Wikipedia talk:Catholic Encyclopedia topics/Archive 1

Question

It says

To create a new article, you are welcome to start by copying and pasting the text from the Catholic Encyclopedia

and

PLEASE do not simply dump text from the CE into Wikipedia.

Which seem to contradict each other. Also, how could anyone cut and paste from it if there are no direct links to the digital transcription of the original text? It implies that the linked to website is in public domain, which I am not sure it is, but then says there are no links to it? I assume it means the origional is in public domain, but the linked to online one isnt, but then why is there a mention of cutting and pasting?

Another point is that the CE no doubt is very POV (as mentioned), so as a rule of thumb we should use other sources and not cut and paste anything.

Thanks Martin (Bluemoose) 19:53, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

I reworded some of the instructions to reflect the points you made about cut and paste. However what I meant by direct link is that while the entire article/topic list is there, there was no easy way for me to provide a link to the CE website for each article. For now there is only the list and to get to the article you must browse the site to read and verify the article. If there is someone who can get the hyperlinks for the article, it would be much appreciated. Leonsimms 20:13, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

Ah I see, thanks. Martin (Bluemoose) 20:44, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

Duplicate entries

If you see duplicate entries like Bethlehem, John Barry or James Beaton please check against the CE to see to what each of the duplicates refer B in Catholic Encyclopedia. I did this to avoid potential copyright issues as I was unsure if the text alongside the article titles were in the original encyclopedia or were produced by the New Advent website.

Evaluation of progress

I have come up with a method of evaluating the percentage completion of this project. Any improvement or suggestions are well received. For pruning, I took a semi-random sample of 8 untrimmed sections of 100 and counted the number of blue links. It averaged out to ~37 blue links per 100 topics. Mulitplied out, (37 * 125) = 4625 or about 4500 blue links that need to be pruned. This number will be used to evaluate the pruned percentage until we get closer to the completed percentage and can be more precisely evaluated

The starting number for the completion percentage will be the sum of completely trimmed pages. Obviously not all pages will be trimmed at the same time but there will be an initial starting count for each page. Reflex Reaction 20:09, 19 August 2005 (UTC)

Pruning

Is it ok to prune some of the links while they are still red and unripe? Blessed (Patriarch of Jerusalem) Albert is Albert Avogadro but I think adding a redirect would be rather useless. There are probably quite a few more particularly people who were blessed. MeltBanana 01:41, 31 August 2005 (UTC)

"Blessed" is one of those titles, that I wished I had known about before I generated this list. Venerable is another. I have tried to conform to wiki naming conventions (no titles such as Sir or Saint in the title) but I wasn't able to get all of them. I think the best policy that has been worked from the other pages in the project, which basically says, if you wouldn't type it into the search box, don't create a redirect, though if you are interested, there is no harm in creating one. As far as deletion of redlinks, go right ahead if the material covered by the CE is matched by an article in wikipedia. Reflex Reaction 16:47, 31 August 2005 (UTC)

Request for help with Spanish missions in New Mexico

If any of you have time, please help expand the individual missions in the topic Spanish missions in New Mexico, many of them are listed in the Catholic Encyclopedia. Last night I created and expanded related topics, but I am not familiar with these New Mexico site, so help would be much appreciated. Thanks Joaquin Murietta 18:56, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

I will contribute where I can, but you can use the text from the Catholic Encyclopedia because it is in the public domain, just remember to add {{Catholic}} at the end of the page. --Reflex Reaction 19:12, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

Thank you, I will come back next week and try to fill them in. I was wondering if it was public domain. Much appreciated. 71.140.134.102 19:13, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

New Catholic Dictionary

Several articles (Joseph O'Dwyer for example) cite the "1910 New Catholic Dictionary," is this the same as the Catholic Encyclopedia? I presume it is not...if that is the case then should a separate tag be made? There seem to be quite a few of these articles Paul 21:36, 4 January 2006 (UTC)

You are correct, they are two completely different items. CE is in the public domain while it appears that the NCD is still under copyright protection, though someone is working on publishing it on the web. http://www.catholicforum.com/saints/indexncd.htm . I would not create another reference tag for the NCD. While it is a good source of information, it generally doesn't have long entries and updating the text and changing the NCD entries into wikipedia convention and would eliminate most of the "this entry was based on..." concerns. Just my 2 cents. --Reflex Reaction (talk)• 22:29, 4 January 2006 (UTC)

• If the 1910 New Catholic Dictionary was published in the United States in 1910 (as it seems to have been), it is in the public domain, as are all works published in the U.S. prior to 1923. See When Works Pass into the Public Domain (the creator of this chair is a law professor at the U of North Carolina. — OtherDave 13:54, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

Links / Reference usage

Hello. I've also looked at the project pages, and am trying to get an understanding on what the commonly accepted guideline for inserting links/references to another encyclopadia, is as it appears to be silent on what to do when the article exsits. (and is somewhat ambigious on what to do if the article is empty) Anyway, my expectation of the steps for projects filling in gaps from other sources references/links is:

1. Article is empty. Create it. Copy text from PD source and/or rewite it. If copied directly, flag it as needing wikfing/npov. Include link in "reference" section. Add cat section.
2. Article is stub. Add link to external link section. (to allow people to do (3) easily)
3. Article is stub and has link. Follow link, research, rewrite, move link into reference section. Add cat section.
4. Article is comprehensive. Look up other encyclo, research. Add reference (inline or ref) if any relevent additions made.

So, as far as I can see, only 1 & 2 should be automatic (ish). 3 and 4 (and rewrite in 1) are the hard parts. However, I'm don't think links should be added to already comprehensive articles without having any additions to the text, as that appears to be against item 1 of WP:EL what shouldn't be linked to.

Another point: I first noticed this when I spotted a large number of edits pointing the same web site, which was seemed unusual to me. I talked to the person in question to try and understand what was going on, but would it be useful to have a little blurb on user page/edit description when doing large scale edits, so if someone see's hundreds of edits from the same person, they won't go through as much confusion as I did?

What are other people expectations on linking practice? MartinRe 19:05, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

JASpencer thank you for contributing to the Catholic encyclopedia, especially creating the redirects. It does seem like you are following the letter and spirit of the guidelines for external links, though I would personally tend to link less, especially for broader topics like the Gospel where there may other online sources that cover more up to date information with a wider perspective than a turn of the century Catholic encyclopedia. I don't tend to link to the CE unless it is near the top in google searches or offers unique information. I would also agree with your assessment, MartinRe...adding edit summaries would have potentially prevented this problem. --Reflex Reaction (talk)• 23:40, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

Agreed on the point about stubs, although I freely admit that I tend to add a link when then the artile is short, but not necesarily a stub.

I think when the Catholic Encyclopedia is dealing with something that is particularly, err, Catholic then I tend to add a link. This may mean adding to a section of an artile. Thus in the God article I entered the article on the nature of God in that section and on the relation of God with the universe in the theology section.

I'll try to add something in the edit summary of non-stubs, but until there is some clear "do not link" guidance I am going to continue linking when I believe that there is valuable information. JASpencer 23:51, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

What originally alerted to me was the addition of three links in the article God (which isn't particularly catholic in focus), nor is it short (or a stub), and I didn't think adding floating links to the CE a good choice. Especially for articles that cross wide boundries, and are often the outcome of extended merging of different views (e.g. "God") I think adding an explicit link to a particular view not wise, and could easily be seen as pushing a pov, causing difficulities.

I would agree with adding links to a short articles (I'm not pedantic on "stub"!), but my opinion is that for more "complete" articles (which I know is a grey area) adding links for the sake of it is not a good idea. I think it better to add to the article, if possible, and then add a reference, not just add a link. The former looks like reseach, the latter looks more like pushing a view.

That's why I've tried to make my suggestion above as general as possible, they could equally be applied to the EB 1991 project, for example. I've also tried to envisage my reponse if these guidelines were followed by a pov I disagreed with, and I'd be fine with it. (I find that a good way of balancing things out, imagine if the situation was inverted, would you agree or disagree with it? If you'd disagree just because the pov has changed, chances are it isn't neutral) MartinRe 00:26, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

Blank Articles by Category

I was wondering if it would be beneficial to organise the blank articles by category as well as by letter. This would allow linking in to Wikiprojects, stub collections and categories - it would also allow an editor to specialise more easily on, say, Catholic scientists or Italian dioceses.

I'll start something up to see what people think.

JASpencer 09:31, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

Here's the starting page - Wikipedia:Catholic Encyclopedia by category. Perhaps comments should start there. JASpencer 09:47, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

It looks much better. --Siva1979^{Talk to me} 16:10, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

Template

I went to add the template to pages I had added from the Catholic Encyclopedia. Then I took it out. My articles did not, in fact, contain any text from the encyclopedia; I had written every one to distill out POV and such like. (And since I included a link to the encyclopedia, anyone could see the template is inaccurate.) Goldfritha 23:27, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

Catholic Encyclopedia

While the Catholic Encyclopedia is on the list of Public Domain sources here at wikipedia, and the article points to NewAdvent as a location of the encyclopedia, that site says:

The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume VII

Copyright © 1910 by Robert Appleton Company

Online Edition Copyright © 2003 by K. Knight

I have googled like crazy to try to find the answer to this - but does this mean I could not paste the public domain text from a page like this Mary into another work? Is the "online edition copyright" valid? Is it valid if the formatting is stripped out? Can someone just copy the entire enyclopedia from that site and post it, like has been done here and is being done here ? 217.227.99.168 08:10, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. On the other hand, I'm in the U.S., and I take an interest in intellectual-property law. Under U.S. law, any work published in the U.S. prior to 1923 is in the public domain. Any copyright that K. Knight claims cannot be on the text from the 1910 Encyclopedia, since that is not Knight's "fixed expression" of an idea. The theoretical copyright is probably in the compilation, but since the original encyclopedia presumably was in alphabetical order, Knight's most original contribution is to turn the stuff into web pages. In my opinion (I am not a lawyer) that is what IP lawyers call a very thin copyright. Further, the so-called Feist decision of the U.S. Supreme Court (1991) discarded what had been known as the sweat-of-the-brow theory -- the notion that I worked hard to put this together, so I'm entitled to a copyright.

The ideal would be to have your own copy of the 1910 work, which would mean Knight couldn't possibly complain. But although I am not a lawyer and you should not regard my opinion as legal advice I would think Knight would have a very difficult time making a case for infringement when the underlying work is already in the public domain. It's not the same as, for example, putting up a recording of Pablo Casals playing Bach's first cello suite. Bach's work (the musical notation) is in the public domain; the copyright would be in the Casals performance, and probably in the record company's compilation of Casals playing several different works.

— OtherDave 21:27, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

Please excuse my scepticism

I have just posted in the (disassociated) Talk page (Talk:Mesopotamia, Kurdistan, and Armenia of Delegation Apostolic of Mesopotamia, Kurdistan, and Armenia, the following comment on that article, which is defended on the grounds that the article is necessary "To assure full coverage on the Catholic Encyclopedia missing articles project." My comment applies not just to that article.

My poor opinion is that this article (if it deserves to be called an article) is utterly useless. Any mention of the fact of the existence of a Baghdad-based Apostolic Delegation that was at one time charged with looking after Catholics in "Mesopotamia, Kurdistan and Armenia" - and, during two distinct periods, also in "Persia" (cf. Dino Staffa: Le Delegazioni Apostoliche, pp. 133-135) - belongs either to a general article on Apostolic Delegations (nobody nowadays would say "Delegations Apostolic") or to the history part of an article on what that Apostolic Delegation has now become: the Apostolic Nunciature to Iraq.

Why should everything that was of practical interest a century ago and so was mentioned in the Catholic Encyclopedia of that time have to be included in a twenty-first century encyclopedia? The result is the inclusion here of information that is so out of date as to be useless. No, not just useless. Some of it, such as that on Canonical age is now misleading. (And no, I do not volunteer to work on that, or other, articles. I gave up after doing my share on Age of reason (canon law)). Including everything mentioned in the Catholic Encyclopedia, by just transcribing what is in that work, is, I think, a thoroughly bad idea. Lima 13:23, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

A proposal for clearing up blue links

We need some clear rules about removing blue links. I propose the following rules:

• 1. The article linked in Wikipedia must be of the same subject as in the Catholic Encyclopedia
• 2. Either:

a) Most of the relevant information from the Catholic Encyclopedia is included in the Wikipedia article, or

b) There is a link to the Catholic Encyclopedia article

This would apply to stubs as well as full articles (we could try to get a CE stub category going).

This would mean that we don't have articles hanging around saying "needs expansion".

JASpencer 18:25, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

No luck on the CE stub category, but I've set up a template {{Catholic-expand}} and a category, Category:Articles that could be expanded from the Catholic Encyclopedia for these articles. JASpencer 09:40, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

OK this is what I propose as exit criteria. I'll start applying this soon unless people have any comments:

If you wish to remove an article from this project please make sure that it meets one of the following two criteria:

A. There is a Wikipedia article that (1) addresses the same subject, (2) has all the usable text from the Catholic Encyclopedia article and (3) has the template {{Catholic}} within the article.
or
B. There is a Wikipedia article that (1) addresses the same subject, (2) has a link to the Catholic Encyclopedia article and (3) has the template {{Catholic-expand}} within the article.

For examples of the sort of article that would fall under criterion B look at the sort of articles that are listed under "Expandable Article" on the various list pages.

JASpencer 15:28, 31 December 2006 (UTC)

A bot (?) some time back went through and changed most or all References to the Catholic Encyclopedia to read  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help) In practice, many of the articles once cut and pasted from Catholic Encyclopedia have grown and developed since then, and no longer accurately represent the Catholic Encyclopedia article on which they were once based. An article templated  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help) scarcely needs an additional {{Catholic-expand}} These things are best left to editors who are actually working with the text of articles. It is always useful to the Wikipedia reader to have the References linked, wherever there is on-line text available, as in these cases: then the reader may compare for him/herself. --Wetman 10:10, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

This is not a straight replacement of the existing {{Catholic}} template, which is still going strong. It was taken from comments on the Catholic Encyclopedia page which in the case of the Feast of Fools said "needs expansion". This was a reason for not deleting the subject from the missing articles page. My argument is that this is a misapplication and that changing the category from missing to expand will mean that the genuinely missing articles can be concentrated upon.

On the case of the Feast of Fools, if you believe that all useful information has been taken from the CE page then replace the {{Catholic-expand}} template with {{Catholic}}. If there is useful information to be got then the article is rightfully there.

JASpencer 10:26, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

I agree with Wetman, above, plus in the case of the article on my watchlist that received this tag, Marcantonio Raimondi, I am puzzled as to why the tag was given. As far as I can see the article has never had any CE material, & it already has a 1911 tag (there also used to be Marcantonio, now merged). If the CE reference is to the free online stuff, it is essentially untrue; on a quick comparison the WP is fuller and better than the CE already, which frankly is not a source I would have considered looking at to expand it. I think this is likely to be the case in the great majority of artists. You don't explain above exactly what you are trying to, but it seems to me you are unlikely to be achieving it with these tags. What is the application of this text?:

If you wish to remove an article from this project please make sure that it meets one of the following two criteria: ....

It seems to operate on the assumption that all articles should have the CE text forced into them - I would much rather see it replaced by better sources in the case of artists. Johnbod 10:34, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

OK, I've not explained the idea well enough. The idea of the Missing Encyclopedia articles project is to make Wikipedia the most comprehensive encyclopedia by ensuring that Wikipedia covers every article in a number of other encyclopedias including the Catholic Encyclopedia - not necesarily with an article. However in the Catholic Encyclopedia pages there were a number of articles where there were corresponding articles but there were comments against them such as "needs expansion" - that is that they should not be regarded as completed before havoing most of the information from the Catholic Encyclopedia incorporated. I don't think that this is appropriate.

The idea is to bring in some objective exit criteria so that any editor can say when an article can be released from the project. It should also create a concensus here. So any comments that you have, and alternate suggestions would be welcome.

On the {{Catholic-expand}} and {{Catholic-link}} templates, these have been created to aid the exit criteria. Most of the comments in the project pages about articles needing extra content may be inappropriate to the Missing Encyclopedia articles project but they are fair comments, nonetheless so this is a way of tagging an article to say that although the CE topic is covered in Wikipedia there is still more information that can be added.

JASpencer 12:07, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

??? This doesn't seem to address any of my points. I think I will just zap the tag, which is clearly not helpful. Johnbod 14:23, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

As far as I can see your points are on a tiny minority of the articles. Do you understand the problem that this is trying to address? JASpencer 15:13, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

Not really, & please don't have a third go at explaining it (for my benefit anyway). They may or may not be "a tiny majority" of the articles, but I note that editors of the sort of articles I edit form a massive majority (100%) of those complaining about this tag on your talk page. You should take these complaints seriously. Johnbod 02:10, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

The talk page is a location that is inherently likely to be be biased. Especially since I note some of the objections on the talk page are not looking to zap the template. Goldfritha 02:25, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

TfD nomination of Template:Catholic-expand

Template:Catholic-expand has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for Deletion page. Thank you. --Stbalbach 23:12, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

Deleting Expandable articles (See Main Talk Page)

I've just deleted all the expandable articles under "A". These are articles which although they may still have some room to include information from the Catholic Encyclopedia they (1) have the same subject in both Wikipedia and the Catholic Encyclopedia, (2) have a link to the Catholic Encyclopedia on the main page and (3) have a link to Category:Articles that could be expanded from the Catholic Encyclopedia on the talk page. If there are no objections I'll start going through the other letters in two or three days taking out the expandable articles there. JASpencer 20:02, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

Proposed Policy Redux

Here is another stab at bringing in some clear rules about removing blue links:

1. The article linked in Wikipedia must be of the same subject as in the Catholic Encyclopedia and 2. A link to the Catholic Encyclopedia is either in the main page or the discussion page 3. If the article is still missing relevant information from the Catholic Encyclopedia then Category:Articles that could be expanded from the Catholic Encyclopedia is added to the Talk Page.

This would apply to stubs as well as full articles.

Any objections?

JASpencer 21:05, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

Somewhat peripheral question: What would you think of renaming Category:Articles that could be expanded from the Catholic Encyclopedia to Category:Subjects also covered in the Catholic Encyclopedia? That way it's a neutral descriptor and there'd be no more arguments about whether or not a particular article really can be expanded from the CE or not? — coelacan talk — 02:12, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

Yes, I initially object. But maybe I am wrong. It's not clear what the purpose of this Category is. What is the purpose of the Category? -- Stbalbach 03:59, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

Sorry for the late reply. I've been sporadically editing and so not paying too much attention to my watchlist.

(1) The point of this category is to allow for subjects that Wikipedia ignores to be entered without the text dumps that tend to happen when external articles are added. This is a decent half way house that means that useful information can be added in at a later stage (for an example see here). I think it is a grave mistake to dismiss it as a source of "100 year old Catholic polemics".

(2) I do not mind renaming if it makes it more palatable, but can it be somewhat less general than "Subjects also covered in the Catholic Encyclopedia"?

JASpencer 22:59, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

What about "Articles with corresponding titles in the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia" .. it's the "could be expanded" part that is the problem. -- Stbalbach 02:15, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

Why is there such a problem with a suggestion of where to get content? The original objection seemed to be that the Catholic Encyclopedia may have contained something of value on individual articles but having such a a prominent template (especially on the main article) was giving it an official stamp of approval. Now there's no way that a category on the bottom of a talk page can be said to be doing this. So is there now an objection to any article being noted as a suitable candidate for expansion from this encyclopedia? The goalposts in this debate seem to be constantly moving.

These articles are individually chosen as articles that are missing out facts that are in the corresponding Catholic Encyclopedia. This is not a particularly good solution to the lack of Wikipedia content, but is far better than any proposed alternatives.

JASpencer 09:27, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

It is apparent from your comments that your purpose for this category is to encourage users to use the Catholic Encyclopedia in expanding articles. This goes against the spirit of the consensus of the recent TfD deletions which clearly said that should not be done for any work, CE, EB, etc... If this is incorrect please say so, otherwise I see no reason not to bring the Category up for a deletion vote. Your other option is to agree to a rename of the category to remove the objectionable ""could be expanded". -- Stbalbach 16:34, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

Some of the problems are well shown by your Jan 20 edits to Agnolo di Cosimo (better known as Bronzino) and his talk page. You added a fact & refed to the CE - fine, but this fact comes from Vasari, who is now all directly on-line. You added to the talk page that the CE has a list of selected works, which it does, but of the four works it lists as being in the National Gallery, London, only one is still attributed to Bronzino - see my comment there. Much more accurate on-line lists exist for nearly all artists at the Web Gallery or Artcyclopedia sites. As with most Renaissance art articles, this one is based on the 1911 EB, and still has too much from there (though rather less as from today). Bronzino is a good example of how, apart from attributions, taste has changed considerably since the CE and EB were written; many of their aesthetic judgements can no longer be sustained (the EB is admittedly worse here). For art articles, and I suspect many general history ones, the CE is just not a good choice for expansion from on-line sources. Johnbod 12:49, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

There seems to be a fondness for arguing from the particular to the general. There are a large number of theological concepts, nineteenth century personalities and saints which have simple stub articles but have a far greater representation within CE (the same would go for other historical sources). To argue from the particular to the general could justify any bad decision. JASpencer 22:42, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

It's just that every time one of your CE interventions appears on a page on my watchlist it is actually unhelpful for that particular article - which is also the case for many others who now take an interest in this matter. If you had restricted yourself to the categories you mention you probably would not have stirred up the hornets nest you did. Having said that I did cruise the CE project list & looked at some articles (I remember Downside Abbey and Cope) where one one might well expect the CE to have been a useful source for expansion, but on examination it turned out not to be. I make no apology for arguing from the particular to the general - the devil is in the detail. Johnbod 01:06, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

What Johnbod said. This is the heart of the problem: the 1913 CE just isn't a factually reliable source any more. I've actually improved the accuracy of articles by slashing obsolete information derived from the CE. Creating a template or a category to encourage editors to expand articles from the CE which can be slapped onto hundreds of articles is not a good idea. If an expert is absolutely sure that the CE contains worthwhile material which can be used to expand an article, then they can add it themselves without prompting. --Folantin 13:15, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

What Folantin said: the 1913 CE is just not a reliable source. We should not be encouraging people to use it. Any category or template that encourages people to use that dubious source is a bad idea. Moreschi ^Deletion! 13:28, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

The CE is a source like any other, in some cases such as Catholic theology and saints it clearly meets WP:RS. Blanket statements such as "the 1913 CE just isn't a factually reliable source any more" are simply agit-prop. JASpencer 22:42, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

That is not "agit-prop", it's a fact. As the example from Johnbod shows, the CE contains misleading information and you yourself were misled by it. This incident also confirms what I already suspected when you slapped a CE expansion template on hundreds of articles on all kinds of subjects, namely that you are not qualified to say whether the CE could be "usefully used" to expand Wikipedia. Also per Johnbod above, the same strictures almost certainly apply to "theological concepts, nineteenth century personalities and saints". It's not as if there hasn't been any further research into these areas since 1913. The online CE is not some magical Fountain of All Human Knowledge that will conveniently save us a trip down the library. It's a seriously flawed and obsolete source and we should not be recommending its use if our aim is to improve Wikipedia.--Folantin 08:19, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

If we can wade past the hot words for a minute - is it a bad idea for a two line stub to have a pointer to a source from which it can be expanded? JASpencer 21:18, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

It's an extremely bad idea if the pointer is to an unreliable source. Expansion does not automatically mean improvement. It's better to have a two-line but accurate stub than a fat article full of errors. --Folantin 10:43, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

Is this the case for stubs on Catholic theology and Catholic practice? JASpencer 20:51, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

Personally, I would not be concerned about templating or categorizing those. Johnbod 22:04, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

Is it perhaps a better idea to work out where the Catholic Encyclopedia can be used as a reliable source (talking about Catholic theology) and where it shouldn't be (talking about otherwise well documented painters)? I suspect that with the deletion votes we are going to move away from reaching some concensus. JASpencer 12:00, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

I think this would be better; although even in these areas it needs to be used with caution - 100-odd years is a long time, even in the Catrholic Church. Johnbod 14:57, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

Agreed, caution would be good here. I'm a firm believer that most of these types of issues can be codified. JASpencer 16:27, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

---

Furthermore, Wikipedia does not necessarily need more content: we need better content cited to reliable sources. Moreschi ^Deletion! 13:30, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

I'm going to be away from Wikipedia for two or three days in case anyone wonders why I'm not replying. JASpencer - Back now, but will be slow in answering. JASpencer 12:00, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

I note with some disapointment that the article has been listed for deletion. It did seem that some decent progress was being made here (for once) and common ground was, if not being reached, at least being thought of as a possibility. The category is listed here for deletion and has become the usual headbutting contest that these deletion votes are these days. JASpencer 12:00, 10 February 2007 (UTC)