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I don´t know, I like my current "anarchic" workethic: no deadlines, no boss, I can improve what I want, when I want, if I want. For example I just stumbled upon Western Europe and "just" decided to improve it. I don´t really know if there is a real advantage being a member of a wiki-project Flamarande 12:19, 10 March 2006 (UTC) I guess I will never be a administrator this way, but then I don´t know what is the big advantage anyway (besides kicking ppl out :). Flamarande12:19, 10 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Hi, I don´t know what you are currently doing, if you are kind of bored (allthough I doubt it) or something. If you are, and if you are searching for some "Roman article" to improve, fell yourself invited to improve (on your own time, on your own will) the Roman Empire/reorganization. It is basicly a radical improvement (more like a "refounding") of the article Roman empire and will hopefully relace the former one, as soon it is finished. Flamarande11:58, 31 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I noticed, I really loved that you reverted that sneaky change (the time that vandal lost, only to be reverted in 3 secs). I really hate these political correct "angels" (I wont use a more correct word) who merely want to "change everything to a religious neutral dating system". They don´t want to hurt anyone by this "evil and aggresive christian calendar". That is plain bull**** (mostly American, and unknown in Europe). I would love that they bugger wikis of other cultures and make there their "good deeds". They would get their as* kicked. You know what is really ironic? I am a atheist (but clearly not a radical anti-christian, like these "angels"). Flamarande21:59, 18 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Macedonian Wars
Great work on the new campaignboxes! Two small suggestions, if you don't mind:
Links to battles should be given as [[Battle of Someplace|Someplace]] to reduce clutter in the box.
New campaignboxes should ideally be added to this list.
I thought that Aeneas was key to Roman culture when I was first struggling through Vergil; but it really is a superficial overlay, an artificial connexion to Greece, just like the tosh about Evander on the Palladium, or Numa and Pythagoras. For most of the duration of the Republic, hardly any Romans had heard of Aeneas, much less thought him relative.
All the guff in the beginning of the Loeb edition of Livy may well be true, but it is true only for Livy's generation; do read the Loeb of Dion. Hal. to see more.
Thank you for your effort to clarify the “We are too far apart in time to communicate” problem. I agree with you that we can only see different "slices" of time for different areas. I tried to point out that description in this chapter was perhaps too basic, and I am glad that it now mentions the relativity of the term "now" and possibility of finding "archeological evidence" of past civilizations, and thus gives wider picture of this topic.
--Planet-Earth18:38, 24 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Apology accepted. This sort of thing is why WP:AGF is vital, although I recognize that it is hard for everyone, especially if one has just been dealing with a POV-pusher or a troll.
Would a new Roman legends article be better? Much of the contents will, when the article is complete, deal with the early Republic. (Roman mythology would be misleading; they are mostly not stories of gods and heroes, in the Greek sense.)
It's a known bug in MediaWiki that comes up anytime two boxes with "float: right;" are used one after the other, which forces the edit links to the top of the second box; this is why they don't appear to be affected when the order is reversed (the campaignbox is very small).
It should probably be run through a peer review (the new MILHIST one, if it gets started soon enough?), since I'm hardly an expert on Roman warfare. Still, some obvious things I noticed:
The warbox seems too long (c.f. "For wars, only prominent or notable leaders should be listed." in the guidelines), but I may simply be unaware of the relative prominence of all of these people.
The chronology is (or should be) entirely redundant with the text. FAC will come down quite heavily on any perceived list-like sections in an article.
The multiple "Note:" statements in the notes section need to be collapsed into a single one, or even integrated into the notes themselves.
Pictures! I'm sure there are some images of the prominent leaders available somewhere, at least.
Given the film's popularity, I'm surprised there's no real discussion of Spartacus in the article, beyond a link at the bottom. Maybe a full-blown "In popular culture" section would be worthwhile?
Kirill Loksaid to check in with you to see if I might be of use to you. I - like Essjay - don't value people by degrees, but I do have some in history. More importantly, Kirill will tell you I actually do know a little! I am particuarly interested in Rome, from the republic to the Bzyantine Empire, the Carolingians, and the medivial age in general. I have some health issues, so I am not fast, but I am dependable, if you would like to see my work, Srnec and I pretty much wrote the Battle of Tours and Charles Martel, and I did Mongol Military Tactics and Organization, and some others. If I can help, I am at your service. Again, please bear with my not being super speedy, my health has been bothering me. BUT, I can help! old windy bear19:46, 17 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
User:Vedexent My friend, honestly, I consider it a great honor to be allowed to work on wikepedia. I am a true believer in Jimbo's vision of this as the single greatest repository of knowledge ever created.
My area of specialization is medieval europe, but I am fairly well versed in the Roman Era, by that I literally mean from the early republic, to the Empire, to the Eastern Empire, the Carolingian's, (I consider Charlemagne to be the legitimate "heir" to the vanished western empire, and the de facto and de jure father of the Holy Roman Empire - though one could argue the basic Carolingian empire was created by Martel and polished by his son and especially Grandson). Now Voltaire may have been right: it certainly was not Holy, it was not classically Roman, and not an empire in the purest sense. But as my friend Smec says, (we worked a great deal together on the Battle of Tours, and Charles Martel - both of us are great Charles Martel fans!) the Holy Roman Empire constitued an enormous political power for a time, especially under the Saxon and Salian dynasties and, to a lesser, extent, the Hohenstaufen.
Please forgive my stupidity, but I lack the link to the member list of the military history wikiproject and the classical warfare task force - if you send it, i would be honored to be a member. I would like to begin with the real turning points of Roman Republican military history - the Punic Wars. (if that is okay with you!) I am recovering from some heart woes, so my work will not be as swift as normal, but I will do my best. If you want to see good examples of my work, as I said, Smec and I basically wrote the Battle of Tours, and Charles Martel articles, and I wrote most of the article on Mongol Military Tactics and Organization.
Just let me know what to do, and thanks for welcoming me! I am honored! If Smec is not a member, I urge you to recruit him, he is brilliant and a great writer! I truly do believe in this project, and want to help...old windy bear 01:05, 18 March 2006 (UTC)
re: Battle of Cannae
Please, if you have time, make any further edits to The Battle of Cannae article as you see fit. You contributions will be greatly appreciated --chub 01:12, 24 March 2006 (UTC)
No need to apologise. I applaud the efforts you've made to improve the article. In fact, I would encourage you to make as many edits as you can. I've But in order to adress your objection you made on the talk page, I need to you to tag areas of the article where you think references are needed.--Chubdub20:27, 26 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I've added a citation regarding the # of troops involved, but I myself feel that there might be other places where citations need to be included--Chubdub20:33, 26 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
wow, can you say "Exhuastion" :-) I added the citations as you requested, so tell me what you think about the article now. Does it still need more work? --Chubdub22:15, 26 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]
An independent military history peer review has been created for the benefit of the project. A number of articles have already been reviewed, receiving significantly more feedback within the project than they did on the generic peer review page.
Welcome to the inaugural issue of the Military history WikiProject's newsletter! We hope that this new format will help members—especially those who may be unable to keep up with some of the rapid developments that tend to occur—find new groups and programs within the project that they may wish to participate in.
Please consider this inital issue to be a prototype; as always, any comments and suggestions are quite welcome, and will help us improve the newsletter in the coming months.
Proposed guidelines for categories of military people are currently being discussed. A number of issues have already been resolved, but the proposed scheme is still in draft form and further input would be very welcome.
The Allen telescope array article itself contains the removed info. See Key Science for the numbers, for instance.
"The individual survey descriptions are not in the SETI article." I don't quite follow that. 2.1 describes Ozma, 2.4 describes SERENDIP, 2.6 describes Phoenix and so on. Marskell17:01, 7 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
No worries. I think using the bullet points would actually be fine. It will only add a little more space. Rather than linking to the sections on SETI. I'll link to the specific pages. -Marskell17:08, 7 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
For interest's sake...
This is what the page looked like the moment it became a feature candidate. Amazing how standards have changed in two years. My Wiki day is almost done but I'm sure I'll see you again soon :). Marskell17:47, 7 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Ought
I do take that point and had that about it vaguely. "Probably," just doesn't sound "paradoxical", you know? I'll insert "should" instead, as lying somewhere between the two... Marskell14:30, 8 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Pronouns
I'm having a bloody hard time making edits because of blocks and this will be my last one for the day (if it shows up at 21:00 I tried to paste it ten minutes before).
I've edited the intro and would like to edit it further, and you can comment on talk if you'd like. There's one larger thing that I'm noticing when looking at your edits. You use "they", "those (people)" and "we" repeatedly.
"They" can replace a more specified noun previously used ("Fermi's grad students" = "they" later on). But "they" shouldn't stand in for a subject that's not been specified anywhere. Note, "opponents of the subject" is not specified. P. Ward and D. Brownlee, is and thus refer to "them" if you need to larer.
"We" should not be used at all in a generic sentences. "We have learned..." No, "scientists...", or better, "biologists have learned...", and then source it if you can. You've been doing a bang-up job sourcing things where you see you can and I'm absolutely guilty of inserting unsourced stuff, so I don't want to sound over-critical. It's just reading the page I feel basically the whole thing is first-person plural, which is not encyclopedic style. Marskell21:16, 8 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Re: Carthage
Last subject I would have expected to produce an ideological edit war ;-)
My initial suggestion would be to start a RFC on the article, which would hopefully bring some more knowledgeable editors around. I'm somewhat loath to step in, since I don't really know all that much on the subject; but my impression is that he's clearly in the wrong here, as the Carthage-child-sacrifice story, true or not, is notable enough to deserve discussion. Kirill Lokshin01:44, 13 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I vaguely recall an Asimov story about some professor who wanted to prove that the Carthaginians didn't sacrifice children...
I think he needs to be pointed to WP:NPOV and WP:V (particularly the discussion of "truth" in the latter); he seems to be under a number of mistaken impressions about Wikipedia. Kirill Lokshin01:56, 13 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The point will be brought up by anyone responding to the RFC, I'm sure. Given the semi-coherence of some of his comments on the talk page, though, I somehow doubt he'll listen. Kirill Lokshin02:08, 13 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Ah well. If he's on an AOL link, there's not much that can be done other than reverting him (and asking for the page to be protected if it gets too bad). Kirill Lokshin00:33, 14 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
It keeps pace with Wikipedia's overall growth, obviously. But more-commonly-visited articls are more vandalism-prone than obscure ones, so you may just be seeing more as a result of moving closer to core topics with your watchlist. Kirill Lokshin00:39, 14 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
More seriously, the protection will stop the edit war for the time being, and allow some time to build a firm consensus (on the talk page) that our friend Marduk is entirely wrong in how he's going about this. Once it's unprotected, we should be in a better position to keep him from running roughshod over the article. Kirill Lokshin14:29, 14 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Rather annoying that the page got locked with anon's version. He's active on the arab wiki as well, and on fr., some others are safe so I'm assumong his germanic language skills are not that good. A yahoo.fr email perhaps, and lots of varied AOL IP's - this guy is persistent. I'll have a look around the other wikis as well. I kind of got dragged here through the RfC, but, hey now that I'm here...I did notice that the nl wiki seems to have a very well worded and NPOV section on the sacrifice issue, maybe I'll have a go translating that. Plus anon did provide some useful input re. pantheon, although unfortunately he attributes nearly all of the classical pantheon to Carthaginian origin...but does give me some ideas for expanding the article. Kirill is right - who'd have thunk....a Carthaginian Liberation Movement perhaps???!Bridesmill15:53, 14 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Would love to, just not exactly sure where to go...please advise. BTW, the Norw. page is an FA - my norwegian skills are 1-2 at best but perhaps we can get something useful from there. Bridesmill16:05, 14 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Of course you're being unreasonable; you're writing serious, well-thought-out messages to someone who thinks he's a Carthaginian ;-)
His incoherence and his utter inability to engage in normal discussion are quite clear at this point; the real remaining question is how much time and effort will be expended on dealing with him. I suspect it might be quite a lot, unfortunately. Kirill Lokshin00:07, 16 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Hooray! Good work getting the page semi-protected. BTW, please look at this article Religion in Carthage. During the time that Carthage was locked, I copied the religion stuff including the child sacrifice stuff oer to the Religion in Carthage article. Of course, if Marduk ever finds Religion in Carthage, we'll have to go through the whole revert/protect sequence again. Still, I think that the Carthage article is getting too long and the religion section is a good candidate for a standalone article.
After I added the section on ethnicities and citizenship to the Carthage article, I started reading through the interesting discussion going on regarding child sacrifice. Though I was surprised to Marduk here, I probably should have expected it... he frequents other historical forums, under names like "Marduk of Babylon." You can probably imagine his behavior. He spent several weeks attacking people from the position of his unique brand of Tunisian nationalism, and it was discovered based on most of his positions, that he had no academic credibility to support his views - beyond intense virulence. So, until he realized people wouldn't stop he refuting him, he spent weeks adding rude and inflammatory comments to every Carthage related topic he could find. Based on his posts here, he seems to have a fairly predictable formula: 1) attack the intelligence of people who disagree with him 2) mock people who disagree with him 3) presents his opinion 4) claims he has sources 5) fails to provide sources, except for one or two obscure Tunisian academics that have no public credibility beyond their unrelated positions. Suffice to say, he's done this sort of thing many times before.
I'm not terribly familiar with the "social" end of wikipedia, but since this situation seemed so absurd, I thought I'd try and inform someone. I also don't know if wikipedia has any means of stopping members from editing articles, but if there's anyone who has that coming...
Antialcidas 20:42, 4 May 2006 (EST)
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Thanks. I hope that in the next month or so, we can atleast get the Hannibal article to GA status, if not FA status. Its fairly long, and it has a few typos, but I look forward to you playing a big role in improving it once I put it up for peer review.
By the way, good looking at for protecting the article against Vandalism + troll pestering. Unfortunately, I was too busy editing Illmatic article (yes, believe it or not, I do listen to hip hop music lol) to pay attention to all of that nonsense that was going on. Has there been a spike in Wikipedia vandalism while I was away? And why is it that Marduk is so bent on bringing down the article with all of his ideological crap? --Chubdub16:04, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
If this person is editing from a static IP, the IP can perhaps simply be blocked. If it's dynamic, well... might have to come up with some more creative solutions. Let's see if the SP holds for now. · Katefan0(scribble)/poll00:41, 18 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Hi, and thanks for your commendations. I will try to enhance some of the writing on the Carthage page, but, meanwhile, what effects will it have if the page is semi-protected? Would it still be editable? I'm pretty much new here and this stuff gets past me. Also, I would like to apologize for being a bit argumentative when it came to the phoenicia.org stuff. KongminRegent15:58, 10 June 2006 (UTC)KongminRegent[reply]
Fermi Paradox again
Any thoughts on what I posted on the talk page? I haven't had a whole lot of time to edit recently. We had one big push and now it's sort of stalled. Marskell09:18, 19 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]
User Vedexent does not respond to User Marskell because...
...he does not exist and he never did.
According to this scenario, User Marskell completely fabulated Vedexent's existence in a fit of Wiki psychosis. When he thinks he's talking to the non-existent user, he's actually clacking his fingers against the coffee table.
...User Vedexent is simply too busy.
In this scenario, Vedexent is focusing on specific pages to the total exclusion of others. He may or may not come back to Fermi Paradox and nobody knows but him.
...User Vedexent is fed up with User Marskell and wants him to go away.
This theory supposes that User Marskell's belligerence in editing drove Vedexent up the wall, in which case Marskell humbly offers the Dove of Peace and encourages Vedexent to return to Fermi Paradox.
No worriews Ved. With tax season done you can return to alien theorizing. My largest changes were merging what/how we look into larger sections plus some shuffling and renaming in the last section. Note we can "cheat" a little with citations. Here is the title page for the Stephen Webb book. We can use his page numbers as they support given points. I'd basically like at least one cite for each of the specific topics at the end. Marskell09:16, 2 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Military history WikiProject Newsletter - Issue II
Military history WikiProject Newsletter - Issue III - May 2006
The May 2006 issue of the Military history WikiProject newsletter has been published. You may read the newsletter, change the format in which future issues will be delivered to you, or unsubscribe from this notification by following the link. Thank you. Kirill Lokshin05:21, 25 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry, to oppose your request for protection but I think you can appreciate that User:Tony Sidaway also agreed that the first step is to try negotiation rather than to over-react to what is, so far, just a bunch of bluster on the Talk Page.
By the way, this is a picky point but the phrase is "battening down the hatches", not "batting down the hatches".
Vedexent, don't feed the trolls unless you have a good stock of blood pressure medicine stashed away. We're watching and will help you revert if and when Kara Umi/Kadaj/whoever launches their attack. In the meantime, you are wasting precious keystrokes on those trolls. Go on doing good edit work and we'll deal with Kara Umi and his sock puppets as necessary when appropriate.
"However, human sacrifice did occur in Phoenician cults and was perhaps also known and practiced in Emesa. Child sacrifice has been attested for in the Bible and was practiced by the Canaanites; its existence is also suggested by many sarcophagi and stelae in Carthage. Although child sacrifice was forbidden in Tyre after the conquests of Alexander the Great, it was still practiced in Carthage in the second century BCE. It can not be excluded that this practice also continued to be performed in Emesa."[1]
Van Zoonen is a very credible scholar, and this is only a mere example, the fact is that the vast majority of scholars support this view. I've never come across the theory of it being a "Greco-Roman propaganda", which is ridiculous really. I added this as a link in the page and you re-added the 'fact' and 'unreferenced' tags. Miskin12:38, 15 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Battle of the Arar
Hi, long no see. I am currently beginning a improvement of the article Gallic Wars. I found there a very strange redirect to the Gallic Wars named Battle of the Arar. Being cautious I checked it out. There is indeed a small 1st battle (in 58 BC) between the Helvetii and Julius Caesar. Caesar suprised a part of the Helvetii as they were crossing the river Saone and massacred them. But despite searching inside of several books I could not find the specific name for it. Normally the name of these battles are related to a near geographical feature, but Arar is totally unknow to me. I searched in the internet but couldn't find the name Battle of Arar anywhere (besides plenty of sites which borrow the info from Wikipedia). I also couldn't find the official name of the small battle. It might just be possible that this battle doesn't even have a official name. Well to make it short do you know the official name of this battle? Flamarande03:49, 27 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Military history WikiProject Newsletter - Issue IV - June 2006
New infoboxes for military awards and weapons are nearing completion; any comments on the proposed designs would be extremely welcome!
A system of article importance ratings has been introduced to accompany the existing article quality ratings. Help with rating articles would highly appreciated!
Five months ago, as we were in the midst of coordinator elections, Loopy commented that "I don't think it's unrealistic to imagine this project as one of the most prominent and effective ones around in say, a year's time." Since then:
We have grown from just under a hundred members to nearly 300, and appear to be the second largest WikiProject (lagging, curiously enough, behind WP:COMICS).
From one small task force, we have grown to include seventeen.
Instead of a hand-made worklist of a few hundred articles, we now have one that is quickly approaching 10,000, and forms nearly a third of the overall 1.0 worklist effort.
I'd say—without any unrealistic optimism—that we're well on our way to fulfilling those expectations!
The Military history WikiProject coordinator selection process is starting. We are looking to elect seven coordinators to serve for the next six months; if you are interested in running, please sign up here by August 11!
My identification of Cassius, the governor of Cisalpine Gaul in 72BC, as Gaius Cassius Longinus, consul in the previous year, 73BC, is based on Keith Bradley, Slavery and Rebellion in the Roman World: 140B.C.-70B.C., Indiana University Press, 1989, p. 96. Best regards, Xiphophilos00:12, 7 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Gaius Cassius Longinus (father and son?)
Re: your question, the Caesar murderer Gaius Cassius Longinus (quaestor 53, thus born ca. 83 BC) is too young to have participated in the war against Spartacus. The Gaius Cassius Longinus who fought against Spartacus was praet. 76 and cos. 73 BC, i.e. born ca. 113 BC, and he may have been the father of the Caesar murderer. Unfortunately, no wikipedia entry exists for him at this time, and I'm not sure if and when I can create one.Xiphophilos18:44, 7 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Military history WikiProject coordinator election - vote phase!
The Military history WikiProject coordinator election has begun. We will select seven coordinators to serve for the next six months from a pool of eleven candidates. Please vote here by August 26!
The recently promoted Aleksandr Vasilevsky is the project's one hundredth featured article.
We have obtained the services of a bot to assist with the newsletter delivery; much thanks to Grafikm fr for setting this up.
Current proposals and discussions
A new round of project coordinator elections has been proposed. The general intent is to increase the number of assistant coordinators from two to six. All project members are invited to comment on the proposal!
The project userboxes have been moved to subpages of the project due to the German userbox solution; plans to clean up the resulting redirects are currently underway.
