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According to the rule that questions should be specific to a particular viewpoint of Christianity, many questions are marked as "too broad" or "off topic."

So, it is common to advise an asker to edit their question as to refer to a specific viewpoint.

Is there a list of on-topic viewpoints?

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  • This might help a bit for on-topic question types
    – user3961
    Jun 23, 2014 at 18:40
  • Wikipedia does a fine job of keeping a list already, and as long as the question is in the format "according to x" it is on topic at this SE site.
    – user3961
    Jun 23, 2014 at 19:57
  • What's with the downvotes? This question garnered some pretty useful answers (there's graphs down there!)
    – Andrew
    Jun 24, 2014 at 6:35
  • 1
    Voting on the meta site is done differently than on the main site. Because there is no rep associated with the meta votes, they are largely done as opinion only. In this case, a downvote is a simple way of saying "No there isn't one and having one wouldn't be very useful." In my opinion, it's not really the best way, but that has become the convention. As an effect, negatively scored questions and answers on meta should still be read because all it really means is that the community at large does not support what the post says, which is valuable information nonetheless.
    – user3961
    Jun 24, 2014 at 18:11
  • It's a common misconception for new users. I gave you an up to make you feel better, but, really, in the future, keep your mindset as "meta votes don't really mean much."
    – user3961
    Jun 24, 2014 at 18:17
  • @fredsbend thank you, that's helpful.
    – Andrew
    Jun 24, 2014 at 19:35

2 Answers 2

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Short answer: NO

Although it would seem like a great idea to document every different Denomination of Christianity, but it would take a lot of time and effort. Also the reason why there are so many of them, is because of all the different view points when it comes to the Christian faith.

An example of the different viewpoints and how they vary is baptism. In the Orthodox and Catholic viewpoint, it's a manner of salvation; while for some Pentacostals it's not. And we haven't even touched the rite of baptism and how it's performed...

Another example is the following question What is "mainstream Christianity"?

My point is that it would be very difficult to classify all (or just majority) of viewpoints in a concise faction on CSE.

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  • I think it would be a good idea to keep a running list of denominational viewpoints for which we have fielded questions
    – Andrew
    Jun 23, 2014 at 7:56
  • @Andrew Tags can be used for that, though lots of other things are tagged too.
    – curiousdannii Mod
    Jun 23, 2014 at 10:31
  • I came up with something that tracks tags for specific traditions and/or denominations, but keep in mind there is overlap and some inconsistencies (hence my recent tag synonym posts).
    – Dan
    Jun 23, 2014 at 14:30
  • @Daи does the query pull data from all of SE?
    – Andrew
    Jun 24, 2014 at 6:37
  • @Andrew I only ran it for C.SE, see my answer to this meta question for some of the data visualized.
    – Dan
    Jun 24, 2014 at 12:25
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I created this query which tracks questions tagged with specific traditions for the past 12 months. Here is some of the data visualized (I've aggregated some of the tags and excluded others in the visualizations, you can see the actual data by viewing the query).

# questions in past 12 months per specific tradition

# questions in past 12 months per general tradition

De/limitations

Does this mean that Roman Catholics are the largest user base here? I doubt it. Most Protestants don't tag their questions with specific traditions nor with general tags such as or (although some do), but rather only with the related theological topic. If anything, it is assumed you want a Protestant response unless you specify otherwise. Even so, this represents the data for the tags I've considered. A more detailed analysis would need to analyze questions without depending solely on tags for the perspective they are looking for, which would undoubtedly yield a much higher number of Protestant questions.

How many total questions have been asked in the past 12 months? 1,912. How many have been considered in this query? Only 534 have been tagged with any specific tradition. The chart below visualizes how few of the questions from the past 12 months are tagged with a specific tradition.

Questions under consideration vs. not

As can be seen, fewer than one-third of questions asked in the past 12 months were tagged with any specific tradition.

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  • 1
    Wow, this is excellent, and very helpful!
    – Andrew
    Jun 23, 2014 at 20:29
  • Is there way to count questions using words in the title or text, instead of tags? (I realize that's the exact purpose of tags...)
    – Andrew
    Jun 23, 2014 at 20:32
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    @Andrew yes you can easily search the body for word occurrences, but then you run into the issue of word sense disambiguation / context, etc. I.e. I could easily reference Baptists in a question about Roman Catholicism, which keyword should hit? This quickly becomes a bigger problem than I care to write software to solve (computational linguistics is something I do research/coding in, but it's too time-consuming to write something ad-hoc for this right now).
    – Dan
    Jun 23, 2014 at 22:23
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    It would be interesting to see these graphs have an "others" category for all the questions that could not be bracketed just to see the scale we're dealing with. Also, our tags are a mess!
    – Caleb
    Jun 24, 2014 at 12:24
  • @Caleb see new data as requested :)
    – Dan
    Jun 24, 2014 at 12:36
  • @Daи I wish I hadn't asked. That's depressing.
    – Caleb
    Jun 24, 2014 at 13:03
  • @Daи is that 1912 including closed questions?
    – curiousdannii Mod
    Jun 24, 2014 at 21:41
  • @curiousdannii no just total questions.
    – Dan
    Jun 24, 2014 at 21:44
  • @Daи okay here are some queries limited to open questions: data.stackexchange.com/christianity/query/203934 data.stackexchange.com/christianity/query/203936
    – curiousdannii Mod
    Jun 24, 2014 at 21:56

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