Template talk:list:religions/en

RFC discussion: March 2015–January 2018
Template:list:religionists/en

Template:list:religious texts/en

Maybe a good idea in principal, but these have been transformed by Pass a Method into lame POV cruft: their theory seems to be that no religion should be mentioned unless all the religions are mentioned. The problem, of course, is that there are lots and lots of religions, mythologies, pantheons, etc., and many of them are virtually unknown, so lists like this tend to be hit-and-miss, and give undue weight to trivia.

Add to that the fact that PAM has very poor judgment, and seems to be randomly adding anything they run into as a religion without really thinking through whether it actually is a religion. Some of the "religions" are being rfved at the moment, and I suspect that there are some secular philosophies and ethical systems mixed in, too. I included the religious texts, as well, even though they do seem to be all real religious texts, because I have my doubts as to how representative the list is. Chuck Entz (talk) 17:02, 1 March 2015 (UTC)
 * The majority of the entries correspond with a list of what the UK governemnt regards as religion. The UK government's statistics can't be that erroneous can they? Check out the Uk governemnt census here. 89.242.85.248 09:05, 2 March 2015 (UTC)
 * That's not the list of official UK religions, that's the list of (statistically significant) write-in entries on the census (note that all major UK religions - Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism - are absent from that list). The government doesn't regard Jedi or Heavy Metal as religions, it just noted that it received a large number of these as write-ins. The actual census question used "No religion, Christian (all denominations), Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, Any other religion (write in)" - which is not to say that those are more official than other religions in the UK, but just that those were the most statistically useful to list (for instance, paganism is roughly as common as Judaism or Sikhism in the UK, but wasn't included because it covered too many different traditions). You can read a very detailed analysis of the technical details of creating a useful but not over-comprehensive list of religions by the Office of National Statistics here, which might give some pointers for creating more useful versions of these templates. Smurrayinchester (talk) 09:36, 9 March 2015 (UTC)


 * I suggest either turning the template into a list of only the ten or so biggest religions, or deleting it and directing users to the category instead. — Ungoliant (falai) 12:29, 9 March 2015 (UTC)


 * I've trimmed them. I would support adding a link to a category for the rest. - -sche (discuss) 23:55, 23 January 2018 (UTC)


 * We really need some criteria for what is or isn't big enough to include... - -sche (discuss) 22:18, 25 February 2018 (UTC)