Talk:Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival

Science and Religion

Can find very nice article discussing Science and Religion by respected scholars at

http://www.science-islam.net

How does it look?

I think the article looks pretty messy; I really have no sense of aesthetics. --Hamsterlopithecus 08:05, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

Images?

I think that for people who watch the sessions but don't personally know many of the speakers (I knew some of them only from their writings) it would really be helpful if the article would contain some "mugshots" to improve understanding of subsequent discussions. Shinobu (talk) 17:50, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

We don't have free images of most of them, but I'll see what's on Commons. – Mike.lifeguard | ^@en.wb 21:58, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks! It also livened the article up a little. Also, lol @ Booba-Kiki. I chose "wrong" because I though Kiki sounded more cutesy and thus thought it was more appropriate for the purple round blob. I can't say if I thought at all about Booba. :-) Shinobu (talk) 23:56, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

The images look really good! Great improvement! Do you think it would be ok if we put a screenshot of the video to give an idea of how the conference looked? Or would we have to ask "The Science Network" for permission? Hamsterlopithecus (talk) 06:54, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Annual conference

This is an annual conference, so do we need an article for each one? I hardly think so. I'd love to see this revamped thusly:

• Intro
• 2006
  • notable participants
  • notable sessions
• 2007
  • notable participants
  • notable sessions
• and so on
• future of the conference
• see also and whatnot

...with an emphasis on notable - not every single session needs to be summarized (or at least not more than a single sentence!). – Mike.lifeguard | ^@en.wb 22:06, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

I think the number of participants, or at least the number of actual speakers, is sufficiently low to be able to list them all. The 2006 conference has about two dozen presentations with discussion, so if you cut away or summarize talks that weren't that interesting, you should be able to get a decent (not too much, not too little) amount of text per conference. Of course, that would leave the question which talks aren't that interesting. Shinobu (talk) 23:47, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

It's not so much about bloat (though that's a concern too), but rather notability. But yea, WP's not paper, so I won't worry about that too much. But the summaries of each talk really need to be cut down. We can't do it by how interesting they are (WP:OR) but we can do it by how prominent the speakers are. So Steven Weinberg would get decent coverage, while Richard Sloan merits a bare mention. – Mike.lifeguard | ^@en.wb 00:00, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

Maybe, but in science it matters more what is said than who says it, and I thought that Richard Sloan made a rather good point, so I still feel a bit uncomfortable with that. Looking back at the article, I note that the summary of his talk is not very representative. Perhaps merging the 2006 and 2007 articles is not such a good idea after all. Shinobu (talk) 21:36, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

Addendum: we might also try to change the formatting to condense things a bit visually. Shinobu (talk) 21:37, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

Someone has done the best thing, which I didn't think of. We now have this article, Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0 (2007 conference) and an umbrella article at Beyond Belief (symposium). This is perfect; let's keep that format for future conferences. – Mike.lifeguard | ^@en.wb 23:44, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

The new table format

I don't think this looks good. Although I understand that it wasn't good at first either, to me, this looks even worse. Hamsterlopithecus (talk) 15:20, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

I reverted the article because the table was confusing. Hamsterlopithecus (talk) 02:49, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

This article should be improved, not razed and redirected

I agree with Cirt that this article sounds too much like an official webpage of the event. Nevertheless, the event was newsworthy and the article does contain a lot of useful information about it. There seems, in fact, to be a more general problem with articles about The Science Network and its "Beyond Belief" symposia. In my opinion, our role as Wikipedians is to improve the articles, not to raze them. Turning this long and informative article into one paragraph in Beyond Belief (symposium) does not improve the quality of material we offer to our readers. betsythedevine (talk) 14:08, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Two problems: It reads like one big advertisement for the organization/event. And it does not have to be "one paragraph" at Beyond Belief (symposium) - it could be a large subsection in fact, but it would be better off merged there. Cirt (talk) 18:57, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for your help on improving this article substantially, Cirt. betsythedevine (talk) 22:35, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

You are welcome. Now that it has been improved, it is more than ready to merge into Beyond Belief (symposium), and make that a higher quality page on the various symposiums. Cirt (talk) 23:10, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

[1] = fits nicely over there. :) We can now redirect this page to that page. :) Cirt (talk) 23:14, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Requested move 3 March 2017

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: No consensus.(non-admin closure) Winged Blades ^Godric 17:19, 29 March 2017 (UTC)

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Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival → Beyond Belief (symposium) – The 2006 inaugural event doesn't seem to be notable in itself. I looked at some keynotes from the 2006 convention, but it didn't look super spectacular: Audience maybe numbering in the hundreds. Having a catch-all article for the three annual conferences would make more sense. See: The Science Network#Beyond Belief Conference Series and List of skeptical conferences. Mark Schierbecker (talk) 22:56, 3 March 2017 (UTC) Relisted. Jenks24 (talk) 12:12, 12 March 2017 (UTC)--Relisting. -- Dane ^talk 02:12, 21 March 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose - A title change, i.e. the proposed parenthetical disambiguation, would not benefit many people as "symposium" is a lesser known term to them. To address notability concerns by Mark Schierbecker, I found one source by Becky Garrison, a humourist; one source by Philip Hefner, an academic; an article from The San Diego Union-Tribune; a journal article by Wendell Berry. There may be more. George Ho (talk) 13:55, 10 March 2017 (UTC)

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The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.