User:InProgress/Mormonism and Wikipedia/Golden Plates

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An analysis of Wikipedia article "Martin Harris"

A FairMormon Analysis of Wikipedia: An analysis of Wikipedia article "Golden Plates" A work by a collaboration of authors (Link to Wikipedia article [{{{wikipedialink}}} here])

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Golden Plates

A comedy of tortured text...

If you are at all curious as to what results when an LDS lawyer with a penchant for extreme detail teams up with an Evangelical history professor from BJU to create a LDS Wikipedia article, then "Golden Plates" is the article for you. Words and phrases are literally tortured in this article. Primary sources are discounted, while secondary and tertiary sources are given precedence. Critical author’s speculative statement are presented as established facts. Disparate referenced statements are cobbled together to produce what can only be described as the literary equivalent of being subjected to “waterboarding.” What should be a relatively minor article balloons into a mass of convoluted statements.

We examine some selected gems:

"A few witnesses testified that they saw the plates, but Smith said he returned them to an angel after translating them."

Notice the "but," which implies to the uninitiated that despite the fact that witnesses saw the plates, this must be left in doubt because Joseph no longer has them. The second part of the sentence has no bearing whatsoever on the first part. These two statements are entirely true, ‘’but’’ the sentence formed by combining them together would not stand up in either the courtroom or history class.

"Among these topics, the credibility of the plates has been, according to Bushman, a 'troublesome item.'"

When one checks the endnote for the Bushman reference, they find a broken Bushman link that doesn't even cite a page number. Instead, there is a quote from Richard and Joan Ostling from Mormon America: The Power and the Promise citing "liberal Mormon Brigham D. Madsen" which states that the "problem" of the gold plates "haunts loyal Mormons."

Smith said the angel instructed him to return the next year, on September 22, 1824, with the "right person": his older brother Alvin.[66] Alvin died in November 1823, and Smith returned to the hill in 1824 to ask what he should do.[67] Smith said he was told to return the following year (1825) with the "right person"—although the angel did not tell Smith who that person might be.[68] For the visit on September 22, 1825, Smith may have attempted to bring his treasure-hunting associate Samuel T. Lawrence,[69] but eventually, Smith determined after looking into his seer stone that the "right person" was Emma Hale, his future wife.[70]

The paragraph above is ample proof that a boilerplate stringing together of facts from conflicting sources produces prose with no nutritional value.

Smith said that he visited the hill "at the end of each year" for four years after the first visit in 1823,[71] but there is no record of him being in the vicinity of Palmyra between January 1826 and January 1827 when he returned to New York from Pennsylvania with his new wife.[72] In January 1827, Smith visited the hill and then told his parents that the angel had severely chastised him for not being "engaged enough in the work of the Lord",[73] which may have meant that he had missed his annual visit to the hill in 1826.[74]

The paragraph above demonstrates what is called "Original Research." The facts are broken down into such small bits that their assembly into paragraphs constitutes research and conclusions that no single one of the cited authors likely produced individually.

A few days prior to the September 22, 1827 visit to the hill, Smith's loyal treasure-hunting friends Josiah Stowell and Joseph Knight, Sr. traveled to Palmyra, in part, to be there during Smith's scheduled visit to the hill.[78]

Smith's "loyal treasure-hunting friends?" Any Latter-day Saint might recalled that Joseph worked for Josiah Stowell on his treasure search.

...When Emma heard of this, she rode a stray horse to Macedon and informed Smith, Jr.,[88]...

One is left to wonder if the horse Emma used happened to just be in the neighborhood...

Joseph walked to what he said was the site of the Golden Plates.

In the extreme effort to qualify anything that Joseph said, we have to say "what he said was" in front of everything...'

In May 1829, after Smith had lent 116 un-duplicated manuscript pages to Martin Harris, and Harris had lost them, Smith dictated a revelation explaining that Smith could not simply re-translate the lost pages because his opponents would attempt to see if he could "bring forth the same words again."[112] Smith seems to have assumed that a second transcription of the lost pages should be identical to the first rather than be filled with variants that would naturally occur if one was translating a text from one language into another in the normal manner.[113]

The citation [113] is from Grant Palmer's An Insider's View of Mormon Origins, and is a speculation on the part of that author. The Wikipedia author's effort (in this case "Foxe") to shoehorn Palmer's speculation as if it were fact makes the structure of this paragraph laughable.

In March 1829, Martin Harris visited Harmony and asked to see the plates. Smith told him that he "would go into the woods where the Book of Plates was, and that after he came back, Harris should follow his tracks in the snow, and find the Book, and examine it for himself." Harris followed these directions but could not find the plates.[123]

In this case, the words of a hostile witness are included in the article as if they were fact. Yet, as the author states earlier, nothing that Joseph said should be included in these articles because Joseph was a "liar."

The article goes on, and on, and on with such information.

Conclusion

FAIR, as an institution, does not edit Wikipedia articles, and recommends that the casual reader investigate beyond the information presented in LDS-themed Wikipedia articles. Check the references and verify their validity. Above all, go to the original sources whenever possible. Keep in mind that every Wikipedia editor, whether a believer or a critic, will either consciously or unconsciously spin the article in the way that suits them. The most stubborn and persistent editor wins in the end, and some battles are simply a waste of time and effort.