Talk:Christianity#History of Christian Spirituality

{{Edit semi-protected|Christianity|answered=yes}}

Total number of adherents of Protestantism in opening section lists 1.17 billion, when the cited source [16] shows 625 million. The main Protestantism wiki uses the 625 million number. 2600:1700:3694:8210:9150:F21D:64C4:536D (talk) 00:13, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

:{{done}} Corrected. --Nsophiay (talk) 07:24, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

This article still uses the outdated PEW estimate for global Christian population which was compiled in 2017. New reliable estimates are available such as this one from World History Encyclopedia.{{cite web|first =Rebecca |last = Denova|url=https://www.worldhistory.org/christianity/|title=Christianity |date =2 March 2022 |publisher=World History Encyclopedia|quote= Christianity is the world's largest religion, with 2.8 billion adherents.}} Yet they are constantly being reverted to the older ones by the editors here. Meanwhile articles on Islam and Hinduism no longer use the PEW data from the same timeframe and have adherent population estimates for 2024. I hereby also invite {{ping|Plakosa}} and Remsense to contribute to this discussion. Thikmi (talk) 13:31, 13 December 2024 (UTC) Thikmi (talk) 13:31, 13 December 2024 (UTC)

:Like I said in the edit summary: there's no reason to cite another encyclopedia for statistics like this. Encyclopedias are tertiary sources, and therefore not as useful to verify specific figures against—for starters, it would always be preferable to cut out the middleman and cite whoever they're citing instead. Unfortunately, if you read the article, the author does not attempt to provide anything like a complete bibliography for their article—this is often the case with encyclopedia articles written by experts, and we rightfully don't get that privilege (though I still wish they would cite their sources regardless). So, we don't have any actual idea of where the 2.8 billion figure came from, so this is not a very good source for it, even if it is accurate. Pew is a secondary source, and provides more in-depth information about their methodology, etc. If you're going to update the figures, get them from a secondary source of equivalent quality to Pew. Remsense ‥ 论 13:50, 13 December 2024 (UTC)

::Also, just so it's not left implicit: the figures are not that out of date, and the discrepancy is actually substantial, so I am rather more skeptical that we should cite this tertiary source that doesn't explain where its number came from at all. (Pew's figure for 2020 is around 2.4, so there must be some real underlying differences to bridge that gap, which again are not explained by the encyclopedia author.) So, do not over-fixate on the idea that a newer figure must be preferable here, because it simply isn't for the reasons I've described above. Remsense ‥ 论 14:06, 13 December 2024 (UTC)

:I utterly agree with @Remsense. Not only Rebecca Denova of the WHE does not cite her source, and the number which she gives could very well be a typographical error, but I also see that in the overdone list of citations that follow the number in question, none of which support it, there is even (cited twice) the WP:WRDWCD compiled by the people of the Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, which unfortunately continues to be spammed throughout Wikipedia despite being a biased source (cf. 1 and 2). Æo (talk) 15:20, 9 February 2025 (UTC)

::Addendum: I also believe, as I already hypothesised in the past, that there might be an organised activity by certain users (even with multiple accounts) to spam these sources in Wikipedia. [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Decline_of_Christianity_in_the_Western_world&diff=1122602982&oldid=1122553459 Here] you can see an IP adding a 2017 publication by Gina Zurlo (of the WRD/WCD and GCTS) to support the claim that Christianity has been growing in Europe (whilst all censuses prove otherwise), and a registered user later added the exact same source and claim to several other articles (cf. [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Religion_in_Europe&diff=1168528648&oldid=1162547452 1] and [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Christianity_in_Europe&diff=1168528846&oldid=1168416331 2]). Æo (talk) 15:50, 9 February 2025 (UTC)

:When are we going to openly acknowledge that almost all "counts" of the numbers of believers are inherently flawed and exaggerated? Parents inevitably list their children, including new born babies, as believers in the same faiths they follow. In many cultures, people say they are believers when they're not, because of social or worse pressure. In my own country the Census question on religion is optional and obviously, unlike other questions, the answers cannot be cross checked against other sources. Churches themselves exaggerate their numbers. I have no idea how anyone can claim to know anything like the true numbers of believers. HiLo48 (talk) 22:30, 9 February 2025 (UTC)

In the third paragraph between the following 2 sentences:

The inclusion of Gentiles led Christianity to slowly separate from Judaism (2nd century). Emperor Constantine I decriminalized Christianity in the Roman Empire by the Edict of Milan (313), later convening the Council of Nicaea (325) where Early Christianity was consolidated into what would become the state religion of the Roman Empire (380).

insert the following short sentence to keep chronology:

King Tiridates III adopted Christianity as state religion in Armenia (301).

Later in the article there are more details provided on this historical event. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Nerses73 (talk • contribs) 12:12, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

{{reflist-talk}}

{{dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment | course = Wikipedia:Wiki_Ed/Nebraska_Wesleyan_University/Christian_Theology_from_the_Enlightenment_to_the_Mid-Twentieth_Century_(Spring_2024) | assignments = Emahaffy | start_date = 2025-01-14 | end_date = 2025-05-09 }}

— Assignment last updated by Emahaffy (talk) 01:21, 2 February 2025 (UTC)

{{edit semi-protected|Christianity|answered=yes}}

Change 'current leader' to 'former leader' or 'most recent leader'. The Chruch is in Apostolica Sedes Vacans, so the acting soverign is the Camerlengo (Cardinal Kevin Farrell). Sorry if this is overly semantic. EllisJ123 (talk) 13:12, 25 April 2025 (UTC)

:{{done}} {{yo|EllisJ123}} Thanks for the heads-up – instead of adding the acting leader, I modified the caption for the time being. When a new pope is appointed, the image and caption can then be updated. --bonadea contributions talk 13:40, 25 April 2025 (UTC)