Wikipedia:Peer review/Gender and religion/archive1: Difference between revisions

I’ve listed this article for peer review because…
I want an honest opinon. It is gonna help me improve my writing as well as catch mistakes which I did not see.
Thanks, Shizasohail (talk) 06:57, 13 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The main problem with this article is it’s a bit of a hodgepodge accumulation of miscellany, and it needs better sourcing.

This is a summary article—the scope is really broad, and so it only really needs to give a short outline, then link off to more detailed pages for the detail. For instance, let’s take the section on abortion. It gives a rather longwinded summary of the Catholic position, then a brief summary of a Hindu position (Hinduism and abortion suggests it may not be quite as simple as the summary in this article suggests), then concludes by telling me that Mormonism is more forgiving in some specific situations.

This whole section could be condensed considerably: put a {{Main}} template link to Religion and abortion, then put a short-ish summary of the key points derived from there. And you can reuse sourcing from there. The same is true for lots of other parts of the article—on the gender of deities, on homosexuality, on ordination etc. There are more detailed articles, so follow Wikipedia:Summary style to write a broad summary article.

The abortion section also contained this:

The pastoral message also has to be observed as each member of a church can interpret a message differently. The context of the church has to be considered as well, such as being in an urban or rural environment. The religious messages and how they are exposed in different cultural contexts can determine the effect it has on its listeners. Particularly women, who are more inclined to be religious, are more passionate about the idea of not getting an abortion.

What’s this supposed to mean? People interpret religious texts differently in different congregations? Okay, sure. More religious women are more passionately anti-abortion?

Is that what the source is saying? No, it turns out. The source is a political science research article about attitudes to abortion. The passage I think that’s closest aligned to the word salad in the article is: the empirical evidence to date suggests that even frequent attenders at congregations in which a pro-choice message is conveyed are more likely to oppose legal abortion than their less observant counterparts. Of course, there is likely to be a disjunction between the message articulated by the pastor and the message received by the congregation. What the source is roughly saying is that attendees at churches (in the United States) with a pro-choice message are still likelier to be less supportive of abortion than those who don’t attend church. Or, per the source, frequent church attenders tend to be indiscriminately pro-life, regardless of the position taken by their denomination on the abortion issue.

Also, note—the source doesn’t say women, it says frequent church attendees (of any gender). We’ve somehow gone from people attending a pro-choice church (in the United States) being more likely to be against abortion than the general populace to the rather different idea that women (everywhere!) are more likely to be religious and those religious women are more likely to be passionately anti-abortion. (I’ve removed that entire paragraph. The source is good, and could be helpfully used for other purposes though.)

Then there is the standard problem with a lot of religion-related articles—primary source references (to scripture) without secondary sources to show the interpretation and relevance of said scripture. And there’s a fair bit of vague generalisation – e.g. mainstream Christian tradition and traditional Judaism. It’s better to be concrete about these things where possible.

Finally, there’s a warning banner about the addition of text from a large language model – see talk page archive. That needs fixing. There’s significant chunks of the article that are waffly and obviously AI generated, starting with the lead. I’ve chopped the AI generated stuff from the lead and replaced it with a rather pedestrian opening paragraph that’s less waffly. There’s still other bits of AI text in the article which need to be checked and handled appropriately.

@Shizasohail: I hope that helps. —Tom Morris (talk)

• You could add some more about Hinduism, considering it is a major religion yet only has a single sentence of text. You could also consider mentioning Judaism as well, since you have the two other major Abrahamic religions (Christianity and Islam) already on there.
• Some scholars, such as Philo, argue that the “sexes” were developed through an accidental division of the “true self” which existed prior to being assigned with gender. Who is Philo? Are they modern or ancient? Is this their personal belief or their interpretation of Genesis?
• God also told the woman that she can only desire the man and that he shall rule over her. The cited Bible quote does not specifically say that the woman can only desire the man. In general, when something is not explicitly stated in a religious text (or even if it is), you should generally cite a source analyzing the religious text rather than the religious text itself because religious texts have all sorts of archaic language and translation weirdness that can make literal interpretations inaccurate.
• This is the earliest idea in catholic religion that says women should only be attracted and loyal to men, therefore supporting the claim that there is only a woman for a man. This is all Abrahamic religions, not just Catholicism
• However, the unitary self is either androgynous or physically male; both of which are masculine in configuration. How is androgyny masculine?
• There is no source for any of the modesty stuff

Shocksingularity (talk) 06:01, 24 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]