How these pages were made

What these pages are for

The aim is for a member to recognize their tradition and for a newcomer to understand it without being asked to accept its beliefs. Accuracy and respect are both required: neither agreement with a community nor criticism of it substitutes for evidence.

Profiles distinguish a community's own teachings, variations in practice, scholarly interpretation and disagreement. They do not decide which faith is true or treat one tradition as the standard by which others are judged. Judaism is presented as a living tradition in its own right; Catholicism is situated within Christianity.

The standards guiding these pages

These are editorial standards, not a certification that every sentence has completed independent review. Source checking is ongoing, and the review status below records what remains unfinished.

Corroborate dates

We aim to check dated claims against independent references and to identify disagreements rather than silently choosing between them. A citation alone does not establish that two independent sources confirm every detail.

Use a tradition's own documents for its beliefs

Catechisms, confessions and official statements are preferred for explaining a community's teaching. The current pages also use secondary reference works; further review is needed where these carry the account without a direct doctrinal source.

Explain population figures

Figures should name the source, date and measure. Baptized members, active participants, survey identities and membership of a federation are not interchangeable. Estimates are not independent censuses, and differently defined totals should not be added together.

Bodies are named as they name themselves

Including where a name is contested, and including where the name a tradition uses for itself is not the one outsiders use.

Scripture is quoted exactly

Verse cards are checked against the site's named edition and link to their chapters. Free editions offered here are reading options, not necessarily the editions authorized or most commonly used by a tradition.

Plain language first

Every section opens with a paragraph a person outside the tradition can follow without help. Technical vocabulary appears afterwards, and anything specialised is defined in the page's own glossary.

Words we do not use

Cult, sect, heretical, strict, liberal, extreme, fringe, and the reporting verbs that quietly signal doubt, such as claims, insists and admits. These do work on a reader that the evidence has not done. A generator check rejects any page that contains them outside a proper name.

Dating conventions follow the reader

Christian pages use BC and plain years. Jewish pages use BCE and CE. Each page says at the bottom which convention it follows.

How difficult history is handled

Documented harm, exclusion and disputes belong in a profile when they help explain its history, institutions or practices. They are not removed to protect a reputation, and they are not included merely to make an unfamiliar community seem troubling.

Use the same relevance test

Consider the connection to the subject, the strength of the evidence and the space the issue needs for explanation. A community's size or familiarity should not determine how favorably it is described.

Be specific about responsibility

Distinguish an institution's decisions, individual actions and members' experiences. Do not assign collective blame to all adherents or assume that one experience represents everyone.

Attribute accounts and disagreements

Identify official statements, independent research, testimony and criticism. A community's own response is relevant, but official acknowledgment is not a prerequisite for reporting well-documented harm.

Provide proportionate context

Explain the historical setting and relevant differences within the tradition without excusing harm. Avoid sensational detail, unsupported comparisons or an obligatory list of faults for every community.

These are introductory profiles, not complete institutional histories. Applying these standards remains part of the ongoing review; no profile should be read as a claim that all relevant experiences or controversies have been covered.

Who has checked these pages, and who has not

Every page is meant to be read by two people before it can be called finished: a member of the tradition it describes, who is asked whether they recognize their community in it, and an outside scholar, who is asked whether it is accurate. Each page carries a written brief for those readers, naming the specific things we are least sure of and the judgement calls we made.

As things stand, 54 of the 54 pages are awaiting both readers. The status is printed on every page, in the Cite block at the foot. Nothing here has been through the review it was designed for, and a reader should weigh it accordingly. A member of any of these traditions who would read its page is welcome to: what is asked, and what the reader line looks like.

Two pages carry an additional note about their sourcing, printed with their source list: Messianic Judaism and Plymouth Brethren. Those notes say plainly what we could not verify and why.

What this set does not do

It does not rank traditions, assess whether any of them is true, or describe any body as a departure from any other. The tree these pages hang from records what grew out of what, which is a historical statement and not a verdict.

It does not attempt completeness. There are far more Christian and Jewish bodies in the world than 54, and the ones here were chosen because they are on the tree, not because they are the most important.

It is not journalism about current events. Where a body is in the middle of a public argument or a legal case, these pages generally say nothing about it, because a page written to last is a poor place to report something that will read differently in a year.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, please send a note through the contact page, and say which page and which sentence. A correction that checks out against two sources is made within a week and recorded in that page's change history, so the record shows what was changed and when.

Corrections from members of the tradition being described are especially welcome, including corrections of emphasis and tone rather than fact. A page can be accurate in every particular and still give a false impression of what it is like to belong to a religious community, and that is the kind of error we are least able to catch ourselves.

The set in numbers

54 pages, 101,088 words of prose, and 1,104 sources, an average of 20.4 per page. Each page carries its own publication and revision dates, its own source list with the date each source was read, and its own change history.

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