Talk:Eurybus of Athens

Hyphantes
Since nobody has thought it necessary to post a count before concluding the deletion request, I'll do it.


 * Keep: 5
 * Merge all: 2
 * Merge, but keep some:7
 * Delete: 0

This means that the original deletion request was rejected. I want to thank everybody for this unanimous vote, because it attests that my contributions were valid.

Actually this appeared quite clear from the start as even the originator of the request, Pishcal, has never cast a vote for deletion. His vote is Merge, but keep some.

Thus remains the question why the deletion request was filed at all. I think that Pishcal  had every right to question the utility of the pages created. He was also right trying to influence the further development of the project. There is an instrument on Wikipedia to do that. It is called Talk page.

However he decided on another instrument without ever contacting me and this gave a number of people, who had never taken any interest in the argument, the power to interfere. What followed has been called a "mess" by Dirtlawyer1 and I would rather agree with his definition.

More precisely, I'd tend to call the procedure an abuse, since it has been wielded to install a kind of preventive democratic control over how users have to submit their contributions to Wikipedia, which is certainly not the purpose of a deletion request.

According to the spirit of the compromise reached and to judge from the messages posted on the single talk pages, it is now in the competence of the admins to decide which articles on ancient athletes are permitted, how many and why. Thus everything has been burocraticized and as a consequence the whole area of research has been transformed into a minefield. So who would ever touch it again?

This approach hasn't worked in the past and it never will. Probably these power plays are also among the motives for the loss of so many valid editors whose enthusiasm must have vanished for a reason. As long as these stupid games have the better, I'm afraid the future looks bleak. Wikipedia can only survive as a free encyclopedia and today we have lost some of that freedom.

After many words, here is the body count of today's battle:

This user has stopped contributing to Wikipedia.

What I leave on the field is a rudimentary list of Olympic winners, thirty-five marginal articles with a merge tag and an incomplete calendar which is currently displayed on 776 pages and should have been expanded to 400 more.

Maybe the users wielding paragraphs and guidelines will take care of the completion of these projects, but from what I've seen I'm not very optimistic. Thanks everybody for watching. Good bye.--Hyphantes (talk) 23:17, 27 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Hyphantes, I would be sorry to see you go. I got involved in this too late, and even if there were more time, I think we have to accept that merger was going to be a fate for many of these articles. I may disagree about the total number and the timing, but the time for that argument is over now. It would be very helpful if you could stay and work with us to improve the articles that still have their own namespaces. There are also new articles that need to be created, like a full treatment of the Chest of Cypselus, and the History of Argos. Jpbrenna (talk) 04:29, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
 * I think you're taking this the wrong way. I think everyone here thinks the content of your contributions are good and valid. How we present this material is important for readers and I don't think of it as a stupid game. It's the same reason why having just Chionis of Sparta is superior to dividing the information between Chionis of Sparta at the 29th Olympiad and Chionis of Sparta at the 30th Olympiad. Where there is little information or much overlap, a larger and broader article/list is a much better solution for anyone wanting to learn about the topic (rather than reading the same information over dozens of individual articles).
 * I certainly place a high value on your contributions and it's a pity that you've done it in a way that has ultimately left you feeling a bit hounded. I think you've done great work on Olympic winners of the Stadion race and could make that even better. There are plenty of people here like myself willing to support and defend your work, while guiding you around the whims of Wikipedia. It can be very rewarding to see your work fly to the top of internet searches and to share important knowledge you feel should be more easily available. This needn't be the end of the line if you don't want it to be. SFB 00:10, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks for you kind comments!
 * I have perfectly understood the arguments brought up during the discussion. That was never a problem. But my project was hijacked by Wikipedia bureaucrats and since I have also a job in real life I have no time and nerve to comply with their requests. So you got what I revealed and the rest I'll keep it for myself. Sorry about that, Jpbrenna, because we were starting to develop some good dialogue.
 * Olympic winners of the Stadion race was no great work at all. Using a bit of intelligence it was done in an afternoon. That's why it could certainly be improved, but now you have Peterkingiron and Dirtlawyer1 to give you a hand. Good luck!--Hyphantes (talk) 23:29, 29 May 2015 (UTC)


 * I am afraid that you will not get much out of on this. I regularly monitor CFD discussions and history and Christianity AFDs, but I am currently doing little in the way of editing or creating articles.  Applying guidelines designed for one area to another is often unsatisfactory.  Following the CFD, I was asked to vote again on a few articles where there was a little more than a stub; and I have voted to keep these.  An article merger leaves behind a redirect, so that searches should still bring up the article where the content is merged.  However creating a mass of placeholder stubs is not helpful.  If there is substantive content on any individual, a substantive article should be allowed.  Where we know nothing of a person excepot that his name appears in a list of winners, it is much better for everything to be in a list article, where a table can provide brief additional inforamtion in a subsequent column, if there is any.  With winners in the modern Olympics, there will commonly be substantive to provide a real biography.  However, would we expect to have articles on competitors in the Wenlock Olympics?  The existence of the games is of interest, but the identify of the people who took part (if known at all) is surely NN.  Peterkingiron (talk) 19:53, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

"Ancient Greek" vs. "Greek" tag
I reverted the Ancient Greek tag to just Greek. Because of problems with the preservation of the Eusebius text, we cannot be sure that the variant given is not a post-classical corruption and that the Eurybotas or Eurybotes variants weren't the more ancient forms. We cannot be sure if Eurybus is a reading derived from one of the Armenian translations or one of the Byzantine pericopes, because the published translations upon which we are relying don't specify this and don't show parallel source language texts next to the target language. (IF we can find one, that would be wonderful, but no one has presented one here yet). Dionysus of Halicarnassus calls the same person by a slightly different name that has a dental stem, and the fact that we have a roughly contemporaneous discus-thrower mentioned by Pausanias with a dental-stem version of the name who might or might not be Eurybus lends some weight to this interpretation, but it doesn't prove anything to a degree that seems to have reached the level of general consensus among specialist scholars. It's worth us mentioning these things and scholars have certainly discussed them, but because of WP:No Original Research we can't make assertions that they haven't made. Tagging Eurybus as "Ancient Greek" seems to privilege it over all the other readings that actually might be more ancient. I think it is better to use the el tag which marks it as just "Greek" and leave it at that for now.--Jpbrenna (talk) 18:33, 9 June 2015 (UTC)