Who is interested in Categorizing or creating pages for churches?

Question

Having looked at some of the subcategories in the religion category, it doesn't appear that much has been done to set it up for use for applying to individual profiles.  I'd think 1/2 or so of all people having a profile on Wikitree would have been a member or or attended a place of worship regularly.  And even for those who are atheist, knowing where a person from the past worshiped would be useful in working on their genealogy.  For older generations the records of a church are one of the only places where their vital information can be found.  Setting up a page for each church  would allow contact information, etc. to be easy to enter/find.

Answer 1

But there are so many denominations.  For example, in looking at the religious categories yesterday for religious professionals, I found Alexander Campbell, the founder of the religion I was raised in--except that the church he'd founded under the concept of Christian Unity had already subdivided into three distinct denominations by the time I was a kid. In my home town, the Christian Church (which was part of a denomination called Christian Connextion, which later became Congregationalist and is now United Church of Christ) didn't follow the path of other Christian Connextion churches. It became a Presbyterian church and then in the 1960s, the Presbyeterians united with the Methodist church--but just in my little town, not in the universe at large.  I have it fairly well sorted out for my home town, but even I haven't kept track of all the denominations since about 1920.  This would be an even more massive undertaking than the military categories.

Comments

It doesn't need to be a massive undertaking if categories are created only when needed.  We actually already have a number of categories which are duplicates.

A discussion has just started in the categorization project email list about reviewing and making necessary revisions to the religious institutions category structure.  

The place to start is with the profile that you want to categorize.  There are already instructions on how to create the category for the congregation/church/synagogue/mosque/temple which that person participated in.

Answer 2

I think there's already a way to do this:

Category: Churches

Would that not work?

Susie :-)

Comments

People belong to all kinds of religious organizations.  Christian organizations (and some Buddhist organizations now) are called "Churches", but Jews have synagogues or temples.  So we need a category that is more inclusive than "churches".  So the overall categories that include everyone are "Religious Institutions."

Answer 3

Yes, I think that the churches should have categories.  A beginning would be adding a category for the major denominations.  Then like Jack says, additional categories for other denominations can be created as they are needed.   It would NOT be a huge undertaking if handled in this way.

Cheryl

Comments

Cheryl As I have been trying to point out with my answer it would be huge and very complex. He eventually wants to add a page for each church and in ohio we have 88 counties. I just did a rough estimate of churches in the county I live in and I estimate that there could be over 100 churches in the county today I know of several that no longer exist as well so even if we did undertake this there would still be large gaps.

Answer 4

The Church I attend would be a problem. It was formed when the two denominations that had buildings just around the corner from each other were both failing. One was the United Church of Christ and the other was the Congregationalist. The end result followed parts of both but did not follow either completely. I see this category becoming a mess fast.

Comments

Well, there are always such problems in almost any area of genealogy.  But there are ways around the problems.  In your case you can create two (or three)  separate categories for the separate and combined churches and then link them in the part at the top for references.  Likewise sometimes churches change their affiliation with larger bodies and one would need to link to both of them.  And of course individuals might want to list several churches which an individual belonged to over time.

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Exactly.  Just like the United Church of Christ represents several merged denominations (Congregationalists, Evangelical and Reformed), so does my United Methodist denomination.  My great-great grandfather would be categorized under both Methodist Episcopal and Methodist Protestant Churches.

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You are making my point, Too many churches would fall into multiple categories making the whole thing very confusing. I for one would never add the categories to any profile I manage because of the confusion.

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Well, afaik nobody is required to add any category to a profile.  And I suppose you're not even required to keep a category on a profile you're a PM of, though considerations of collaboration should be kept in mind.  But we already have similar problems in dealing with Surnames, and location names, etc.  Those who are interested in them will put up with any work needed and others will just ignore them.

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Dave, This has nothing to do with collaboration but rather being too complex to be of any value. I have attended 6 churches in my lifetime so that would put 6 categories on my profile cluttering it up and at least one would have to be a subcategory of at least two higher level categories and that could cause even more problems. The categories and could get very messy and not add anything of value to the profiles that would be of any value in genealogy.

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Dale, generally, categories are added to a profile only when they are considered important to the individual being profiled.  I personally would not consider occasional church attendance something worth categorizing.  I don't know the importance to you of the six churches you attended; that is the kind of thing you or your biographer considers!  Perhaps all were worth mentioning, perhaps just one, perhaps none.  It does strike me that if someone was a lifelong member of First Baptist Church of Shreveport, and assumed various leadership roles in it during their life, that could be worth categorizing.  It really is a judgment call, not an obligation.  

The categorization question, then, is how you categorize the First Baptist Church of Shreveport.  If you simply put it under "Baptist Churches of the World", you'll have so many churches that the category is useless.  But if you subcategorize it under the local Baptist Association, and that under the regional Baptist Association, it can become too complicated or arcane for anyone to follow.  Those are the issues presented to the categorization group for discussion right now.

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Jack I attended each of the churches for a longish portion of my life.The first as a young child then we moved and changed churches. I got married and changed churches to one closer to home. I moved again so another church change and you get the idea for a pattern. Dave wants to set up a page for each church and that would be a huge undertaking, for Ohio alone I estimate about 8 to 10 thousand churches in existence and many more that no longer exist. I just do not see that any added value outweighs the problems involved.

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Dale, I think there are two basic misunderstanding about process here.  The first is the idea that all instances of a type have to be categorized.  That's true for the 50 states -- if you have a category for Maryland, you should have one for New Jersey.  It's not true for churches, which are a very optional category.  The second misunderstanding is that categories should be created in advance.  Again, that's useful for what I would call, for want of a better word, mandatory categories like the 50's states.  But not at all for optional categories.  They should only be created when they are needed.  (I create categories for specific land grants in Maryland -- it's very helpful to group together various people who have owned them, who are frequently family members.  There is no intent whatsoever to create a category for every single named piece of land in Maryland!)

I would join you in considering it a complete waste of time to create a category page for the First Baptist Church of Shreveport unless you have a profile you're going to categorize with it.  So in this conversation, I'm talking about the 6 churches you've been a member of, any or all of which you might want to categorize--or not.  I'm not at all talking about the 18,000 churches in Ohio.  Each one of those will only be categorized if someone thinks it is important to a particular profile and it will only happen when they have the time to categorize that particular church.

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Jack, Yes there is a misunderstanding. I am saying that the process will be more complicated than it is worth. Dave is saying he would like a page for each church. Even if you only try to put them on profiles that exist how are you going to find the correct church to apply to a person? I live in Chardon, Ohio, in the city alone there are at least 7 churches but wait I do not live in the city. lets say about 20 churches in that address designation. So which ones to apply? This is supposed to help find records before the government kept records so you have a person born in a general area how do you decide what church, the records have to be found first. My point is it will be so difficult to set up and provide so little value. I do know the answers for my questions about what churches I attended  but you need to find the records first for those deceased ancestors and that is when there is a problem. The very profiles this should help are the ones we do not have enough data for to even apply it.

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Well, Dave, first of all, people have already started doing it, and we have a whole bunch of church and religion categories that the Categorization Project is now looking at to see if it could stand a bit better organization.  But most importantly, Dave is not proposing anything that will consume YOUR time.  WikiTree has a huge voluntary component to it -- things happen when individuals want them to happen.  If Dave wants to create a really nice page for a specific church -- if he has more than a couple of paragraphs it should be a free space profile -- he's welcome to do that.  Days of research, nice photographs, something passersby will admire -- he can do that.  The system makes it possible.  It doesn't require anything of anyone else.  If he wants to link three profiles to that church, that's good, too.  It doesn't require anything of anyone else.

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Just an FYI to anyone reading this thread, I did not flag Dave's comment to my answer and do not understand why it was flagged. My big point is that by the time you have correct information needed to apply this category it no longer adds any value.

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Actually, Dale, I'm saying exactly what Jack is saying,  Create pages for churches you're interested in.  But first there needs to be a set of rules on how to do it.  Since i have a one place project for Monroe Township, Licking County, Ohio, I'd want to have all the churches in Monroe Township and probably those of churches nearby.  Anyway, I think I'll start a new thread on the same or a similar topic since this one is getting a bit old and I'd like to talk a bit about the advantages of church pages to go with your list of problems.

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Rules are simple.  If the church name is Liberty Christian Church, Smalltown, Licking County, Ohio, you create a category:  [[Category:  Liberty Christian Church, Smalltown, Ohio]] (without the county name).  If you have more than a two paragraph writeup about the church, you can create a free space profile to accompany it.  You can then place the Category on the profiles of people associated with Liberty Christian Church.  

Where categorization is taking a look right now is what category this church category should be nested under, because you really need to know that when you're creating it.  So probably nest it in [[Category:  Licking County, Ohio, Religious Institutions]].  If that doesn't exist, you nest it under [[Category:  Ohio Religious Institutions]], and that under United States Religious Institutions]].  That's where collaboration is good, because if you get the first one well grounded in the structure, the rest of them are easy.

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I should know this, but I'll ask anyway.  What do you do if there's no town or city nearby?  Do you use the township and if so do you include "township"?

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Yes! Township. Or any other identifying place.