Talk:Flat Earth

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This Pseudoastronomy related article has been awarded GOLD status for quality. Please keep this in mind when editing the article. See RationalWiki:Article rating for more information.

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Curious about the slight Muslim apologist tone?[edit]

This is an extraordinarily well-written and thoroughly explored article. I particularly enjoyed the lengthy and often humorous rebuttal against the tiresome Bibilical/Christian fundamentalist arguments for a flat Earth. However, the comparatively shorter and arguably less disparaging section discussing similar Islamic arguments, along with the notable effort to soft pedal the quote by Abd al-Aziz Ibn Baz (a man of significant power and influence who called for punishment for those refuting his Qur’anic interpretation), seem to perpetuate an admittedly insufficiently sourced theme I’ve observed on Rationalwiki—to present any negative aspects of Islam with kid gloves or an excess of sensitivity. The net result from reading this laudable piece left me with a flavor of bias that I’m sure wasn’t consciously intended, but nevertheless implied that employing the same delectable condescension towards Christian fundamentalist tropes towards their Islamist counterparts is somehow inappropriate, prejudicial or taboo.

As someone who aligns with progressive principles and disdains bigotry of any kind, I get the principles behind this (and again I freely admit that I don’t have rigorous evidence for my observations). It would be contrary to the mission and values of this site to give any fuel for Islamophobes. However Islam, Christianity and Judaism are all descendants from the same Abrahamic texts, and when any of them are interpreted to the extreme and weaponized to discourage free thought or social progress, the net harm is the same. And I don’t think that flat earth beliefs are any less idiotic or worthy of ridicule and scorn if they come from a someone considered marginalized in our country (the cleric above is certainly not marginalized in Saudi Arabia) than they would be coming from a bigoted alt-right Republican in Mississippi. Organized religions have been responsible for some of the worst atrocities and obstacles to progress throughout history, and to deny how they continue to threaten and pillage human rights in countries such as Nigeria or Iran out of a hesitation to cause offense makes ridiculing silly Christian megachurches a bit less intellectually honest in my view.

Affiliating with any of the organized religions and defending their ancient texts written out of ignorance and superstition remains a choice—it isn’t always an easy choice in other parts of the world (or even here), but it is still a choice. Pointing out the inanities and arguments against what is written in those texts and how they are misinterpreted today is one of our only strategies to overcome their ongoing harms. In this regard, there can be no sacred cows—Islam should be as open to criticism and ridicule as any other, without any suggestion that doing so is an act of bigotry against its adherents. Similarly, the history of oppression and atrocities towards Jews should not shield the Torah and its interpretations from criticism either. When learning about the religious justifications for flat earth beliefs, I want to hear all the examples from all religious groups with uncensored, equal rigor, and no attempts to apologize for them or lessen their significance. This is one of the few sites I turn to for such frank depictions, and I hope that I’ve misjudged the author’s intent. If I have, my apologies. Srkbear (talk) 17:43, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

What Muslim apologist tone? All we're pointing out is that like medieval Christianity medieval Islam was more scientifically-minded than modern day fundamentalist Islam and Christianity. It's important to acknowledge that Islam isn't inherently a religion of primitive superstitions followed by barbaric brown-skinned savages with a death fetish. Carthage (talk) 03:55, 23 August 2023 (UTC)
Indeed, in Islam, science is viewed as a means to understand the natural world: He subjected for you whatever is in the heavens and whatever is on the earth—all by His grace. Surely in this are signs for people who reflect. (Qur'an 45:13) It's a clever move in that their god fits into every subatomic particle man manages to break matter into. With Christian fundamentalism, the problem is science is disproving the Bible's literal interpretations used to control masses, and conservative (especially at the extreme of Christofascism) leaders aren't too excited about that.—Nomoresecrets (talk) 14:22, 22 January 2025 (UTC)

Gold[edit]

What would this article need to reach gold? I'm thinking it's missing largely its present-day connection to QAnon, but that's about it. Moon Sock (talk) 14:24, 14 June 2023 (UTC)

Made the cover story abstract ←§ Edward the eight (talk) 00:46, 26 August 2023 (UTC)

what a difference it may or may not make[edit]

There's no feasible way in which everyday life for the vast majority of the human population could be changed by the based on whether or not the Earth is a giant hockey puck or oblate spheroid.

It would affect the conspiracy's millions of employees, though. —Anton Sherwood (talk) 02:33, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

To be fair it does say "the vast majority". On the other hand our text was ghastly so I have improved it a little.Bob"Life is short and (insert adjective)" 11:56, 2 August 2024 (UTC)

Capitalization[edit]

I am seeing some inconsistency in the the use of capital letters.

We have "Earth" always in capitals which is correct. But sometimes we write, "Flat Earthism", "flat earthism", "flat Earthism".

My suggestion would be that "earthism" and "earther" should not be capitalized unless they are in titles. (I think there may be some inconsistency in hyphenation as well.) Bob"Life is short and (insert adjective)" 20:53, 13 February 2025 (UTC)


The article's grown greatly, time to split out subarticles?[edit]

This article has grown greatly (415K now, 139K before @Nomoresecrets expanded it). Nice new content and topic organization, but at the same time I think it's too long now to comfortably fit into one article. (This is doubly so for an article with lots of embedded videos -- all of those in one article makes for a slow and resource-hungry loading of the page, very noticeable on a laptop from the previous decade, as I use.)

I suggest splitting out sub-articles on some of the topics, in some manner. Looking at existing articles, one idea may be to place stuff on experiments and things mostly tied to one named person each in an article on its own. Nomoresecrets, any ideas for organizing an article series, and do you like that idea? --ApooftGnegiol (talk) 11:32, 18 February 2025 (UTC)

Second this. Antares (talk) 11:42, 18 February 2025 (UTC)
I agree. The article has started to throw math module backend errors, and it's been a few days since all the images have loaded properly on refresh. Even some YouTube videos have occasionally failed to load. I think the individual experiments are the most logical place to start the article splitting. Those are bound to grow larger over time, and especially historical experiments don't provide nearly as much value for their size in this article. The memes at the bottom of the article feel a bit dead weight: they're quite old and do not really increase the snark level. The "Why The Confusion" section should probably be moved to its own article, such as "History of Flat Earth". IMO this article should focus on understanding the movement and debunking it with best available materials, and links to supplementary articles. Related to sections 3-11, those will require quite a bit of work to reduce duplicate arguments, so I think having them in one place helps at least for the time being. Once their restructuring is done, it's a good moment to evaluate whether further splitting is needed. -Nomoresecrets (talk) 12:16, 18 February 2025 (UTC)
Ok I have moved the experiments to their initial articles and linked to them. I replaced less important embedded videos with links, and collapsed practically all videos (no idea if that helps at all with performance, I suspect not, but at least it makes the page slightly shorter). I ran a test and noticed the math module images can be saved from the page and uploaded as images. The math-tagged section should definitely be left next to the images as a backup so they can be edited later if needed. That's a useful place to help if anyone's interested. I also deleted the links to meme images now, but didn't vaporize the files from the server. Finally I checked for large images, found one and converted it to jpg to speed up its loading. Let me know how the performance is now. As for the size, I doubt the article will grow massively anymore. Out of big names, practically everything Dubay has claimed has now been debunked. Weiss seems to be mostly a subset of his claims. Both Weiss and Oakley rarely produce "educational" content, and their webinars/podcasts aren't worth scouring. Sargent's material is 10 years old, and Witst/Jeranism seem to be ditching the cult. IMO the article is no longer too massive and it's still going to get a bit shorter as dubplicate information is reduced and the text gets polished. --Nomoresecrets (talk) 15:02, 18 February 2025 (UTC)
Not even replacing all the math backend calls with PNGs, or getting rid of most of heavy GIFs and unnecessary images helped with page loading issues. With heavy heart, I moved the debunking sections to smaller, topic-based sub-articles. Hopefully the server will one day be able to support an article this comprehensive without need to hide the golden substance behind links. Nomoresecrets (talk) 20:53, 24 March 2025 (UTC)