Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
Now to my mind if there are no sources outside the movement we ought
to be very wary about covering the subject at all.
Being wary is always a good thing, but I doubt there's consensus for a
blanket prohibition on such topics; this is essentially the definition
of [[WP:CRUFT]], and we've all seen _that_ debate before.
Some obscure topics, especially religious ones, are very hard for anyone
to study in depth without forming an opinion for or against them, or at
least being seen as having one. Often this is compounded by an "if
you're not with us you're against us" mentality on one or both sides of
the debate. Thus, there are few if any generally accepted neutral
secondary sources, and the best a tertiary source like Wikipedia can do
is balance the arguments from both sides.
Given that the authorship of ACIM seems like a very typical example of
such a topic, I'm in fact quite positively surprised by the quality of
the article in question.
added a section to [[forgiveness]] detailing
ACIM's view of the
concept which was larger than the section devoted to Bhuddism and
about the same size as the one for Islam.
That certainly seems like a case of undue weight. If the concept is
that important to ACIM, the proper place for expanding on it is in the
ACIM article (or, indeed, in a subarticle thereof). We can even provide
a link to it from the forgiveness article, for those who are interested.
Back to the article on the court case: I'd say
it's a footnote to the
book unless it's been covered extensively in the mainstream media,
discussed in the Harvard Law Review as a ground-breaking case, cited
as precedent in other cases or whatever. The only cited source we
have in that section is from the Foundation for A Course In Miracles,
which was one of the parties to the dispute. I am minded to merge.
I've looked into this a bit, being the one who closed the first AfD. As
I wrote in my closing summary, there were several opinions in favor of
merging, but also some good arguments for keeping the articles separate.
I thus chose to close the debate as "keep", with the understanding
that the option to merge was still open if anyone chose to do that.
One argument worth considering is that apparently the authorship section
was originally deliberately split from the main ACIM article in order to
keep the main article of reasonable length. One might reasonably argue
that this gives the authorship debate undue weight, but merging it in
its entirety back into main article would give it even _more_ undue
weight. This strategy of splitting long sections on obscure subtopics
into separate articles is one that has served us well, and as long as
the sub-articles are well written and neutral, they do us little harm.
Of course, if one managed to condense the entire sub-article into one or
two paragraphs that said everything that needed to be said about the
subject, things would be different. I personally tend to take an "I
believe it when I see it" approach to such plans, not because I'd be
particularly skeptical about them, but simply because their success
depends on so many factors that it's hard to predict in advance. But
it's definitely not something I'd oppose, if someone can pull it off
without throwing away encyclopedic information in the process.
The court case does seem notable to me; it may not be a landmark case,
but it's certainly unusual. We probably should have an article on it in
some form, if only to link from [[Wikipedia:Unusual articles]].
--
Ilmari Karonen