR criteria and views on "ethnicity". I suspect that is why you ask that "someone" do it for you so that this way you would avoid taking all the flack that would ensue were you to do it on your own arbitrarily. In the meantime you nonchalantly introduce the "box" and "formulae" such as at Wikipedia:WikiProject Ethnic Groups Template: Hoping that everyone (via a few "someones") will "fall for your bait" and just do your manipulative intellectual bidding. So PLEASE cut out the efforts you are expanding ever so subtly to swing the "Jew" article YOUR way in your determination to create an absolute SCHISM (or "divorce")---for lack of better words--- between JEWS and JUDAISM, which go together. (Only for the purposes of management of information was the subject matter of Jew dealt with separately from Judaism, it was not meant as a signal to rip the two apart body, limb, and soul, as the underlying connection and essense is understood to always remain.) You cannot just reduce the Jewish people to a "Semitic" sub-group as per your example on Wikipedia:WikiProject Ethnic Groups no different to other similar groups of "13-15 million people". You would NOT be doing either the Jews or anyone else a favor were you to succeed as you would only in effect be neutering and negating the unusual uniqueness of the Jews and their totally out-of-proportion significance to the human race, world history, and and most of all religion which you do not seem to value as much as you aspire to seek out obscure "tribal" connections to the Jews who have virtually no real or meaningful connections with the Jews as both a nation or a culture. You are "defining ethnicity down" to the "lowest common denominators", when this article is MORE about ethnicity in the sense of NATIONALITY from the Greek ethnos which means NATION, and not mere vague "TRIBES" or "SECTS" to be studied by sociologists and academic statisticians alone. This is NOT an article about Jewish genetics ! --->If that is what interests you then fill that up with all the type of details you seem to find important ! For the sake of fairness to the impartial readers of Wikipedia, the issues revolving around Jew are far weightier and are of a profounder nature than you would make it appear were you to have your way in the end using YOUR definitions of "ethnicity" which do not always match with JEWISH views of "ethnicity". IZAK 06:57, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC)
I leave it to readers of the previous comment to determine who has an axe to grind and who is trying to build an NPOV encyclopedia. I did, indeed, initiate Wikipedia:WikiProject Ethnic Groups, and am probably the main person focused on it, though I am far from the only participant, as you can easily verify by looking at the relevant pages. Absolutely, the Jews are an ethnos, but one where the question of who is and is not part of that ethnos is more than typically contentious, and therefore should form a significant portion of such an article: consider your own recent argument about the Karaites. I am certainly not trying to turn this into "an article about Jewish genetics." Ethnicity and nationality are not simply matters of genetics. They are equally a matter of culture and identity. If this article is not where to take up these matters, where do you think they should be? And what exactly should be the topic of this article (as against the topic of Judaism)? And if you feel that this article should not be the one its own introduction currently says it is, then I suspect we (all) should discuss that matter on its merits. -- Jmabel 07:59, Jun 9, 2004 (UTC)
- The Jew article is basically fine, I am not criticizing it, even though it describes things with which I do not personally agree, yet for the sake of presenting things as they are, I do not attempt to tamper with most of it, provided they are truthful and fit into standard definitions of the subject. The arguments I presented about the Karaites were not "mine" I did not invent them or conjure them up. I was conveying the classical view of that movement and its adherents as it has been maintained for centuries by almost all scholarly opinions in Jewish learning. What I was objecting to was the writer's presentation of them as being more significant or influential than they are when in fact all they are is just a tiny fringe group that has long ago seen the end of its own following/s. The writer also sought to project Karaites as Jews, when in fact there have always been many sects of Karaites and some of them have insisted adamantly that they are NOT Jews. YOU say: "Ethnicity and nationality are not simply matters of genetics. They are equally a matter of culture and identity. If this article is not where to take up these matters, where do you think they should be?" shows that you do not give enough credence to the root soil from which Jews grew as a nation, which is not mere "ethnicity and culture" but almost purely from their religious roots in their faith in Judaism. Again I say, the need to talk about Jew as distincty from Judaism is not to say that from here on forwards the Jew is "divorced" from Judaism (therby creating a "SCHISM" between the two) and let the ethnic and cultural debate and definitions reign supreme. On the contrary, as this articel shows ( and I did NOT write the Reform or Conservative views at all), debating the status, DEFINITIONS, the ethnicity of Jews is largely done within the parameters of how the different religious streams, Reform Judaism, Conservative Judaism, Orthodox Judaism, and how in the internal debates in the State of Israel both a "Jew" and "Judaism" is defined, which what the article does do. What you are attempting to do is to go outside these bounds and bring in new criteria that would fly in the face of anything accepted thus far. So, the place for this? It's right here, on the "TALK" page where it belongs, as any and all changes on the Jew page are obviously taken very seriously and monitered by many people on Wiki out of a desire to create a balanced NPOV. (By the way, once you start getting into those little ethnic groups from Africa etc which have a hanful of people, you may as well start little sections about "The Jews of Moscow" or the "Jews of California" or the "Jews of Hollywood" or "Jews of Britain" etc where SIGNIFICANT numbers live/d...where will it end...?) IZAK 10:26, 9 Jun 2004 (UTC)