Talk:Radical Group declares Tsunami punishment from God

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Doing so automatically signs your name and time of posting... like this: -- Davodd | Talk 02:28, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Coments on this article
From (1) and (2) I think it is a waste of time working in this article. -- Carlosar 01:39, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
 * 1) Is this article worth? There are people around who think the tsunami was some kind of alien atack, others say it is the end of the world, others that it was an special weapon developed by some country or organization, others say it is part of a nazi plan, etc. Should we publish all these kind of news? There are a lot of better things we could write about than write about conspiracy theories from minor groups. Unless this group is a big one or has some kind of importance, this article is worthless.
 * 2) There is another thing too. You are using this article to be against free speech and religion freedom(although maybe that was not your intention). The article say (although not very clearly) that every religion hate and are a dangerous threat to homossexuals. This is far from true. Also you say the free speech is a dangerous thing. So, at least this article is a difficult one.

Personally I don't think this article says anything negative about religion, but instead discusses the negative opinions of this specific church. Searching for this church on Google I found thousands of websites discussing it, and dozens of news articles regarding their influence and protests. They seem to have some influence within some or many communities in Canada and the southern United States, but I think this influence is not large enough to justify an article about it on a site intended for the global community. Perhaps later on sections could be formed discussing news items related to special-interest groups, but for now there does not seem to be a place for this article.

Further, I think that the issue of free speech here is actually a large one. Free speech is considered very important, but there is a point where it crosses into a grey area and moves from personal, heart-felt opinion to hatespeech. The problem with trying to discuss free speech then is, where is the line between free speech and hate, and who is it that can decide where that line is? As such, I think that this article itself is an example of free speech that can, in some views, cross over into anti-religious statements.

I feel that this article has no place on this site in the website's current state, but I do not feel that it should be deleted.

As an addition, I apologize for the dreadful formatting of my statement above; but do read it, if you can live with scrolling.

Well.... I don't know if it's _news_ really, but it did draw my eye and it's interesting in a twisted sort of way. I certainly wouldn't want to see very many articles like this on wikinews, but given the amount of tsunami news we carry it does seem to round things out. This sort of falls into the category of 'man bites dog' - sure, 'dog bites man' is more common, but it happens all the time. We're seeing articles saddened about the Tsunami aplenty, this one is unusual for taking the opposite stance. BryceHarrington 07:19, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I was appaled to find that an anonymous user had included the following in the article:  Wikinews shouldn´t be misused for spreading thoughts of religios extremists, ok, maybe the only good place for things like this would be in an article about psychosis or other mental diseases. Clearly, this shows disrespect for the so-called "extremists," and disrespect for any group (no matter how badly we may thnik of them--and, admittedly, I think these people are pretty bad) is absolutely not permissable in respectable journalism.

Hate Speech
Allowing hateful speech (or hate speech) is not a loophole in the First Amendment; it is one of the things the First Amendment specifically protects. The Amendment states, in part, "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech." That means that hate speech is protected speech, whether or not you agree that it should be the case.

The article should be changed to not imply that there is something wrong with the Amendment that someone is exploiting.

Moved to Article workspace
I have moved the article from the Main Page to the Article workspace because I think we should discuss this article at least for two days (or maybe a little more). This is not a serious problem to the article because if it gets ready and everybody agree, it will be back to the Main Page again. In my opinion we cannot publish this article in a hurry and even it is not necessary to do that. This news in particular will not get old if we publish it after one week or even one month. -- Carlosar 00:38, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Is this article worth? Ok If you say so.
I am trying to understand this article and deciding if there is a place for it in Wikinews. First I would like to ask if there are people who can confirm the story to show up. There are a lot of strange guys saying strange things in strange webpages. There are a lot of information around intenet but also there are a lot of mess. I think the questions we can make about this article are:
 * Is this news or just internet mess(example: troll thing)?
 * Is the article correctly written and NPOV?

As I said before I think this article is difficult. It demands a little research.

The 'man bites dog' was funny and I think a phew articles like this are not a trouble and maybe they are welcome. I am not sure if I can say the same about the article 'Radical Group declares Tsunami punishment from God'. It seems sensacionalist at least, troll thing. Maybe I am wrong, you can remember me the episode of sarin gas in Japan, or the coletive suicide which once happened in South America. But is this article in particular real?

In my opinion this article is polemic and that is why I ask you to give your opinions here. --Carlosar 01:02, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Maybe the article is worth at some extent. If there are people who can support the article and if the article gets correctly and well written it can be published. -- Carlosar 01:43, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)

This article is factual, unbiased, and relevant
A Google search of this man reveals that, in the news articles, anti-WBC webpages, and WBC sites that he does exist, his church exists, they really do protest, and they are relevant. One of my friends heads a Gay Righs group and has picketed this man before. Students in my school have done a presentation about this man before. In fact, yesterday, when I first read this article, I visited the sites, and their links were valid and functioning. Today, I found that that was not the case. Visiting GodHatesFags.com, I found a link on the top right-hand corner connecting you to GodHatesSweden, which was still working. I propose that, perhaps, heavy traffic by wikinews visitors to that site may have caused the sites to crash or shut down by exeeding their bandwidth. I feel that this article contains a NPOV and factual, relevant information that affects Gay Rights activists and Tsunami survivors of Swedish origin and that its place should be maintained. Kidduffah 04:58, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)
 * Since you approve the article claims with good explanation I think it is ok. Now I think we should decide if the article can be published as it is or it needs some corrections. -- [User:Carlosar|Carlosar]] 15:31, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Carlosar 15:45, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)--Now I would like to point out the following questions:
 * The article should be changed to not imply that there is something wrong with the Amendment that someone is exploiting.
 * Clearly, this shows disrespect for the so-called "extremists," and disrespect for any group (no matter how badly we may thnik of them--and, admittedly, I think these people are pretty bad) is absolutely not permissable in respectable journalism.
 * It seems there are some bad language in the article. Do you think it is ok?
 * They seem to have some influence within some or many communities in Canada and the southern United States, but I think this influence is not large enough to justify an article about it on a site intended for the global community.
 * Since the article is true and relevant for some community, I think we should publishing it. Unless these communities are very small and recent. Maybe we should say in the article something about the zone of influence of the news(unless you think the article already has done that)?

Let's publish it?
In my opinion we should wait one or two days more and if nobody say anything agaist the article or begin making changes I think the article should be published as it is. I have nothing against the article since other people convinced me that the article is not a troll thing and that the group has some importance, although small and regional. -- Carlosar 15:56, 4 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Anonymous Revisions show lack of responsibility
To add to Carlosar's comment that someone had added a derogatory comment regarding extremists, I want to point out that I found someone had added the line "PISSSSS!!!" after one describing Phelps's interpretation of homosexuals as 'fags' burning like faggots of wood and fueling God's wrath. I wanted to comment that additions like these show that proper control of wikinews revisions is not being maintained and childish personal additions are being made at the expense of credibility. Perhaps something can be done to improve this state for the sake of all articles and Wikinews's credibility by making it impossible for anonymous people who are not logged in to make updates.


 * Vandalism happens, doubly so on wikis. It is a fact of life and is something that the other Wikimedia projects have generally dealt with by not feeding the trolls and simply reverting the vandalism. If one restricts editing to logged-in users, the trolls will create accounts instead and be further drawn into a game that none of us really want to play with them.
 * The proper way to deal with trolls, vandals is to revert them. See Wikipedia:Vandalism for more info. -- IlyaHaykinson 02:02, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Copyedit effort
I've taken a step to remove some content from the article that seemed unnecessary in reporting the story. Specifically, I removed part of the long quote (half of that seemed enough to show the point that Phelps was making), removed a paragraph dealing with Phelps' comments about the death of a teenager (unrelated to the Tsunami story, and this story already mentioned that the church is an anti-gay activist), removed links in first paragraph to various web sites (wikinews is not a link repository &mdash; if necessary we can add a link to References or External links), removed mention of First Amendment Hosting (no obvious relation to the story). -- IlyaHaykinson 04:39, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)
 * I have added some links to Wikipedia(take a look and verify if it is good) and I have put a See Also section. -- Carlosar
 * The article is good to me. -- Carlosar 02:31, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Article is back at the Main Page
Since this article has been removed from the Main Page for discussion and revision, which I believe it is finished, now I have put it back at the Main Page again. -- Carlosar 11:25, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)