Wikipedia

Ifly6

Joined 18 November 2009
Unified login: Ifly6 is the unique login of this user for all public Wikimedia projects.

I read economics at university, with a minor in public policy and an unhealthy interest for classics with special interest for the late Roman republic. Professionally, I work in economic research with a focus on banking and the regulation thereof.[1]

Feel free to leave me a message on my talk page!

Views on citation and sources edit

See also: User:Ifly6/More essays, User:Ifly6/Useful sources (Rome), User:Ifly6/Useful sources (Greece), User:Ifly6/Useful formatting, and User:Ifly6/List of primary source errors

Citations must be specific edit

Usage of templates such as Template:Cite book and Template:Cite journal ought to be compulsory (and you should use all the relevant paramaters, especially edition). There are clear network effects from having a consistent, widely used, easily parseable citation system.[2] They ought to be put in hand in earnest. It is impossible to overutilise Template:Sfn and Template:Harvnb. Pinpoint citations also should be compulsory. Even worse is when editors point to a source nobody else can find or read;[3] Wikipedians should reject such sources which are so reliant on assertion and faith. Both are little better than saying "trust me".

Sources must be academic and modern edit

I feel also that there is a major problem with old sources on Wikipedia. Just because you found something in some hundred-fifty year old book does not mean that it is reflective of the current scholarship.[4] Just because Herodotus, Plutarch, Suetonius, or some other ancient historian said "this is how it happened" does not make it true.[5] The factual validity of the ancient (and, for us, primary)[6] sources is heavily questioned in modern scholarship.[7] Nor should we be accepting things simply on Mommsen's reputation; scholars and archaeologists have done excellent work since the 19th century and yielded many much-needed corrections.[8] Also, if your contributions are literally just regurgitating what you saw in HBO's Rome, please stop.

Textual criticism has gone a long way since the 19th century. It is simply not the case that the classical texts are "unchanging" or otherwise that somehow people in the 19th century got everything right even on the texts themselves. For example, D R Shakleton-Bailey, writing in the 1999 Loeb edition of Letters of Atticus, summarises significant advances in critically correcting previous "fragments of earlier manuscripts, and, importantly, reports from a variety of sources" and similar advances in chronological assignment of Cicero's letters.[9] If you want to read a lot about the (somewhat dry) but very important field of emendation just read extracts from A E Housman.

Similarly, editors ought not rely so heavily on mass market books, inter alia Tom Holland,[10][11] which repeat discredited interpretations or regurgitate the ancient sources reflexively. Archaeological evidence is not some idle boast. It is extremely important. We know much of the extent and magnitude of Gracchan land reform only because we have recovered their boundary stones. We know about the Roman market economy's extent in trade of staple goods only because we have recovered the amphora.[12][13] Modern academic sources that engage with multiple disciplines should always be preferred.

Cribbing the OCD for primary sources edit

Further information: WP:SAYWHEREYOUGOTIT

It feels at times as if some editors are writing articles by reading some reference, like Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography or the Oxford Classical Dictionary, for the primary sources. Then they read the primary sources and base the article on those. This is, frankly, really bad. It runs into the exact problems that plague those primary sources. The primary sources (eg Plutarch, Appian, Livy, etc), although secondary sources in their day, are not internally reliable enough to base a whole narrative around. There is great suspicion that the stories in them are purposefully embellished and not wholly factual.

Even if we ignore the issues with the primary sources and the need to use them with care, editors should be honest about where they are getting their information: if you found it in Smith or the OCD, say so. Don't lie like Robert Graves and pretend that you did your own original research when you just copied the primary sources from a reference work.[14] We have modern sources. They are readily available. You can cite both them and the primary sources like Plutarch and Appian, after reading the modern assessment of accuracy on some point. These are not ancient Chinese secrets.

Useful links? edit

These are links from the Wikipedia Library. A lot of classics scholarship is published in book form (for some indiscernible reason) rather than journal form, making Jstor less useful than one might hope. These links might be helpful.

Name Link
Digital Prosopography of the Roman Republic https://romanrepublic.ac.uk/person/
Oxford Reference https://www-oxfordreference-com.wikipedialibrary.idm.oclc.org
Oxford Research Encyclopaedias https://oxfordre-com.wikipedialibrary.idm.oclc.org
Oxford Scholarship Online https://oxford-universitypressscholarship-com.wikipedialibrary.idm.oclc.org
DeGruyter https://www-degruyter-com.wikipedialibrary.idm.oclc.org

You can find some books summarised in précis on reviews on the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, which is usually very helpful. It also helps determine whether something is or is not a bad book (provided it has been out for more than a few years). Recall, however, that non-academic books will normally get no reviews.

In the category of not useful links are things like YouTube videos. It is basically impossible for anyone who is not a specialist to know enough to make a weekly series of videos on, say, Roman history. Channels like Kings and Generals are among the worst: they constantly disseminate inaccurate, obsolete, or uncritically-read primary source accounts of events. Various blogs across the internet are similarly of little value unless the author is prima facie credible: I would put a minimum there to be a PhD in the relevant topic.

Annoyances edit

This section details what I think are some annoyances. These are my views only.

Points and capitalisation edit

Omit all unnecessary punctuation. Thus, not e.g., but eg, T. R. S. Broughton but T R S Broughton. As to capitalisation, in general I agree with WP:NCCAPS' deference to academic styles:

[T]he Wikipedia MoS and naming conventions are a consensus-based balance between them, drawing primarily upon academic style, not journalistic or marketing/business styles...

I also think the standard should be raised from consistently capitalised in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources to almost universally capitalised in academic sources. Thus, if there is any doubt about capitalisation, decapitalise it.

Brutus's conspiracy, Marius's consulship, etc. edit

For classical names, you can use a trailing apostrophe alone. I don't think anyone should bother changing whole articles one way or the other, but I will defend that the trailing apostrophe alone is entirely and absolutely acceptable.

I'll just quote:

Use an apostrophe alone after classical or classicizing names ending in s or es: ... Herodotus'... Venus'... Xerxes'... Erasmus'... Themistocles'... This traditional practice in classical works is still employed by many scholars. Certainly follow it for longer names... as well as for the post-classical Latinate names favoured throughout the Middle Ages.[15]

Useless archive links edit

The citation templates all support the addition of archive links: |archive-url=. Adding archive links for live sites is a waste of your time and is, as far as I can tell, largely done to pad edit counts.

  1. WP:ARCHIVEEARLY is not a policy, guideline, or recommendation. WP:DEADREF does not require or recommend addition of archive links as much as it does creation of archives. Now...
  2. Archives for every single link added to Wikipedia are created automatically by Internet Archive.[16]
  3. Internet Archive bot already edits all links that become dead to include the archive link.[17]

Thus, adding archive links to live sites to preempt their (not always likely) death like this is completely unnecessary. They are also many times cruft-inducing or plainly useless. First, on the cruft. The following is from a single reference on an old version of Julius Caesar. It should read Suet. Iul., 1; Plut. Caes., 1; Vell. Pat., 2.41. Instead, it reads: 

<ref>Suetonius, ''Julius'' [https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Suetonius/12Caesars/Julius*.html#1 1] {{Webarchive|url=https://archive.today/20120530163202/http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Suetonius/12Caesars/Julius*.html#1 |date=30 May 2012 }}; Plutarch, ''Caesar'' [https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Caesar*.html#1 1] {{Webarchive|url=http://webarchive.loc.gov/all/20180213130122/http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/e/roman/texts/plutarch/lives/caesar%2A.html#1 |date=13 February 2018 }}; Velleius Paterculus, ''Roman History'' [https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Velleius_Paterculus/2B*.html#41 2.41] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220731043323/https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Velleius_Paterculus/2B%2A.html#41 |date=31 July 2022 }}</ref>

This is hard to parse in the editor and when multiple references are chained in sequence, extremely difficult to get through. Removing them shortened the article by around 28,000 bytes. Furthermore, the "archives" automatically generated for many links, especially those to paywalled sites, are completely useless. See, for example, these archive links to Jstor, a site which is almost certainly not going down any time soon: 

<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Steel |first=Catherine |date=2014 |title=The Roman senate and the post-Sullan "res publica" |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/24432812 |journal=Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte |volume=63 |issue=3 |pages=323–339 |doi=10.25162/historia-2014-0018 |jstor=24432812 |s2cid=151289863 |issn=0018-2311 |access-date=26 May 2022 |archive-date=26 May 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220526152815/https://www.jstor.org/stable/24432812 |url-status=live }}</ref>

That archive link points to a blank page. It does not help that the archive dates commonly added are wrong and postdate |access-date= (though not in this instance).

Among other discussions, see:

There is no consensus in favour of mass addition of archive links to live websites. Some articles have clear consensuses against doing so. I think the same rationale applies elsewhere. Regardless, this "archive everything" mind virus is of extremely middling value to the encyclopaedia while incurring substantial costs for editors.

And this eventually led to the Roman empire! edit

There is absolutely no need to constantly add And XYZius' actions led to these other actions that eventually led to the formation of the Roman empire. This is classic whig history in the exact way Butterfield criticised English historians of anachronistically projecting parliamentary-democracy-awesome into the English Civil War. The Parliamentarians were not democrats.[18] Nor were the Gracchans or Marians proto-democrats or secret Augustan-style autocrats.[19]

Tiberius Gracchus did not set up the Roman empire. He was not intending to set up the Roman empire. Land reform was connected to (1) gaining political power and clients and (2) dealing with the shortfall of soldiers in the census.[20] Gaius Marius also did not set up the Roman empire. He was not intending to set up the Roman empire. While he did do some murdering at the end of his life – which nobody should be defending – hiring soldiers from the poor was temporary and meant to find men to fight without resorting to unpopular (but still feasible) conscription.[21] Both men need to be understood in terms of their times and not as an modern politicians or as proto-autocrats in hindsight.

If you're going to do a This eventually led to the Roman empire! sort of comment, some kind of explanation would be needed. Who believes this? For what reasons? How did it contribute to the later event? Is there consensus on that attribution? Teleological history, regardless, should be avoided.

Populares and optimates as political parties edit

They were not political parties. Some scholars think they were ideologies, a topic of heated debate.[22] And recent work has shown they are modern label of which Romans knew nothing.[23] I will grant that there is a long history of using populares and optimates to describe Roman politics, made famous by Mommsen. I will also grant that there is a reason for us to have stuff like categories for populares as an affordance for readers. But this party politics standpoint is not where the scholarship has gone.[24]

What that means, I think, for Wikipedia editors, is that we shouldn't be putting populares in everywhere. We need to be judicious. This is especially true with infoboxes, which per the Manual of Style are supplements to articles. First, if the article does not say that a person is popularis, it should not include it in the infobox. Second, if the populares are not political parties, they cannot also be factions in a civil war. This also requires us to reflect critically about the sources we use. Many old sources, especially before the 1930s, talk in party politics terms. That does not make them reflective of current scholarship. Age matters. Classical scholarship moves slowly, but that does not mean it is still.

Major contributions edit

People edit

Topics edit

Good articles edit

Everything else edit

Minor contributions edit

Further information: User:Ifly6/Minor contributions

To-do list edit

I keep this list largely so I can keep track of my own projects. But if you see something that you think is interesting here, do feel free to set up (if not present) or comment on the relevant talk page. Constructive feedback is always appreciated.

Priority edit

Non-priority edit

Old drafts edit

Further information: User:Ifly6/Old drafts and Special:PrefixIndex/User:Ifly6

Notes edit

  1. ^ I am wholly uninterested in getting into the classical studies academic rat-race. They skin people alive (financially) out there.
  2. ^ I say all this even though Template:Cite book is not what I would prefer (OSCOLA). In part, this is because templates like Template:Sfn allow for direct links to the thing being cited. And cite-book also allows for easy links to the direct resources available. This is important for verification or further reading.
  3. ^ For example, if your source is an unpublished thesis from a defunct university that appears nowhere in any catalogues like ProQuest, that is not a verifiable source. (As in literally verifiable by others.) Nor is some 19th century book with a print run of two that exists only in the dingiest back corner of the British Library. You could claim anything about the contents of that book.
  4. ^ DGRBM, for example, reports the First Catilinarian conspiracy as if it happened ("we shall discover no reasonable ground for ... any doubts with regard to ... the facts as presented to us by Sallust"). It is the scholarly consensus today that such a conspiracy never happened and is fictitious.
  5. ^ Herodotus, widely known as the father of history and of lies, did not care about his sources and threw it in if he heard it (almost like Wikipedia). Plutarch was a moralistic conservative who wrote history-involved morality plays as much as he wrote history. Suetonius was in it for the meme and the virality. A lot of the time the various written sources also disagree. Getting to the truth of the matter requires expertise and scholarship.
  6. ^ "Primary sources in Classics are the literary works (poems, plays, and histories, for example), and artifacts (pottery, coins and sculptures, for example) and other materials from the ancient world". McLean, Valla. "Subject Guides / Classics / Primary Sources". MacEwan University. Retrieved 2022-05-10. Appian, Plutarch, etc categorised under primary sources:
  7. ^ If you pull out a modern edition of something even light-hearted like Valerius Maximus you will find footnotes all over the place just saying that this or that assertion was wrong. With the early Roman republic, scholars have been extremely sceptical of the narrative sources. Of the late republic, where the sources are best, they are still regularly contradictory. See eg Tempest, Kathryn (2017). Brutus: the noble conspirator. Yale University Press. pp. 246 et seq. ISBN 978-0-300-23126-7. There you will just find a table noting what every available source says about Brutus' activities after the assassination. Looking across it, you will also find quickly they (Plutarch, Appian, and Cassius Dio) do not all agree... and not just on minor things.
  8. ^ For example: Drogula, Fred K (2015). Commanders and command in the Roman republic and early Empire. University of North Carolina Press. p. 314. ISBN 978-1-4696-2126-5. Although Mommsen supplied no evidence to support this position, his scholarly auctoritas was sufficient to sustain his argument in spite of the fact that a series of historians have demonstrated conclusively that this restriction on consuls [the supposed lex Cornelia de provinciis ordinandis] did not exist...
  9. ^ Shackleton Bailey, D R (1999). Introduction. Letters to Atticus. By Cicero. Loeb Classical Library. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. pp. 22–24.
  10. ^ Re Rubicon: Weber, Ronald J (2004-01-01). "Review of "Rubicon: the last years of the Roman republic"". History: reviews of new books. 32 (4): 166–166. doi:10.1080/03612759.2004.10527455. ISSN 0361-2759. It lacks a thorough critical analysis of its primary sources... [and] draws almost exclusively from written accounts, ignoring the physical remains of the period. His account focuses on politics over social and economic trends, and his consideration of the vast amounts of scholarship about the period is [very limited]... students would do better with [a reissue] of... Gruen's The Last Generation of the Roman Republic.
  11. ^ So it is again with podcasts. Dan Carlin can repeat his story about Gavrilo Princip ordering a sandwich all he wants. It does not become true. Dash, Mike (15 Sep 2011). "The origin of the tale that Gavrilo Princip was eating a sandwich..." Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved 2021-05-22.
  12. ^ See eg, a beautiful book, Temin, Peter (2012). The Roman market economy. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-1-4008-4542-2.
  13. ^ Eg If your textual source says that no one buys imported Gaulish wines, but you in fact find lots of wine amphorae from Gaul, your textual source is wrong and the amphorae are right. Devereaux, Bret (2022-02-11). "Rome: Decline and Fall? Part III: Things". A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry.
  14. ^ As to the lying allegation, see Stray, Christopher (2007). "Sir William Smith and his dictionaries". Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies. Supplement (101): 35–54. ISSN 2398-3264. JSTOR 43768051. What Graves does not mention is that the sources used for his book were culled from Smith's dictionaries, as is clear from a comparison of his reference listings with Smith's own.
  15. ^ Ritter, R M (2002). The Oxford guide to style. Oxford University Press. p. 114. ISBN 0-19-869175-0. OCLC 34244433.
  16. ^ Links added by editors to the English Wikipedia mainspace are automatically saved to the Wayback Machine within about 24 hours. WP:PLRT.
  17. ^ As of 2015, there is a Wikipedia bot and tool called WP:IABOT that automates fixing link rot. It runs continuously, checking all articles on Wikipedia if a link is dead, adding archives to Wayback Machine... and replacing dead links in the wikitext with an archived version. WP:PLRT.
  18. ^ Even if you believe that the Levellers were democrats, the Parliamentarians in general (who suppressed the Levellers by force and imprisoned their leaders) were not.
  19. ^ As much as political opponents to Tiberius Gracchus would like to assert, we have no evidence he was actually trying to make himself king. As to "democrats", "such exotic creatures did not exist in Roman public life". Morstein-Marx, Robert (2021). Julius Caesar and the Roman people. Cambridge University Press. p. 580. ISBN 978-1-108-83784-2.
  20. ^ A manpower shortfall, which by the way, was illusory. Turns out people don't register for the census when they know they are going to be drafted into a sanguinary no-profit Hispanic war. Roselaar, Saskia T (2010). Public land in the Roman republic: a social and economic history of ager publicus in Italy, 396-89 BC. Oxford University Press. p. 225. ISBN 978-0-19-957723-1. OCLC 520714519.
  21. ^ Rich, J W (1983). "The supposed Roman manpower shortage of the later second century BC". Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte. 32 (3): 320. ISSN 0018-2311. JSTOR 4435854.
  22. ^ Corke-Webster, James (2020). "Roman History". Greece & Rome. 67 (1): 100. doi:10.1017/S0017383519000287. ISSN 0017-3835. S2CID 232177339. As to the debate itself, some people think populares believed in popular sovereignty while optimates believed in traditional government. People no longer associate corn doles with populares only (Cato, eg, expanded the corn dole during his tribunate). Basically every single issue was debated to death for-and-against by "both sides" during the republic; which puts something of a dent to there being "sides" in the first place. Even if there is an ideological tendency, populares-are-popular-sovereigntists is not entirely compatible with populares never advocating democratisation of the republic and how their policies usually cemented aristocratic control of the state. Robb, M A (2018). "Optimates, populares". In Bagnall, Roger S; et al. (eds.). The Encyclopedia of Ancient History. John Wiley & Sons. doi:10.1002/9781444338386.wbeah20095.
  23. ^ Robb, MA (2010). Beyond populares and optimates: political language in the late republic. Steiner. ISBN 978-3-515-09643-0.
  24. ^ See, inter alia:
    • Tempest, Kathryn (2017). Brutus: the noble conspirator. New Haven. p. 31. ISBN 978-0-300-18009-1. OCLC 982651923. On a side note, it is important to understand that these terms - boni and optimates versus popularis (sing) and populares (pl) - did not constitute political 'parties' in any modern sense.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
    • Flower, Harriet (2010). Roman republics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. p. 150. ISBN 978-0-691-14043-8. Romans had not had political parties in the second century, nor did anything like clearly identifiable groups emerge after the period of the Gracchi. Party politics may have been in the air in 100, and later Cinna may briefly have had a party of sorts, but his political group had been destroyed and no one was eager to revive his memory.
    • Gruen, Erich (1995). The last generation of the Roman republic. Berkeley: University of California Press. p. 50. ISBN 0-520-02238-6. The phrase originates in an older scholarship which misapplied analogies and reduced Roman politics to a contest between the 'senatorial party' and the 'popular party'. Such labels obscure rather than enlighten.
    • Mackie, Nicola (1992). "'Popularis' ideology and popular politics at Rome in the first century BC". Rheinisches Museum für Philologie. 135 (1): 49–73. ISSN 0035-449X. JSTOR 41233843. It is common knowledge nowadays that populares did not constitute a coherent political group or 'party' (even less so than their counterparts, optimates).
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