Talk:Sophonias

The need for this disambiguation page
I can appreciate the value of the standardization laid out in WP:MOSDAB. However, I'm concerned that common sense in this case requires a bit of flexibility. One issue that should not be forgotten in the case of a disambiguation page is the likely circumstances under which it will actually come into use for a user of the encyclopedia. In this case, "Sophonias" is so obscure as an alternative version of Zephaniah's name that almost no one will look for Zephaniah under that name. However, a student of the Ancient Greek world, seeing a footnote citing evidence for some point from one of the other Sophonias's commentataries, may well wonder if the encyclopedia provides any information about this obscure source. And this disambiguation page at least clarifies that, no, it does not (beyond the bare-bones statement here). A single sentence of encyclopedic content may not seem to have much value, but it would be more respectful to make sure it does not get casually annihilated&mdash;whatever you have to do according to your own interpretation of the way the rules say things have to be, whether that means writing a stub yourself or some other strategy to make sure you're not deleting valuable information. Wareh (talk) 15:40, 19 February 2009 (UTC)


 * If you feel this other person is notable, please write an article on them. If it not being 'annihilated', it's being corrected to fit MOSDABRL. Boleyn2 (talk) 19:54, 19 February 2009 (UTC)
 * I'd like to echo B's good call on this. The flexibility contemplated by the rubric you cite is for much more exceptional cases than this, and IMO only for ones that strike much further from the roots of the Dab-page concept. If our Dabs are so incomplete that the absence of an entry (and in the pre-article state, thus the absence of a Dab) fails to speak for itself (which i doubt), the response needed is for more editors be sure the articles they are interested in are adequately covered on appropriate Dab pages; keeping the Dabs focused on their task is the user-friendly approach, so they are as efficient and as close to transparent as possible. (And that is why i'm dialing back the wording that does nothing to distinguish him from the OT figure. That said, thanks for an unusually thorough start to the article, probably complete enuf to justify the absence of the stub tag that i expected! --Jerzy•t 10:00, 20 February 2009 (UTC)
 * I just can't wrap my mind around how the absence of an explanation can "speak for itself." It assumes a reader who already knows who Sophonias (commentator) is, but the point was how the otherwise uninformed reader who'd encountered a reference to him would be helped.  If this is what MOSDAB gnomes are up to, I can only imagine how much encyclopedic information is being deleted.  Wareh (talk) 15:23, 20 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Your imagined user is mistaken in using an encyclopedia, when they need a biographical dictionary. NAD. The remedy for that mistake is for them to turn at that pt to a reference that can solve their problem without sabotaging its own primary purpose; if they continue beating their head against the wall we have to present to them, neither a pedia nor a dict can help them. --Jerzy•t 23:39, 23 February 2009 (UTC)
 * As a working scholar in the field (& author of an encyclopedia entry on a person in a printed academic encyclopedia) I just can't share your confidence about the rigid & certain difference between the two. One sentence here was a perfectly good placeholder pending a two-sentence stub (or the eventual article as we now have it). There is not an existential gulf separating the two. Moreover, MOSDAB should have been followed if the article were not written, and I'm sure you'll agree that the examples in that section of MOSDAB are certainly on the borderline of being "dictionary entries." Wareh (talk) 14:56, 24 February 2009 (UTC)
 * I'm reminded of (IIRC) Lincoln Steffens arriving at Heidelberg or one of the great German institutions and presenting his academic credentials; the response was something to the effect of "An American Doktorat? So you'll be registering as an undergraduate." It's not that i think your background is not going to be valuable here, but there's a lot that's just not done here the way it is in academia or traditional publishing. If you look at the edit history, or the talk-page archive, of, say, the guideline you cited, you'll see that we've built the guidelines and policies up using substantial trial and error, and some of the errors reflect the fact that Nupedia wasn't practical, and those involved took a leap into the unknown with a funky thing called a wiki. You're on the right track in thinking that my view is not nearly as important as the guidelines, but the guidelines need interpretation, and interpretation by many eyeballs, so that the effort you've made specifically toward convincing me are out of proportion, unless this is mostly a learning exercise on your part.  In support of that option, i'll tell you that while those guideline examples look like dictdefs, their purpose is entirely different: as they are intended for a Dab rather than an article or list, they can be recognized as navigational devices, having an info-providing function only in service of facilitating the navigation to another article. I am, well, not constantly, but frequently, cleaning up Dab entries like
 * * Empennage
 * or
 * * Comet
 * they fail to speak for themselves by not making clear,
 * that "empennage" (which, only bcz i know the context, i take to be a tangentially appropriate French metaphor, and which is probably equally opaque to many who want to learn, e.g. what a aircraft tail is for, or what moves in one) is connected to aircraft, as the version in the example nicely makes clear, and
 * that the sense of "comet" that the entry lks to is not a concept that "tail" is a name for (which is a momentary stumbling block for every user who gets that far down the page), and which of the possible kinds of relationship makes "comet" relevant to "tail" or vice versa, so that the user does not have to supply guesses: "Comet cleanser and tail: hmm, not likely; is 'Comet' the name of an vehicle with a tail: hmm, maybe; is a comet an animal with a tail: hmm, maybe, comet, comet, oh, no, that's 'civet';..." and so on.
 * At the risk that i've forgotten too much of the details, i'll note that "to another article" is crucial, since i think that this discussion began over a sentence that has no link, and which -- dictdef or not -- would interfere with the purpose that we've hammered out the Dab guidelines to serve. --Jerzy•t 05:32, 26 February 2009 (UTC)