Talk:Archaeology and the Book of Mormon/Archive 9
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"Several hundred years"
The intro, on C-mas day 12/15/19, refers to B of M civilization as being over several hundred years. This is an understatement; it's incorrect. Isn't "several" a synonym for "a few?" More than 2 and less than 10? B of M speaks of peoples ranging from about 2000 yrs BC to "several hundred" years after Christ 4-500. Why don't we delete "several hundred" and put in "at least 2500?"Moabalan (talk) 17:09, 25 December 2019 (UTC)
- Several hundred is purposely vague because the main narrative from 1 Nephi through the end only happens over the course of less than a thousand years. The narrative for the pre-Nephi period is only brief and told as a narrative within the narrative by refugees. It's hardly on the same level of narrative as the main timeline. Presenting 2000 years as the timeline for the BOM is disingenuous at best since it implies to the casual reader that it is a more exhaustive piece of fictional history than it is. "Several hundred years" maintains a certain ambiguity in the Wikipedia text for those who might want to include the barely passing reference to the period before Nephi. --TaivoLinguist (Taivo) (talk) 15:29, 26 December 2019 (UTC)
Harvard reference Sorenson 1984
The phrase "and this view has been published in the official church magazine, Ensign." has a link to a Harvard citation, which previously gave an in-line error but linked to a source that looked like the right one. An editor has recently tried to fix it, and now the error is gone but so is the second part of the citation - the link just jumps to a dead link saying "Sorenson" further down the page and there's no way to see which Sorenson link it refers to. I don't (yet) understand the Harvard citation template well enough to fix it, so I'll revert it for now. Apologies to Mechachleopteryx - I hope you or someone else will manage to fix it. Pastychomper (talk) 08:22, 15 October 2021 (UTC)
- @Pastychomper Now fixed. The issue was that there were two sources that match the description in the reference (Sorenson 1984) and the software that implements harv / sfn did not know which to link to. Having looked at the articles it was clear that the first was meant, so I have disambiguated the dates as recommended in Template:Harvard citation#More than one work in a year. Most of my editing is currently tidying this sort of issue with short footnotes, so feel free to drop me a line if you hit another one and can't work out how to fix it. Best, Wham2001 (talk) 08:47, 16 October 2021 (UTC)
- Thanks. Pastychomper (talk) 09:14, 25 October 2021 (UTC)
Lede
I am of the opinion that the wording in the second sentence in the lede is questionable, to say the least: "Although some historians and archaeologists consider the book to be an anachronistic invention of Joseph Smith, many members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) and other denominations of the Latter Day Saint movement believe that it describes ancient historical events in the Americas." Is there any evidence that even a small minority of non-LDS-movement historians and archaeologists believe that the Book of Mormon is any sort of accurate description of ancient history? I very much doubt it. And without such evidence, why 'some'? Why is Wikipedia implying that there is some sort of academic debate over this? This clearly needs rewording. AndyTheGrump (talk) 02:09, 17 December 2021 (UTC)
- Looking at the article history, 'some' seems to have been added as above by an anon IP in July this year, with no discussion. [1] Given the above issues, I'm removing it. AndyTheGrump (talk) 04:28, 17 December 2021 (UTC)