Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (ancient Romans)

message: But! It assumes that every single one of them deserves a wiki-article. Do you want to create an article just for saying so and so was pretor in 244 BC? I'd rather have something in the style of Caecilius Metellus, creating separate articles only for people w´hich further distinguished themselves. In other words I suggest: keeping all the stubs together in the paged named after the name they share. MvHG 11:26, 18 May 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I've gone back and forth on that several times in my WP career. Right now I'm tending to favor splitting, because when you put several people in one article, links from events centuries apart end up on the same page, and we make the poor reader manually sort through the dozen people trying to figure which one was actually meant, and editors not familiar with the subject would likely "fix" the descriptions incorrectly if they picked the wrong person. Of course, if a person is not ever going to be linked to from anywhere else, then there's no reason not to leave on a group page. Stan 15:51, 18 May 2004 (UTC)

text: I've been working on articles about individual Roman gentes, and the practice I'm following is to group all of the members on one page, sorted by family if necessary, and then by date, with each name on the list linking to a separate article, if there's enough material to warrant one.  Of course many of these are just red links for now, and I'll have to go back and write up the articles later!  The ones about whom there isn't enough (or doesn't appear to be enough) material for at least a paragraph or two, get about one line explaining their significance and citing the ancient sources used to document them.  If it later turns out that there's enough material to justify a separate article, it's easy to add one and link it to the page about the gens!  P Aculeius (talk) 19:23, 12 January 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Interesting proposal 

message: There's a grammatical error in the first sentence. It should read "...about whom we have...", not "...about which we have..."; Roman citizens are people, not things. I've not made the change myself, since conventions should not be changed without consensus.  If another editor seeing this concurs, please make the change.MayerG (talk) 19:15, 12 October 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  "which" vs. "whom" 

message: I have taken some of the detailed discussed at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Classical Greece and Rome#Consul disambiguation and implemented them into the convention. Further expansion and clarification is till needed but this appears to clarify the position on disambiguation. --Labattblueboy (talk) 08:35, 19 January 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  clarification 

message: Over the past several months there has been contentious debate over aspects of WP:Article Titles policy.  That contentiousness has led to efforts to improve the overall effectiveness of the policy and associated processes.  An RFC entitled: Wikipedia talk:Article titles/RFC-Article title decision practice has been initiated to assess the communities’ understanding of our title decision making policy.  As a project that has created or influenced subject specific naming conventions, participants in this project are encouraged to review and participate in the RFC.--Mike Cline (talk) 17:33, 16 February 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  RFC – WP title decision practice 

message: I think it might be worthwhile to specify that in text, Romans should be referred to, in the first instance, by disambiguating linked name or with an explanatory phrase instead of the abbreviations common in classical scholarship. What I mean by that is not  but rather . Similarly, a link is should be sufficient disambiguation. If the text simply says Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, this is a problem (which one?). If it links to Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus (this time the tribune's father), I think that should be noted as okay. Ifly6 (talk) 10:08, 5 June 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: This seems like basic common sense to me.  Not sure why anyone would be intentionally leaving it unclear which of several potentially notable persons with the same name is being referred to.  If it occurs, it's probably accidental, or in the case of using abbreviations instead of writing out words, being overly faithful to specialist sources.  But in either case it's easily corrected: reword and/or link to the article on the intended person (if there is one).  If abbreviations are necessary—i.e. in a table—then they can be written out and listed in a section preceding or following the table.  I don't know whether any of this needs to be added to the guideline, because it's just basic editing.  Is there some other circumstance I'm not aware of?  P Aculeius (talk) 13:57, 5 June 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Name in article text