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Latest comment: 4 months ago19 comments3 people in discussion
Hey, I get it. There is this approach going around in the Book of Mormon obsessed world that tries to read a lot of context into the work. That's cool and interesting, but we aren't here to go out on limbs. So I removed a paragraph that is cited almost entirely to one interesting but parochial source (and the text is not properly attributed to the authors though it should have been). [1]
Predictably, it was reinserted for... less than edifying reasons, AFAIC.
I'm not too thrilled with the walled garden nature of those citations (and, let's be honest, none of the first 20 references to the book was talking about the content of this paragraph). Impact factor is pretty low from what I'm seeing. Doesn't look like it deserves this kind of emphasis. jps (talk) 18:21, 26 June 2024 (UTC)Reply
I'll add that Jan Shipps's review in The Journal of American History (September 2007) called Rough Stone Rolling's treatment of the topic a brilliant explication of the Book of Mormon, which challenges Terryl Givens' study of the Mormon scripture as the best currently in print.
Are there sources about and assessments of the topic with superior impact factors that establish your interpretations, stated on this page, as academically consensus? When I searched "Book of Mormon" AND "fanfiction", the first hit was a Reddit thread. On GoogleScholar, the hits were studies of fanfiction about conventional media written by Mormons. Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 18:36, 26 June 2024 (UTC)Reply
I mean there seems to be strong citogenesis to these ideas among a small group. Some of that is inevitable when dealing with a niche field, but it can cause weird obsessions in the literature to form that do not necessarily reflect a "general understanding". And there isn't a strong case being made here this paragraph represents a fair appraisal of what the general understanding of BoM is supposed to be. jps (talk) 19:41, 26 June 2024 (UTC)Reply
My impression is that Wikipedia by design is biased in favor of academic understandings of topics. We want to summarize a general understanding of the topic in the relevant scholarship, which isn't necessarily the same as what the hypothetical average opinion across humanity would be. Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 19:53, 26 June 2024 (UTC)Reply
Wikipedia by design is WP:NPOV which sometimes is academic understanding, but unless there is a clear exposition of what that "academic understanding" is, we are not equipped to declare what it is. In the case of literary investigations of sacred texts, Wikipedia is not supposed to adopt, uncritically, every novel argument found in the academic literature. jps (talk) 15:38, 27 June 2024 (UTC)Reply
Considering this merely one among many novel argument[s] in literature about the topic seems to disregard that it's an assessment that's been affirmed and reaffirmed in relevant scholarship for more than three decades. You use the term citogenesis—a phrase I'm more accustomed to seeing used when Wikipedia circularly cites itself via another source—but what's going on seems more like WP:USEBYOTHERS.As for understanding what an academic understanding is, guidelines indicate that academic understandings of a topic are found in academic secondary sources: works written by professional historians with university postings, and/or published by university presses and peer-reviewed journals. These are the kinds of sources to which the content is cited. Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 18:30, 27 June 2024 (UTC)Reply
What you are describing as secondary sources are actually primary sources inasmuch as they are offering novel arguments. Find a source which talks about the ubiquity or lack thereof. Then you'll have a secondary source for our purposes. jps (talk) 19:17, 27 June 2024 (UTC)Reply
You seem to be invoking an understanding of primary sources that applies to hard sciences, in which academic journals publish raw data generated by experimentation. Such articles report on and primary experimental data and so they're primary sources, so for topics in hard sciences—especially those that fall under WP:MEDRS—review essays are appropriately expected.
In humanities disciplines like history and religious studies, however, primary sources are the corpus of texts that provide data: archival collections, historical newspapers, diaries and journals, etc. Secondary sources which interpret those primary sources are published as monographs but also as journal articles, as these fields' journals don't generally publish experimental data (experimentation being not really a thing history can do—the past is past).
If you think my take on what a primary source versus a secondary source is problematic, maybe you should open a query at WP:RSN or start a WP:RfC. I am pretty sure I'm not out on a limb here. jps (talk) 02:17, 1 July 2024 (UTC)Reply
I agree that we have an overreliance on Bushman... And the walled garden in general as it were. But I think we should be looking more broadly at the sourcing, for example we probably shouldn't be using BYU Studies Quarterly in this context and I'm not sure what use Sudholt is to us either as it seems to be pretty out there in the opposite direction from the walled garden "This article reads The Book of Mormon as an attack on the incoherence of American nationalism – as, specifically, a book about the inevitability of its own irrelevance." and is unless I'm missing something more thought expiriment than historical exercise. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 18:53, 26 June 2024 (UTC)Reply
I've revised the Historical context section such that it no longer cites the BYUSQ source, though I'm struggling to see what was so at issue with it. It wasn't even written by a Latter-day Saint. Was there something unacceptable about the claim it was cited for, that the rapidly growing number of religious denominations and sects in the young nation seemed to offer too many religious choices, leaving some Americans with the impression that no legitimate path to salvation existed at all? Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 19:21, 26 June 2024 (UTC)Reply
BYU Studies Quarterly is only marginally reliable, editorially they take an apologist line (they are after all "Scholarship Aligned with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.") As for the text itself I don't think its actually an excellent summary of the souce... But thats not really my bag with it. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 19:31, 26 June 2024 (UTC)Reply
There is this approach going around in the Book of Mormon obsessed world that tries to read a lot of context into the work.: By way of clarity, OP writes "Book of Mormon obsessed world". From what I can tell, the claims to which he objects are ones cited to sources published by journals or presses in the secular academic fields of religious studies, history, and the humanities. Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 19:24, 26 June 2024 (UTC)Reply
Just as a statistic on the overeliance... From their back and forth we can see that Bushman considers Shipps to be as good or better than he is as a historian of the Mormon tradition, Shipps appears to think more or less the same of Bushman. One is the "historian for the house" and one is the outside expert so to speak (Shipps is not LDS). This suggests that in a properly weighted article we would cite Bushman and Shipps about the same amount... But we don't appear to cite Shipps once and we cite Bushman ~25 times. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 15:52, 3 July 2024 (UTC)Reply
Wikipedia's policy is to represent a point of view that is as neutral as possible. Part of this means Wikipedia avoids stating as facts claims that are extremely contested. The belief that there is a lot of strong evidence for the Book of Mormon having ancient historical origins is very contested. As an idea, it's primarily believed in by Latter-day Saints and some other denominations in the Latter Day Saint movement; in total, they represent a few million people in the world, out of many billions. More pertinently for Wikipedia, it's an idea that is not asserted by the balance of reliable sources. Wikipedia's policy on having a neutral point of view directs us to focus on what is reported and analyzed and expressed in reliable sources. Rather than try to have Wikipedia express our own personal conclusions about the world or community-specific points of view about the world (such as a specific religion's beliefs), we aim to summarize what scientists, historians, journalists, and other professional researchers say about the world.
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