Why do some “statistic citations” have no statistics, just text in the notes field?
Most records in the Adherents.com database have at least one actual number accompanying them: This might be a number of adherents in a given location, the percentage of a region’s population who are adherents, the number of meeting units (congregations, churches, branches, temples, etc.), or the number of countries the faith group is organized in. Sometimes, however, we have included a record with none of these four figures. We have done this mainly to include some idea of where a religion exists, or how big it is, when there is no other information available. Some groups are too poorly studied today, or went extinct a long time ago (such as Mithraism or Zurvanizm) to obtain hard data for. So if the text we have indicates something about what region a group is in, or generally how big it is, we may include this text in an Adherents.com record, especially if we don’t have other, more quantitative data. Currently (August 1999), 8% of the Adherents.com records do not have an actual number
