Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Homunculus (talk | contribs) at 05:43, 21 January 2012 (Re). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

This article has not yet been rated on Misplaced Pages's content assessment scale. It is of interest to multiple WikiProjects.

Please add the quality rating to the {{WikiProject banner shell}} template instead of this project banner. See WP:PIQA for details. Religion: Falun Gong / New religious movements Low‑importance This article is within the scope of WikiProject Religion, a project to improve Misplaced Pages's articles on Religion-related subjects. Please participate by editing the article, and help us assess and improve articles to good and 1.0 standards, or visit the wikiproject page for more details.ReligionWikipedia:WikiProject ReligionTemplate:WikiProject ReligionReligion Low This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale. This article is within the scope of Falun Gong work group, a work group which is currently considered to be inactive. This article is supported by New religious movements work group (assessed as Mid-importance).

New section?

I wander if it would be appropriate to create a section called Falun Gong and bussiness with the following entry: "Vasilios Zouponidis becomes the Business Pioneer of the year. An engagement for human rights gave birth to his idea of starting a business in telecom and it has developed to a very profitable business. The Prize was handed over by the King of Sweden in the royal castle in Stockholm. In a Swedish TV interview Vasilios told the audience about his practice of Falun Gong and the brutal violation of human rights in communist ruled China. ", since this issue seems to be quite notable. --HappyInGeneral (talk) 09:31, 30 October 2011 (UTC)

Events concerning a single individual are probably too narrow to be described at length, but if it can be shown to be part of a broader pattern or trend, then we can describe that.Homunculus (duihua) 17:28, 13 November 2011 (UTC)

Revisions

I'll alluded to this over at Misplaced Pages talk:WikiProject Religion/Falun Gong work group , but am going to articulate it in some more detail now. This page has been pretty badly neglected for a long time. I have been working to prepare an update and reorganization, but would like to make sure I haven't missed any important considerations as I do that. A few of the problems I've found on the page, which I hope this will address:

• It's poorly sourced in a number of areas
• The page organization lacks coherence; for instance, 'public relations' is listed under the heading of 'ethnographic fieldwork'.
• There is a good deal of highly relevant information that is nowhere to be found, including the history and development of Falun Gong's overseas diaspora, their congregational experiences (ie. group meditations and study sessions), organization of Falun Gong overseas, and so forth. A number of academic studies of high quality have examined these questions, so there's a lot to draw on.
• The list of ways in which Falun Gong has responded to suppression (currently named 'protest actions') is extremely limited. In fact, the current section is mostly about Vancouver, Canada. I intend to flesh this out, looking at protests and demonstrations, parades, vigils, sit-ins, legal initiatives, the use of arts and culture, the creation of media branches, research & advocacy groups, etc. In doing this, and in other parts of the page as well, I hope to describe trends in broader terms, rather than giving undue weight to a small handful of very isolated events (unless they are somehow especially illustrative of a trend, but even then, they should probably not have whole paragraphs devoted to them).
• Some of the information on the page is now outdated. In the case of the Vancouver consulate protest and the Les Presses Chinoises defamation case, for instance, the courts have reversed their previous decisions since the page was last edited. Similarly, there has been some recent news coverage addressing new legal initiatives, hacking and espionage by the PRC, and other issues that are worth including here.
• There is no section examining the international response to Falun Gong and the crackdown
• There is no discussion of Falun Gong outside North America, really. I hope that I can bring in more information, throughout the page, on Falun Gong in Europe, Australia, Southeast Asia, etc.

Are there other issues I've failed to consider? Homunculus (duihua) 14:55, 13 November 2011 (UTC)

I've made the changes described above. In preparing these changes, I cut down on the length of individual anecdotes in favor of illustrating broad trends, supplemented with succinct examples. Not perfect, but it's much more comprehensive, organized, and global in scope than before. Homunculus (duihua) 01:20, 15 January 2012 (UTC)

Er yes, but your changes, all performed in a single edit incorporating content and structural changes, are very difficult to track. From a quick reading, it seems that the article is now very heavily biased towards Falun Gong; many of the elements critical of FLG seem to have been virtually wiped out. Could you undo it and re-create your changes in a more transparent fashion? I don't want to breach my self-imposed topic ban. --Ohconfucius 03:32, 21 January 2012 (UTC)

Due to the substantial scale of changes that were necessary (see above), including very significant organizational and structural changes, I prepared the document offline over the course of several months, all the while waiting to see if there would be any response to my proposals. I took the total silence on this page (and the sorry state of the article) as license to be bold. I apologize that the changes are difficult to track, but if I were to make these changes in a series of smaller edits, I think the diffs would be even more difficult to follow. Moreover, since most of what I did was add content (page length doubled, number of citations more than doubled), implementing changes incrementally would not solve this problem.

I made an earnest attempt to be even-handed in my treatment of the material. Nearly all the references from the previous page were preserved, as was the vast majority of the content. Some content—both 'positive' and 'negative'—was condensed and summarized, and non-notable events discarded or relegated to references. Looking at the previous version, there was some material that might have been construed as critical of Falun Gong — for instance, city officials saying they didn't want Falun Gong distributing political leaflets at parades, or a lengthy anecdote about an individual in Vancouver who didn't want to print a newspaper that wrote a negative review of Shen Yun. None of those things stand up as notable in an article on such a large topic. It also occurred to me that, if we focused on individual anecdotes, it would be difficult to ensure neutrality, as anecdotes and opinions are easily cherry-picked (see suggestion above to report on community awards earned by individual practitioners). Better, then, to describe broad trends and significant events, with anecdotes used selectively to illustrate those trends. In this spirit, I also cut out or reduced a number of other things that may be construed as sympathetic to Falun Gong, such as the paragraph about an Ottawa practitioner winning a discrimination case, and a petition signed by Yale University faculty and students in support of Falun Gong. Finally, some commentary was removed when neutral, concise statements of fact were all that was necessary; for instance, we don't need a paragraph of Maria Chang's thoughts on how the socio-political climate of contemporary China may have guided the Epoch Times' public representations.

If you have some specific questions or ideas on how the page can be improved, please do share them. I had a couple more changes to make as well, which I will do now. Homunculus (duihua) 05:43, 21 January 2012 (UTC)

• All unassessed articles
• C-Class Religion articles
• Low-importance Religion articles
• C-Class New religious movements articles
• Mid-importance New religious movements articles
• New religious movements articles
• WikiProject Religion articles