Talk:Yearly Meeting

Monthly Meeting

I removed "Most Monthly Meetings meet for worship at least once a week; the designation Monthly Meeting refers to their meeting monthly to conduct business" as this is not correct for Britain Yearly Meeting. Vernon White ^{. . . Talk} 16:32, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

Introduction too long and broad

The current introductory paragraph is too long, and delves too deeply into other meeting types. I propose that it be reduced to its essential features:

• YM's are the "top level" administrative entity in a given area;
• That they may comprise, but do not control, a number of meetings (with designations such as ½YM, QM, MM, regional m, area m, recognized m);
• That alternatively, they be a single worship group, or comprise a number of worship groups with no intermediate structure;

and that a table be created (or linked to, if it exists) with an overview of the types of meetings and where they are found.

Martin Kealey (talk) 11:35, 8 February 2021‎ (UTC)

Germany YM

The text describing Germany YM is much longer than the other YMs. Perhaps it could be moved to its own article? (Or better still, translate de:Deutsche_Jahresversammlung? Google Translate does a passable job on the text, but links and tables would need work.)

Martin Kealey (talk) 00:48, 8 February 2024 (UTC)

Using native language names for Meetings

Looking at the German version of this page, we have a problem. The German page simply copies the Meeting names as given on this page, meaning that they use the term “Yearly Meeting” even when that's not the native language of the Meeting itself - and of course not German.

To be consistent we should either:

• Give priority to the name of each Meeting in the native language of the Meeting itself, with the English translation in parentheses; or
• Translate the names of the Meetings into the language of the Wiki (such as German or Russian)

A comment on the German version is germane:

Hi! Quakerism is closely linked to the English-speaking culture. If you google "friends meeting" you will find Quakers. The correct translation into German would be "Verversammlung der Freunde". However, there are only ~300 people in Germany and Austria who call themselves Quakers or "Friends". Perhaps there are another ~3,000 "Friends of Friends" who are familiar with the term. With 100 million people in Europe whose native language is German, it can be assumed that hardly anyone knows "friends" as a self-designation for Quakers. That's why you won't find any meaningful results in search engines when you search for "Assembly of Friends". That means: Internally, Quakers speak of "friends and girlfriends". Since "friend" in German is associated with a man, both genders still have to be addressed in a group. But since there are more non-Quakers than Quakers in the assemblies, and you want to address them explicitly, there are monstrosities like: "Dear male and female friends, dear male friends of the male friends, dear female friends of female friends...". In purely practical terms, people often simply refer to themselves in the third person as "Quakers" in a gender-neutral way. That's why I advocate not translating self-designations (names of organizations) from English into German. And in all other cases of "Quakers" not writing "friends".

This suggests that former should be preferred, though perhaps both English and native translations should be included on non-English wikis. Martin Kealey (talk) 05:22, 25 January 2025 (UTC)