Talk:Criticism of concordats

The article's neutral point of view

This article concentrates all the criticism of the concondats without noting the possible positive aspects nor the arguments in their favour, thus compromising the article's neutral point of view of the subject. Bonifacius 17:44, 2 August 2011 (UTC)

Neutrality

Hello, and welcome. Neutrality concerns are extremely important, and it is always good to be watchful for transgressions of Wikipedia's NPOV policy. In this instance, pains have been taken to be compliant. Before tagging an article as not neutral, please be courteous and speak with page editors first, otherwise it is easy for edit wars and all kinds of easily avoidable drama to begin.

When documented arguments and commentary are strong on certain subjects, it is worth creating a content fork in order to expand Wikipedia. For example, see Israel and Criticism of Israel, or The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and Criticism of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Note that the criticism pages have no neutrality flag, and yet their content represent exclusively critical commentary and facts.

So long as our articles remain well sourced, describe scholarly and expert thought in a neutral fashion, and never present opinion as if fact, we are on good grounding.

I'll remove the neutrality flag for now, and if there are any concerns, we can talk them out and resolve them.

Thanks again, PeterBrietbart (talk) 11:33, 15 September 2011 (UTC)

I understand that this page is supposed to be solely for criticizing concordats, and that's fine. However, the vast majority of sources that this page draws from are anti-catholic, anti-religious, and 'militant-secularist'. So far as I can tell none of them come from any scholarly source. This is an encyclopedia, not a forum for people to cite news articles from completely biased sources. I fully acknowledge and accept that we have a page criticizing concordats, however, that page must be filled with facts cited from legitimate academic studies. Unless we want to put a big disclaimer at the top of the page something to the effect of 'this page is a compilation of and summary of news articles from anti-catholic, secularist, and atheistic websites (all obviously with an agenda)' we need to really start from the ground up and rebuild this page. My first course of action will be to mark this page as not neutral; then I will plan on deleting some of the major errors.

Wikipeida isn't a blog, and isn't an aggregator of news stories. It's an encyclopedia, and therefore, unless news articles are clearly prefaced and labeled as what they are, they shall not be presented as fact. It is totally absurd that people here are authoritatively talking about international law, Holy See policy, etc, and then sighting such websites as "International League of non-religious and atheists". If you're going to talk about law, site law textbooks- not news articles from clearly biased and agenda filled websites.

--Fictio-cedit-veritati (talk) 22:19, 23 September 2011 (UTC)

Hi Fictio. Your edit removed the entire lead of the article, and a number of sources. Sources are not typically deemed to be unreliable on the basis of being "anti-religious" or "anti-catholic", and indeed, when we're discussing the "criticism of an aspect of religion", many of our sources are probably going to represent criticisms of religion. I'd be happy to discuss this further, but for the time being, going as far as to (for instance) remove the entire lead is probably not helpful for the article. Do you have any better sources which discuss these issues than the ones we're currently using? If so, we could probably talk about incorporating those as well. Thanks.   — Jess· Δ♥ 23:36, 23 September 2011 (UTC)

Hello Jess, as per Wikipedia's NPOV standards, I will be putting back the neutrality header. I understand what you're saying about removing the header, perhaps I'll try reworking the wording. The issue is really that this entire article should be rewritten from credible sources. As I mentioned before in my last comment on this page, this is an encyclopedia. It is absurd to write a page- whether it be a criticism page or otherwise from a compilation of news articles from sources that are hardly known and a website that is full of historical and current errors. Furthermore, no, the best sources of criticism of Catholicism are typically considered to be academic writing by say protestants, ie, Kant. The point here is really the academic part. For example, if we were writing a criticism page on Israel, we're probably not going to place much emphasis on on neo-nazi sites. Perhaps their view will get a mention but the page isn't going to be written based on them. Concordatwatch does in fact represent criticism about concordats, but it poorly written and historically inaccurate. What better sources? Well that really isn't my responsibly, I was reading Wikipedia and noticed this poorly constructed article so I called it out. If I have time perhaps I could help rewriting it, but until I or somebody else can we really ought to get rid of this often factually inaccurate and misleading information. After all, we wouldn't write a criticism of the USA page primarily from Taliban criticisms, we'd write it from the work of qualified academics. Do you understand where I'm coming from? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Fictio-cedit-veritati (talk • contribs) 03:46, 24 September 2011 (UTC)

Hi Fictio. Yes, I can understand where you're coming from. However, I hope you can also understand that the article is written from the standpoint of the sources we do have, so until we have better ones, that's all we have to go on. If there's a problem with reliability, we can certainly discuss that (and the WP:RSN archives might be a good place to look too), but after a preliminary glance, I don't see any glaring problems there. Again, I understand the feeling that "all the sources we're using are anti-catholic", but until we have better ones to replace them with, the best we can do is represent all the prominent verifiable views we have. Does that make sense? I get that you don't have a ton of time to research this and find sources - after all, we're all volunteers here - but that's the only way we can really proceed (aside from discussing our current sources, of course). All the best,   — Jess· Δ♥ 04:51, 24 September 2011 (UTC)

Hi! I originally tag this article since, as things stand, there is a comprehensive POV problem in wikipaedia's treatment of concordats. Currently, there are two articles: Concordats that's just a list of treaties, and this one Criticism of concordats, that contains - as per its title - only criticism. If one were to take both of them together, it would seem that there is not single argument in favor of concordats and one would have to wonder why some many states and even the Church would want such instruments. The fact is that there ARE some argument in favor of concordats, both from the point of view of the Church and from the point of view of those States that have signed them and - in order to keep WP neutrality - either those arguments should be reflected or this article deleted. Bonifacius 13:21, 24 September 2011 (UTC)

Bonifacius, I completely agree with you. Concordats are presented in these two articles in an almost completely negative light. They both heavily draw from and paraphrase from condordatwatch- a website that in my opinion is biased, historically inaccurate, often misrepresents information, and writes about legal documents (concordats) without proper qualifications to read/interpret legal documents. Given all of that it is absurd that wikipeida use this website as a source. I also agree with you as to your desire for these articles to be cleaned up or deleted. Just because concordatwatch is out there doesn't mean we have to lower ourselves to using it. It would be better to have no article than an article filled with misinformation.

I find the linking to condordatwatch for the text of concordats completely inappropriate because (among other reasons) the website usually prefaces the text of concordats with it's own addition of heavily criticism of concordats. It is not in keeping with wikipedia's standards to send readers to a site to read a document and then have that documented prefaced by criticism. Therefore, I advocated the removal of all links to concordatwatch as a source of reading the text of a concordat.

Another problem I have with theses pages is treating concordats as any different from treaties. A concordat is simply that Church's term for a treaty; just like nuncio is the Church's term for ambassador. Therefore, any criticism of a concordat that is not unique to that of treaties doesn't belong here. For example, under the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, all treaties are signed by the head of state or competent official (no permission from any internal legislative body is necessary). Since concordats are treaties, they are signed under the same norms; meaning that criticizing them as 'undemocratic' is really a criticism of the all treaties, and moreover, the VCT, and doesn't belong on this page.

I look forward to reforming these two pages for a neutral understanding of concordats. --Fictio-cedit-veritati (talk) 22:19, 25 September 2011 (UTC)

If you guys want new "pro-concordant" content included, all we need are reliable secondary sources discussing that content. Do either of you have any we could use? Thanks.   — Jess· Δ♥ 06:27, 26 September 2011 (UTC)

The best I know is in Spanish: Corral Salvador, Carlos, "Derecho Internacional Concordatario" BAC (2009). There are some good articles in Italian, as well. Bonifacius 21:54, 26 September 2011 (UTC)

Ideally it would be nice to have a pro-concordat article, though first I think it is more important to clean up the ones that we currently have. Bonifacius, I'd be happy to help, but unfortunately, I don't read Spanish. I'll try to look into other sources, and also work to reform pages that we currently have on the topic. --Fictio-cedit-veritati (talk) 19:44, 6 October 2011 (UTC)

Concordat Watch

The website concordatwatch.eu hardly meets Wikipedia's standards for an unbiased source. The site's about page states: "The contributors have diverse viewpoints, but we are united in the conviction that separation of church and state is urgently needed to help ensure human rights for all." Muriel Fraser's name is at the bottom of the about page and she is a researcher at the National Secular Society. I think these facts really speak for themselves. Aside though, the website is also filled with plenty of historical inaccuracies and there is no immediate evidence of peer review. For these reasons I suggest that any statement on the Wikipedia page originating from concordatwatch be removed. --Fictio-cedit-veritati (talk) 06:41, 7 January 2012 (UTC)

Misuse of primary sources

This article appears to be, to a considerable extent, based on WP:PRIMARY sources (most frequently the concordats themselves), and makes frequent synthetic claims about them (after all "criticism" of the concordats would hardly be likely to be contained in the concordats themselves). Except where a concordat is being used to verify its own contents, it should be removed as a source. Hrafn^Talk_Stalk^(P) 07:02, 7 January 2012 (UTC)

I agree, and another issue, though perhaps appearing more on the regular concordat page, is that often times Concordatwatch is linked to for the text of a concordat. Ie, if you wanted to read a concordat it would take you there. The problem with is that not only is the website biased, but also often contains a paragraph of criticism at the top of the page before the actual text of the concordat. It hardly seems appropriate to have readers subjected to somebody's criticism of the document when it was linked to as simply the text of the document. --Fictio-cedit-veritati (talk) 21:57, 7 January 2012 (UTC)

Reliability of secondary sources

As an expansion of #Concordat Watch, I would suggest that a check be made of all the secondary sources used in this article. Many (most?) of them appear to be from small organisations, possibly self-published, and of uncertain reliability. It isn't helpful that many of them are non-English. Hrafn^Talk_Stalk^(P) 09:20, 7 January 2012 (UTC)

I agree, and have partially done that already, finding that many of them are written by secular societies, et cetera, that are obviously trying to convey a message. I really don't see a way to salvage 95 percent of this page as the vast majority of it seems to be written from inappropriate secondary sources. --Fictio-cedit-veritati (talk) 21:51, 7 January 2012 (UTC)

Fixing this page

Clearly, as is noted in much of the above conversation, this page needs to be overhauled. Having taken sometime and looked over it, and its sources, it would seem that the best thing to do is delete most of it and let people rewrite it from there. I'm suggesting this because there are hardly any reliable sources in the entire page (vide supra), and cherry picking what is good would take a long time and yield a very poorly put together page. What are other editors thoughts? --Fictio-cedit-veritati (talk) 01:17, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

A better idea would be a WP:MERGE of the best-sourced material (most probably the 'Financial privileges, tax exemption and secrecy' section) in this article into Concordat. A 'criticism of' article that is far longer than the text-based portion (i.e. excluding the large list) of the article on the subject that it is criticising, is against Wikipedia policy. Hrafn^Talk_Stalk^(P) 02:36, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

Yes, that's an idea too. After a brief read of that section it does seem to be a bit better sourced in that it isn't sourced to concordatwatch entirely. I'm not happy about the sources though; this is a fairly obscure, legalistic topic, so I don't think newspapers are really a good source. Right now though, we could merge the 'Financial privileges, tax exemption and secrecy' section, excluding the rest (thus deleting it). After the merger we could talk about reworking (if necessary) the merged section. --Fictio-cedit-veritati (talk) 03:31, 11 January 2012 (UTC)