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Freemasonry is a former featured article. Please see the links under Article milestones below for its original nomination page (for older articles, check the nomination archive) and why it was removed.

Article milestones Date Process Result March 15, 2004 Refreshing brilliant prose Kept February 23, 2006 Featured article review Demoted February 24, 2006 Featured article candidate Not promoted April 28, 2006 Peer review Reviewed April 28, 2007 Featured article candidate Not promoted May 29, 2007 Good article nominee Listed June 30, 2007 Good article reassessment Delisted June 13, 2012 Good article nominee Not listed January 4, 2014 Good article nominee Listed May 1, 2025 Good article reassessment Delisted Current status: Former featured article

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The subject of this article is controversial and content may be in dispute. When updating the article, be bold, but not reckless. Feel free to try to improve the article, but don't take it personally if your changes are reversed; instead, use the talk page to discuss them. Content must be written from a neutral point of view. Include citations when adding content and consider tagging or removing unsourced information.

I see that an editor has tagged the lead as being too long. I have to agree. I think the recent additions explaning the various traditions and factions were wonderful, but also overly detailed for the lead. It should probably be moved into its own section lower down. The lead should be a brief summary. That said… we could probably do with a reorganization of the entire article while we are at it. It has become a bit unwieldy. So … once we sort out the lead… let’s go through each of the other sections and discuss. Blueboar (talk) 14:48, 8 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I honestly think the entire article is too long and spends a lot of time focusing on the differences between various traditions. In my opinion, each tradition's article should have more in depth discussions of its idiosyncrasies while the top level Freemasonry article should likely talk more about commonalities, with potentially a brief introduction into the differences. This would also help with some of the WP:NPOV issues the article has, where the comparisons sometimes trick authors into falsely hinting at a preference for one side or another; in reality, no comparison really needs to be made. As discussed elsewhere, these traditions are not at odds with one another, so comparing every subsection of this article between them gives the false impression of some kind of competition, rather than being two arrangements of the same composition. Seemlyable (talk) 00:42, 14 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The article effectively has two "history" sections, with geographic subsections under each: "History" (which has subsections for North America, the Middle East, and continental Europe) and "Development and Expansion" (which has subsections for France, Russia, Italy, Latin America, and China) directly below it. We should combine these somehow. Prezbo (talk) 10:47, 14 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Agree. This article should give the 10,000 foot/meter overview. National histories are best done in Freemasonry in X country articles (of which we have many). Blueboar (talk) 17:04, 14 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Propaganda Due probably deserves a mention. Prezbo (talk) 11:01, 14 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Nah… UNDUE to mention one lodge that went Fringe. Blueboar (talk) 16:59, 14 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

My understanding it was a big scandal in Italy, probably one of the first things the average Italian thinks of when they think of Masonry. I could be wrong. I see it’s not mentioned in the lead of the Freemasonry in Italy article, I’ll start there. Prezbo (talk) 19:13, 14 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The issue is that P2 was only marginally connected to actual Freemasonry. Blueboar (talk) 21:17, 14 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I’ll do more research. But my first thought is: what is “actual” Masonry? Isn’t that like talking about “actual” Communism or Christianity? It’s a fractured social milieu with no central authority. When I’ve read about P2 it’s always described as Masonic or pseudo-Masonic. Prezbo (talk) 21:32, 14 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

P2 had its charter rescinded in the 70s, and was no longer recognized as a legitimate Masonic lodge. anyone can call themselves “masonry”… but to be legitimate, a lodge must be chartered by a Grand Lodge. Blueboar (talk) 18:16, 17 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think for Wikipedia’s purposes, if a group calling themselves Masonic is involved in a big national scandal, that rates prominent coverage in this context, even if the national Masonic hierarchy didn’t consider them legitimate at the time. However I also agree with you that the national sections in this article need to be trimmed in any case. I added a sentence about P2 to the lead of the Freemasonry in Italy article, I think whatever we say about Italy here should be a condensed version of that lead. Prezbo (talk) 20:19, 17 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hi -- I've added the AI generated template here in regard to Hypersite's additions (which make up much of the length mentioned in the discussions above). While they have been edited somewhat, a lot of the original content, and its original tells of AI use remain, and so there may be hallucinations in the text as well as tonal issues. Gnomingstuff (talk) 12:12, 28 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Hypersite: Which portions of this article were generated by a large language model? Jarble (talk) 01:28, 7 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I've clocked about 35mb of plaintext worth of LLM text chats across a few models at this point. To me it's very obvious:

Bulleted lists that make no concrete claims, are so abstract as to be meaningless, and do not cite any sources are a giveaway for AI slop on the internet.

However, the public AI text models are now perfectly capable of providing "references," but they will not necessarily reference them accurately or even at all ("phantom citations"). I went through many of the sources, but it's honestly too much work for me to confirm that this was written by AI.

This article is now unreadable imo. I would ask a wiki lord to remove Hypersite's slop drop to repair it.

Why can't an actual member of the freemasons write this piece? There's still a lot of them out there. They are happy to talk about their thing. Blotto Oblongato (talk) 09:28, 30 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]