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Apart from the style edit, I think the wikilinks between the various Belgium lodges can be removed since they will all direct back to this article. LessHeard vanU (talk) 21:26, 29 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry to be agreeable, but Freemasonry in x is a very good way to get around the questions of whether a particular grand lodge/orient is notable. In most European/colonised countries Freemasonry has had an influence beyond Roman Catholicism in Afghanistan and could far more easily show notability that way. It could also cover the history of pre-GL freemasonry in the country, anti-Masonic activities (popular or state) and other contextual aspects that are hard to put in the current organisational based approach.

Obviously the creation of geographic articles should not be an argument against the creation of organisational articles - which should be on the merit of those articles alone. So even with a Freemasonry in France article, the Grand Orient de France should keep its own article. (The Grand Orient of Belgium is unlikely to be without an article for long, although I'm not volunteering).

If there was a Freemasonry in Switzerland article I would not have been as suspicious when the Grand Orient article was taken down.

JASpencer (talk) 07:55, 30 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I still detect some confusion, though. Yes, "Freemasonry in X" avoids a notability issue, but only to a point: verifiable independent sources need to be found, and even if you want to stretch and say selfpubs are OK, the information still has to exist, and that information has to assert notability. In this article, I have to assume the historical data is true (because I didn't find it myself). The Swiss GLs didn't even have a tenth of what's here, and this isn't much; I spent just as much time working on other new articles and found a lot more to support those than I did on this. Without information, what is there to base an article on?

It sounds like you're also trying to make a statement that WP:OTHERSTUFF would apply to: you seem to say that Freemasonry in a given country is always article-worthy, and the policy states that an argument cannot be made for notability of article B because we have article(s) A. It has to be on a case-by-case basis, which is where the aforementioned "lack of info" point comes in.

Also, there seems to be a lot of supposition of other information eventually showing up in the future, which is fine if there's an established tradition, but if 90% of the groups in the stated area are less than 50 years old, there's just not going to be anything - much of what is written on a jurisdiction is predicated on anniversaries. If "regular" topics can't get away with violating CRYSTAL, a Masonic topic shouldn't either. MSJapan (talk) 20:54, 31 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It's a possible compromise on which things can work up from. There would be a few countries where Freemasonry would not be notable (San Marino? Belize?) but that can be coped with by having articles on a regional basis if necesary. Regional articles could also work in the many areas where due to cultural bias not only in the Wikipedia project as a whole, but among the Masonic editors. It would defuse the situation when you go up for AfDs, lose most of them and we all spend more time either defending or destroying the project rather than building it. JASpencer (talk) 21:17, 31 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

As I am interested in (masonic) history and there is quite a bit of documentation available I have added the requested source information which is readily available about the Grand Orient of Belgium and RGLB. You do not need to bee a freemason to find these sources, I have all my information out of the public domain. It seems though, that there is very little public literature about Continental freemasonry in the Anglo-Saxon world? I wonder if there are any continental style freemasons making contributions to Wikipedia or only general history enthusiasts

Well there's you and User:Liberal Freemason (from Germany). I don't know any more. JASpencer (talk) 17:13, 1 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

This makes it hard as those Continental freemasonry articles rely on only a few editors. I make my contributions out of general historical interest. Anyhow, both the Grand Orient of Belgium and the RGLB now have a basic but decent source section. I like the Belgian overview also as an add-on.Pvosta (talk) 17:20, 1 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]