Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Local Church controversy

Local Church controversy

Important disclaimer: This AfD isn't intended to imply, that no criticism of Lord's recovery should be in Wikipedia.

This is obviously a POV-fork. This seems to be the lamentable stale-mate found in many of articles about so called sects: The main articles Lord's recovery, Witness Lee, Recovery Version of the Bible are in gloomy colors, not even mentioning the critical POV. The POV-fork is only critcism, and needs better sourcing. NPOV policy strongly discourages separate pro and con articles.

Pjacobi 15:15, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

Delete cannot be verified MAZO 15:27, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

• Comment appears to be just a POV fork but support a merge with Local churches--MONGO 16:11, 8 January 2006 (UTC)
• Delete as apparent POV fork. Merge the content if appropriate, I guess, but I am hesitant to do anythign but kill forks. I should WP:AGF I know... Just zis  Guy, you know? ^[T]/_[C] AfD? 22:07, 8 January 2006 (UTC)
• Delete as unverifiable POV fork. Stifle 02:20, 9 January 2006 (UTC)
• Merge into article local churches, article contains quite some information which can be verified (and some is referenced already). Alternatively keep and add a summary in the Local churches article, per Wikipedia:POV fork#Articles and subarticles There is also the point that this article contains quite some edit history since April 2004, which should not be deleted. Of course, the content should be cleaned up thoroughly regarding NPOV and sourcing, but that's IMO no reason for deletion.

I think that the controversy article is worth keeping as a subset of the main article, the Lord's Recovery, as there is information included in it that is not found in the main article. It might get pretty cumbersome to try to integrate it into the main article so keeping it separate is useful. However, there may be a few places where a NPOV approach is needed to clean it up, although I thought most sections did aim for a NPOV.

  (colinlavergne)

For my two cents, please note that the Local_Church article has had a long history of being blanked, vandalized, and contested in attempts to - in the words of sysop DJ Clayworth - canonize the movement. The forked article, Local Church controversy, was originally created by ongoing efforts to present the article on the Local_Church in the most positive possible light while only grudgingly admitting that concerns existed by people outside the movement - the same sorts of concerns that have arisen with articles on Scientology or the Jehovah's Witnesses for instance.

Personally, I feel that this fork was created under false pretenses and against the spirit of Wikipedia, and didn't want to put too much effort into editing a page that I had hoped would simply be deleted. If this article is to be deleted, I wouldn't mind taking the effort to clean up the mess in the controversy article so that it can be folded into another article that meets the standards desired by the Wikipedia community.

I propose that the existing article be significantly revised and folded back into the article on the Local_Church as a section of the article. I also propose that this discussion be posted in the Talk:Local_Church article, with a notice that this section was intentionally folded back into the original article and should remain there rather than being forked again into a new article. TheLocalChurch 21:26, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

As asked by Pjakobi, here some critical sources on the local church which I consider as reliable (though, of course, not neutral) - not complete, I'm in vacation away from my library. --Irmgard 22:58, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

Johannes Aagaard, Neil Duddy and The Peculiar Teachings of The Local Church Aagaard is Professor for NRMs in Aarhus.

Local Church Fights for Evangelical ID Card Not neutral, but tells clearly who says what

ApologeticsIndex: The Local Church While Hein sure is not neutral, he presents lots of sources, usually on both sides.

Bautz on Watchman Nee German, neutral, reliable