Talk:Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival is part of WikiProject Atheism, which aims to organize, expand, clean up, and guide atheism related articles on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit this article, or visit the project page for more details.
B	This article has been rated as B-Class on the Project's quality scale. (If you rated the article please give a short summary at comments to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses.)
For more information and how you can help click Show → If you would like to participate, you can edit this article, or visit the project page for more details. Quick help: See changes to: Main talk page Article layout Links to Atheism information and Wikipedia:Research resources Writing about religion and Article development Citing sources, Verifing Sources and Original research Assume good faith and be civil Core articles Atheism article New atheism articles To Do List: edit - history - watch - purge Join WikiProject atheism and be bold Show off a userbox with {{userWPA}} or {{userWPA2}} and attract potential members Help with articles. See this month's adopt an article. Help out with the To-do lists Be consistent Use a "standard" layout for atheism related articles (see: atheism layout style, The perfect article, and Featured articles) Add Atheism navigation template on the bottom of all atheism articles; (use {{Atheism}} or see navigation template) Add Atheism info box to all atheism related talk pages (use {{Wpa}} or see info box) Add {{Category:atheism}} to the bottom of all atheism related articles, so it shows up on the list of atheism articles Maintenance / Etc Find/cite sources for all positions of an article (see citing sources, and atheism references). Try to expand stubs, however, some "new" articles may be neologisms, as this is common with positions on theories on life and may be suitable for deletion (see deletion process) Watch the list of atheism related articles and add to accordingly (see atheism articles) And always write for an encyclopedia. Article to improve for the month of November Agnosticism Create Notable atheist articles Shorten / merge into others false choice into false dilemma - discuss whether you are for or against this merge here Expand an atheism stub Your immediate attention false choice into false dilemma - discuss whether you are for or against this merge here Clarify references in Atheism, using footnotes.

	Philosophy Portal This article is within the scope of the WikiProject Philosophy, which collaborates on articles related to philosophy. To participate, you can edit this article or visit the project page for more details.
B	This article has been rated as B-Class on the quality scale.
???	This article has not yet received an importance rating on the importance scale.
Additional information: Related task forces (major fields): Philosophy of religion

Contents 1 Science and Religion 2 How does it look? 3 Images? 4 Annual conference 5 The new table format

[edit] Science and Religion

Can find very nice article discussing Science and Religion by respected scholars at

http://www.science-islam.net

[edit] How does it look?

I think the article looks pretty messy; I really have no sense of aesthetics. --Hamsterlopithecus 08:05, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Images?

I think that for people who watch the sessions but don't personally know many of the speakers (I knew some of them only from their writings) it would really be helpful if the article would contain some "mugshots" to improve understanding of subsequent discussions. Shinobu (talk) 17:50, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

We don't have free images of most of them, but I'll see what's on Commons. – Mike.lifeguard | ^@en.wb 21:58, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks! It also livened the article up a little. Also, lol @ Booba-Kiki. I chose "wrong" because I though Kiki sounded more cutesy and thus thought it was more appropriate for the purple round blob. I can't say if I thought at all about Booba. :-) Shinobu (talk) 23:56, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

The images look really good! Great improvement! Do you think it would be ok if we put a screenshot of the video to give an idea of how the conference looked? Or would we have to ask "The Science Network" for permission? Hamsterlopithecus (talk) 06:54, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Annual conference

This is an annual conference, so do we need an article for each one? I hardly think so. I'd love to see this revamped thusly:

• Intro
• 2006
  • notable participants
  • notable sessions
• 2007
  • notable participants
  • notable sessions
• and so on
• future of the conference
• see also and whatnot

...with an emphasis on notable - not every single session needs to be summarized (or at least not more than a single sentence!). – Mike.lifeguard | ^@en.wb 22:06, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

I think the number of participants, or at least the number of actual speakers, is sufficiently low to be able to list them all. The 2006 conference has about two dozen presentations with discussion, so if you cut away or summarize talks that weren't that interesting, you should be able to get a decent (not too much, not too little) amount of text per conference. Of course, that would leave the question which talks aren't that interesting. Shinobu (talk) 23:47, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

It's not so much about bloat (though that's a concern too), but rather notability. But yea, WP's not paper, so I won't worry about that too much. But the summaries of each talk really need to be cut down. We can't do it by how interesting they are (WP:OR) but we can do it by how prominent the speakers are. So Steven Weinberg would get decent coverage, while Richard Sloan merits a bare mention. – Mike.lifeguard | ^@en.wb 00:00, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

Maybe, but in science it matters more what is said than who says it, and I thought that Richard Sloan made a rather good point, so I still feel a bit uncomfortable with that. Looking back at the article, I note that the summary of his talk is not very representative. Perhaps merging the 2006 and 2007 articles is not such a good idea after all. Shinobu (talk) 21:36, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

Addendum: we might also try to change the formatting to condense things a bit visually. Shinobu (talk) 21:37, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

Someone has done the best thing, which I didn't think of. We now have this article, Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0 (2007 conference) and an umbrella article at Beyond Belief (symposium). This is perfect; let's keep that format for future conferences. – Mike.lifeguard | ^@en.wb 23:44, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] The new table format

I don't think this looks good. Although I understand that it wasn't good at first either, to me, this looks even worse. Hamsterlopithecus (talk) 15:20, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

I reverted the article because the table was confusing. Hamsterlopithecus (talk) 02:49, 3 April 2008 (UTC)