Talk:Alms

The definition of tzedakah on this page does not sound like it is a good thing. Sounds more like the terminator for some reason.

Christianity

The verse quoted should probably not be there, as it is not talking about almsgiving specifically. It is talking about "practicing righteousness," found in a more literal translation. Is there any verse from the Gospels that commands almsgiving? Tim Long 01:13, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

Ordering of religions?

Today I see someone put Buddhism first. I can see this being justified on at least two basis: chronology, alphabeticalization. However, honestly, I'm concerned that the motivation (or at least the perceived motivation) is POV (especially since the remaining sections were not re-ordered in terms of chronology or alphabetization, etc.). Is there a WP standard for ordering religions in articles like this? If not, what makes most sense, seems most fair, to others? Thanks for any clarity, Larry Rosenfeld (talk) 04:38, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Well, it's been nearly a year and no one's responded. So, to simplify potential reader's scanning of the TOC and article, I'm going to order the religion-specific sections alphabetically.

Other options such as ordering the sections chronologically I think would be less useful to WP readers and would not add any historical perspective since this article does not present the different religions' perspective on alms as being interdependent. (For instance, if the Christianity section identified that Christian notions of almsgiving was somehow in reaction to or an evolution of Judaic practices, then it might make more sense to order the sections chronologically.)

Practically speaking, this means swapping the section on Islam with the section on Christianity. I deeply regret if this swap is seen as somehow motivated by anything other than a desire to increase the article's readability and deal with this issue in a non-arbitrary fashion. As indicated above, I welcome alternate solutions based on superior reasoning.

With metta,

Larry Rosenfeld (talk) 18:43, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

External Links

Under "Islamic" heading the second entry "Gifting alms for the poor, how much?" links to a single irrelevant page. No past page found in The Archive. Consider deletion? 202.72.180.207 (talk) 07:47, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

The link might have been spam from the get-go. In fact, the contributions to the article Gift economy by the same user who inserted this external link here (User: Tikimoped, whose primary interest appears to be things tiki-bar-related) were immediately removed as such. Thus, I'll go ahead and delete this link momentarily. User:202.72.180.207, thanks for flagging this. If anyone believes that my resultant change is in error and/or my assessment is inappropriate please feel free to revert/correct with an explanation. Best wishes, Larry Rosenfeld (talk) 18:28, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

Recently added "Hinduism" section from "all rights reserved" material at http://santhemant.sulekha.com/

Recently a very poorly formatted addition was made under the heading of "== HINDUISM ==" (where the equal signs are part of the literal sectional title). In addition to being poorly edited (e.g, the first words are literally, "Bold text," and much of the initial text is in all capital letters), this text seems to have been cut and pasted from a blog as evidenced by text strings such as "Feb 9 2008 | Views 8 | Comments (0) Leave a Comment Tags." Based on this assessment, a Google search was done for text from this newly inserted material and it was found that this text was cut-and-pasted from http://santhemant.sulekha.com/blog/post/2008/02/give-me-only-this-o-rama-swami-samarth-ramdas.htm. At the bottom of this source page it states "© santhemant., all rights reserved. Page protected by COPYSCAPE. DO NOT COPY." This copyright appears to be antithetical to Wikipedia's GFDL-compatibility requirement and thus, if for no other reason, this text needs to be deleted (reverted).

I truly regret reverting such material since (a) this article is in serious need of a section on Hinduism, and (b) the cut-and-pasted text is compelling in its devotional earnestness. If the above text can be shown to not be in violation of WP's GFDL-compatibility requirement (and to be pertinent to the topic of "alms," e.g., vs. "devotion"), let's restore the text (undo my undo) and I'd be happy to help fix up the text for WP presentation (e.g., it appears that there's a need for a side-by-side Sanskrit-English poem translation which likely could be better represented in an HTML table). Alternately, if anyone else could add material appropriate to Hindu scriptures and practices related to Alms that too would be greatly appreciated.

Please forgive me if I error in this and even if I do not.
Larry Rosenfeld (talk) 03:49, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

Santhemant - thank you so much for the additional interesting information. Best wishes, Larry Rosenfeld (talk) 06:39, 11 February 2008 (UTC)