Talk:Major religious groups

Should be renamed " (non) Current Major religious groups"

The article is about religious groups now. Egyptian, Greek, Roman or Babylonian religions where also major in their time.

Semi-protected edit request on 4 December 2025

In Contents, under "Small-sized religion" which is under "Religious Demographics", there's a table with Zoroastrianism. The hyperlink that directs to "Iran" is redirecting to Japan instead. Can this be fixed. Thank you HamsterHamburger (talk) 02:31, 4 December 2025 (UTC)

 Done. I'm very confused as to why that happened. NotJamestack (✉️|📝) 02:54, 4 December 2025 (UTC)

'Trends in adherence' section unclear and needs revision.

The Trends in adherence table is a little unclear, is there a way to reorder it so it is more obvious what it is trying to say? Such as a label: 'Change in number of people adhering to religious group (%)'. I assume it is relative to population growth but it is unclear, it might just be the total increase in followers, in which case we should add population growth as a baseline to compare it to.

It is also not clear what is meant by 'Adherence'. It could mean how strictly one is adhering to the beliefs and is unclear if this is just population growth in areas where this is the predominant religion or if people are converting/giving up that specific faith or saying they are in survey data.

It is also a mess with the years in the graph: 1970–1985 (%), 1990–2000 (%), 2000–2005 (%), 1970–2010 (%) Each group has a different start point and length, so its not useful for tracking adherence over time or the rate of change. Also the religions added seem arbitrary (some large, some small) and some with only one data point should be removed. It would make more sense just to have the last column (1970–2010 (%)). I would delete it myself, but I try to avoid removing the hard work of others unilaterally, if it can just be cleaned up a bit with a better title or more explanation.

Anyone have any thoughts on this? Am I misunderstanding the table? Ragagama (talk) 23:56, 23 April 2026 (UTC)

The World Map Inaccuracy

The world map showing religious distribution obfuscates the reality of practicing peoples throughout the countries it's meant to represent. I'd be open to creating an interactive version of these demographics, unless anyone has a better suggestion for visualization of this data? Eden1231123 (talk) 03:01, 25 April 2026 (UTC)

Removing Judaism

It should be removed as it is a minority religion with other religions larger than it not being included i.e Sikhism. Oo Uui (talk) 15:56, 14 June 2026 (UTC)

I don't know. Christianity and Islam are essentially built upon the Hebrew Bible. tgeorgescu (talk) 16:01, 14 June 2026 (UTC)

Yes, but this is about size not influence Oo Uui (talk) 16:02, 14 June 2026 (UTC)

Where do you want to remove it from? Sikhism is for example in this article.

I think you mean from the pie chart? In that case we should follow the source (Pew in this case). It is likely that there is some Western bias involved in their choice but we can't really do anything about this. We could combine judaism with the other category and mention its size in a footnote and also mention the other religions (which Pew doesn't give a number for) included in there. This could be acceptable because we shouldn't imply that there are no bigger religions.

If you have another source that gives a breakdown of the sizes of the religious groups than that is welcome. Rolluik (talk) 19:07, 14 June 2026 (UTC)

sikhism https://pluralism.org/sikhism-0#:~:text=Sikhs%20call%20their%20tradition%20the,Guru%20Gobind%20Singh%20in%201708.

Judaism https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/06/09/how-the-global-religious-landscape-changed-from-2010-to-2020/ Oo Uui (talk) 19:09, 14 June 2026 (UTC)

Came here wondering this too. Seems biased to include it when the page is considering priority by size/number of adherents. I'll take it off of special mentions Pablo Mayrgundter (talk) 21:37, 22 July 2026 (UTC)

I don't oppose merging it in the other category (2.4%) and placing in a footnote that Judaism represents 0.2%. Rolluik (talk) 21:53, 22 July 2026 (UTC)

I would oppose. The source explicitly lists it as one of the major religions. Unless we can show that RS do not treat Judaism as a major religion, it should be listed per WP:DUE EvergreenFir (talk) 21:56, 22 July 2026 (UTC)