User:Jmabel/Orthodoxy work in progress

Orthodox Churches

As of March 2012 the Commons categories related to Orthodox Christianity are a true mess. I've done some cleanup, but the problems go way beyond my expertise. I think a good guideline would be to reorganize this part of the Commons hierarchy in line with the organization of these categories in the English-language Wikipedia, which seems to me to have this tremendously better sorted out. However, even that is of limited guidance, and certainly will not sort out all issues. For example, there are a lot of pictures of of church buildings without accurate information as to precisely what type of "Orthodox" the church is, and there is quite a difference between, say, Armenian Orthodox and Finnish Orthodox.

I got a decent start on disentangling Eastern Orthodoxy from Oriental Orthodoxy and what country a church is located in from what patriarchate it is under. I also dealt with an roughly century-old autocephalous entity called the Orthodox Church in America, which people had confused with Orthodoxy in North America in general However, there is an enormous amount of work that should be done here, and I am neither expert on the topic nor sufficiently interested in it to plunge in to what looks like a 100+ hour piece of work.

If anyone wants to engage this, I've created this page as a place people can make notes about what they are up to, or to discuss unresolved issues. Although this is in my namespace, others should feel quite free to contribute. In general, please follow the usual guidelines for using a talk page. I will be glad to help, but more in a "how to do this on Commons" way than by bringing any real expertise to the topic. - Jmabel ! talk 01:39, 7 March 2012 (UTC)

Hello! While not being orthodox Christian myself and only having an outside interest for the topic, I'd like to make the following comment, copied from [[File talk:Hasakah,orthodoxchurch.jpg]:

• Orthodox to the narrow sense means what you call Eastern Orthodox. It does not need to be specified.
• Orthodox to a broader sense can be used for any religious movement which claims a literal reading of Scripture, such as Copt Orthodox, Jewish Orthodox or even suna Islam.
• This means that there is no larger "Orthodoxy" body of which "Eastern" Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox and Jewish Orthodox would be subsets. To put it differently, it is correct to say that Oriental Orthodox are not Orthodox.Place Clichy 13:25, 7 March 2012 (UTC)

Obviously, "Orthodox Jewish" (and suna) are unrelated. But I think our category hierarchy needs to say "Eastern Orthodox" rather than just "Orthodox", because (until I did a bunch of recent disentangling) nearly all of the Oriental Orthodox churches, institutions, and individuals had been classified under "Orthodox". However, I have given up on disentangling this completely, because so many pictures are so vaguely classified. And, within Orthodoxy, there are many places in the world where multiple Eastern Orthodox Churches are a active, and it would be very useful to give the affiliation of each church. For example, here in the U.S., Greek Orthodox are the most common, but we have (more than one type of) Russian Orthodox, and at least a few of almost anything you can name. Similarly, in Finland, one finds mostly Finnish Orthodox, but with the occasional Russian Orthodox (and especially older churches that were originally Russian Orthodox) and, in Helsinki at least, a smattering of others. - Jmabel ! talk 16:06, 7 March 2012 (UTC)