Talk:Roman diocese

message: "It is, therefore, unsurprising that, as the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches began to define their administrative structures"
At the time of the the collapse of most of the western Roman Empire, there was no such thing as the "Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches".   There was Christianity.   In any event, the term 'catholic' meant, at that time the universal church, the true meaning of the word 'catholic'.   To identify "Catholic church" in this context as the current Roman Catholic Church (by contrasting it with the Eastern Orthodox church from which Rome was to break - or the other way around, depending on ones views of Romes schism with the Pentarchy) is historically inaccurate.--jrl 13:02, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Factual inaccuracy

message: I've rolled the article back to revision 854883716 of 13:04, August 14, 2018 by Furius to remove approximately 40kb of original research added by  without the addition of a single source. Further rollbacks may be required. See also Talk:Elizabethan Religious Settlement#Rollback to remove original research, and the user's talk page. Mathglot (talk) 01:02, 28 November 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  rollback #1 

message: Just a note to acknowledge that User:DuckeggAlex's eleven edits from Nov. 28 are fine; some even have edit summaries, and they appear to improve verifiability by adding ISBN's to some previously existing references. So that's the good news. However, any new edits to the article at this point, good or not, complicate clean-up of the already existing damage to the article by earlier unsourced original research which still needs to be investigated and removed, because further rollbacks would remove new edits including good ones, which would need to be reinstated after the rollback. So, as a courtesy, I'm asking everyone for their indulgence for a while, and posting this notice:
:
When things are back to normal, I'll strike the text above.  This is just a request, as I can't tell anybody what to do or not to do, but further edits will cause an additional burden on editors trying to clean up the article. (If this message is still present after a long period, please ping me, in case I forget to strike it.) Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 05:20, 28 November 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: For the record, there were a slew of edits to the article on 2 December 2018 by , but these were exclusively or almost exclusively to add missing <ref> tags, and not content. This was actually beneficial, because it exposed the references which had hitherto been buried in-line in the running text of the body of the article, so that they became visible in the "References" section in the bottom matter.  The tags also permitted a Regex pattern which slurped all the references, so that we now have them available below at "#Source list saved from article for any future versions of the article, without having to dive into the History to find them.  Mathglot (talk) 21:33, 2 December 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: Rollback has been completed (see #Rollback #3, below). Please feel free to improve the article. Mathglot (talk) 09:45, 6 December 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  post-rollback2 edits 

message: This is a brief summary timeline of the article edit history, in order to give an overview and assist in deciding how best to proceed, especially (but not only) vis-a-vis sourcing and organizing current content vs. further rollbacks. The article began in 2007 and grew slowly over a period of ten years and numerous editors to 6.5kb. Starting in September 2017, the article exploded in size with hundreds of edits primarily by two users:  and  (and also  as well as two IPs that belong to him I believe), reaching 192kb on November 27, 2018, before being sequentially rolled back in three separate operations ending on December 6, 2018.
* 135585363 17:15, June 3, 2007‎ Article created as a redirect by  and turned into a 2kb stub the same day.
* Article expanded slowly over 10 years (diff) to 6.5kb with numerous editors
* 786254572 07:54, June 18, 2017‎  (at this point, article was 6,544b, and had 2 refs)
* 799956413 20:36, September 10, 2017‎   start of 864-edit run by this user (and )
** during this three-month run, there were 29 other edits by 20 unique users ()
** 840676833 12:23 May 11, 2018 Alexander Domanda end of 864-edit run. (135,078 bytes, 56 refs, 7 ibids, 99 op cits. Lead: 51 paragraphs, 5,450 words, 33.4kb; Body (excluding bottom matter): 139 paragraphs, 15,147 words, 92kb) 
* Between 840729848 19:40, May 11, 2018‎ and 845880869 19:26, June 14, 2018‎ 5.86.156.73 there were 25 edits by 8 editors; 14 of them by two IPs belonging to Alex imho: ( and ; ending at 136,118 bytes, 56 refs.
* 846962102 00:05, June 22, 2018‎ first edit by . Article at 136,512 bytes. Start of run of 100 edits by DuckeggAlex. The IP edit right before this one, was the target of rollback #2.
** Between 00:05 June 22 2018 and 00:26 August 14 there were 2 edits by 2 other users ( +46b, Magic links bot +20b)
** 854816559 00:26, August 14, 2018‎ End of 100-edit run. (153,142 bytes, 56 refs, 9 ibids, 107 op cits; Lead: 2 paragraphs, 223 words; Body (excl bottom matter): 142,867b, 207 paragraphs, 23,309 words.) This rev was the target of Rollback #1.
* August 14, 2018‎ three edits by  (+1568b) rescuing 37 in-line citations lacking <ref> tags, including conversion of 4 ibids and 10 op cits
* 854883716 13:04, August 14, 2018 article stood at 154,710 bytes, 93 refs, 5 ibids, 97 op cits
* 854896205 14:56, August 14, 2018‎ DuckeggAlex begins run of 466 edits 
** Between 13:04, August 14, 2018 and 23:10, November 27, 2018 there were 30 other edits by 13 users: ()
** 870942685 23:10, November 27, 2018 last of 466-edit run by DuckeggAlex (192,739b, 93 refs, 17 ibids, 120 op cits; Lead: 9 paragraphs, 776 words, 4,845 bytes)
* : 870954244 00:55, November 28, 2018‎ (-38,029b) rolled back by  to revision 854883716 of 13:04, August 14, 2018 by Furius (154,710 bytes, 93 refs.  Lead: 2 paragraphs, 219 words, 1,392b)
* : 870955752 01:08, November 28, 2018‎ (-18,592) rolled back by Mathglot to rev 845880869 of 19:26, June 14, 2018 by 5.86.156.73. (136,118b, 56 refs; Lead: 53 paragraphs, 5,564 words, 34,162 bytes)
* References in rev 871592599 of 04:09, December 2, 2018 saved to Talk page. (permalink)
* :  872274955 of 09:43, December 6, 2018 (-131,204‎b) rolled back by Mathglot to revision 786254572 of 07:54, June 18, 2017 by Materialscientist (6,551b, 2 refs; Lead: 1 paragraph, 46 words, 328 bytes)  
I would like to keep this section lean and mean and data-rich; so please open a new section for discussions of what to do about the article.  Comments related directly to the formatting of the timeline itself, or how to improve it are welcome here (or just fix it yourself). Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 22:40, 30 November 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Timeline of article edit history 

message: [T]he sections of the text that run from Civil Dioceses to Ecclesiastical Dioceses repeats in extenso the text that precedes from footnotes 1-35. Too much material? DuckeggAlex (talk) 15:57, 2 December 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: Since this concerns the article Roman diocese, it more properly belongs here.  I've opened this section and pasted your comment from my Talk page, so that any user may reply to it. (As I will, but not just now.) Mathglot (talk) 17:15, 2 December 2018 (UTC)
replies: text:  Except for just a quick note to say that this is originally your question, so if you don't like the section title I came up with above, feel free to change it to something more to your liking. Mathglot (talk) 17:51, 2 December 2018 (UTC)

text: "Too much material" is right DuckeggAlex, way too much all the way through that article. Congrats on using a talk page, please communicate with your fellow editors.Smeat75 (talk) 17:15, 2 December 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Body text duplicates footnote content 

message: Article has been rolled back to version 786254572 of 07:54, June 18, 2017, per consensus of participating contributors at discussions here and here.  All references from the previous version of the article have been saved, and copied to this section above.  Anyone should feel free to edit the article again.  Mathglot (talk) 09:43, 6 December 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Rollback #3 

message: Just wanted to start by verifying the basic definition of what this article is about.  All four articles (de es fr it) pretty much agree with the English one that it's an intermediate level of the late Roman Empire civil administration: starting with the four praetorian prefectures at the top, each divided into a number of dioceses under them, and provinces under that.  
* de: Dioikesis (Greek διοίκησις, German Diözese) originally designated administration, and especially state financial administration. Diocese () later developed as a term for the middle level of late Roman administrative system. The term was not widely used until late antiquity: The Roman Empire was initially divided into 46 provinces, which were increased to 101 provinces around AD 300 by Diocletian, primarily by subdividing them; these in turn were grouped into dioceses.
* es:  Diocese (in Latin, diœcēsis, διοίκησις dioíkēsis 'administration') was the term for one of the admistrative divisions of the Late Roman Empire, starting with the Tetrarchy. It formed an intermediate level of government, comprising several provinces. Each diocese was governed by a vicarius ("vicar") who reported to the Praetorian Prefect.
* fr: A diocese (Latin : diœcesis or diocesis) is a geographic subdivision of the territory of the Roman Empire.¶ In its most well-known sense, it is a subdivision of the Roman Empire specific to Late Antiquity, which comprises several Roman provinces under the authority of a vicar.
* it: The diocese (, from , "administration") was an administrative division of the late Roman empire, which grouped together several provinces. The diocese was subordinate to a praetorian prefect, which was the highest administrative division of the empire. The diocese, therefore, was at an intermediate level between the provinces and the aforementioned prefectures.
The French article points out that there are actually two meanings for it, the main one, but also, a secondary meaning of a judiciary subdivision of a Roman province, and they have a brief section discussing that sense of it at the end. The second paragraph of the Spanish article says the same thing, also saying that civil diocese is a synomym of the primary meaning, in order to distinguish it from the ecclesiastical meaning. THe German one starts out with a more overarching term that includes a Greek sense of it. The Spanish is the only one to specifically call out vicarius (instead of the indigenous word for vicar, vicario in the case of Spanish), so that's worth a look. Mathglot (talk) 12:40, 8 December 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Basic definition 

message: Ok, I have done this now: Talk:Roman diocese/Draft structure. Probably best to keep discussion here as much as possible. Looking over the articles in more detail makes clear that they focus a lot on territorial adjustments. We will need to go back through DuckeggAlex's material for the organisational side of things. Furius (talk) 11:52, 9 December 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: Note for the record: the page was moved without leaving a redirect (hence the red link), and can now be found at redirect page . The content of the Draft structure page was copy-pasted to the article itself; see this discussion for details. Mathglot (talk) 09:13, 27 September 2020 (UTC)
thread_title: Subpage for structure

message: Ann-n-n-nn-d, here we go, again. This time, by anonymous users: one IPv6, but mostly by . Their editing pattern suggests very strongly that they are a block-evading sock of . User:73.219.142.120 is now the #2 editor at the article; way behind Alex, but ahead of everybody else already. All-time #4 is the IPv6, but it looks like Alex gave that one up, in favor of IP-73.  Not sure who's interested or following, but notifying previous discussants .  Stay vigilant; a rollback #4 may be in the offing. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 23:00, 6 September 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Also, minor player . Mathglot (talk) 23:04, 6 September 2020 (UTC)

text: I've blocked IP73 for a month. Please let me know if there is continued disruption here. --Izno (talk) 01:39, 7 September 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Here we go again... 

message: Anyone in favor of WP:TNT at this article?   has kindly provided us with this draft; what if we just blew away the current article entirely, and started from Furius's draft? That would make any further rollbacks unnecessary, along with the management headache involved in dealing with it. We just start clean, from zero.  Well, not zero: from this draft.  Mathglot (talk) 06:40, 7 September 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  The way forward: redux 

message: :Does anyone have a preference? If there's no objection, I'm going to go ahead and replace the article with Furius's draft at this point. Adding . Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 09:37, 25 September 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:  The draft that I drew up is not perfect, but will hopefully provide a good start. I'd retain the first paragraph of the current article as the lead. Furius (talk) 12:35, 25 September 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Blow it up per Mathglot and Furius is my view. Smeat75 (talk) 13:44, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

text: No comment. --Izno (talk) 14:43, 25 September 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  pre-TNT feedback 

message: The following suggestions are removed from the Draft and posted here instead:
Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 00:17, 26 September 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  improvement suggestions copied from Draft article 

message: Okay, everything is in place; here goes... Mathglot (talk) 01:23, 27 September 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: . The former content of Talk:Roman diocese/Draft structure draft page (now a red link) has been pasted to Roman diocese in rev. 980529119‎. The draft page has been moved to  and turned into a redirect.  This completes the TNT operation.  Thanks to User:Furius for building the draft, and to all who helped regarding the #HISTMERGE issue. Mathglot (talk) 01:41, 27 September 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  TNT implementation 

message: In looking ahead to a future development of the article from a leaner starting point, we may wish to have a list of sources and references from the earlier version at our disposal.  All references are preserved in the history, of course, but having a list makes it easier to access them:
* /Saved refs from rev 980262288‎#in numerical order - in numerical order: from rev. 980262288‎‎ of 2020-09-25
* /Saved refs from rev 980262288‎#in alphabetical order - sorted, for easier access
Note that an even longer list of references is preserved in section #Sources going forward, above.
Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 21:52, 25 September 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Convenience list of refs from last version 

message: There has been additional, possibly suspicious activity at this article by two new editors  and . Also, the one-month block on  just expired, and the minute it did, here they are again.  Please remain vigilant, and thanks to  for being the first to notice, and being proactive on this. Mathglot (talk) 10:59, 8 October 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Update: these are blocked now. Mathglot (talk) 01:00, 9 October 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: This dude blazed through 50 edits before we could block him. Elizium23 (talk) 01:49, 9 October 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:  Sheesh!  Appreciate it, . Hopefully, it will stay relatively quiet, other than genuine non-sock improvements for the forseeable future. Thanks again. Mathglot (talk) 08:57, 9 October 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Additional suspicious activity