Vicipaedia:Petitio magistratus/Nickshanks

Nicholas Shanks; 28 Oct 2004

I would like to nominate myself for administrator status on the Latin wikipedia.
About Me
I am 23, British, and have recently taken up re-learning Latin after ten years. I am educating myself using the five Cambridge Latin Course text books. My Latin is not yet good enough to write articles, and as such I prefer to read (which aids my learning) and do maintenance tasks, such as the creation of Urbs/Index stipularum.
Wikipedia Opinions
I am of the general opinion that Latin does not equal Roman. As with every other language, Latin has developed since those times, and articles written in Latin today should not be bound by the constraints of "what the Romans used to do". On en: I am pro-stub, on la: I am anti-stub. I believe clicking pagina fortuita should always lead one to a page that is worth reading, e.g. a Flumina Europae article instead of the collection of much smaller articles such as Albis that exist at present (which would redirect to Flumina Europae#Albis in this example). At the moment articles like these just have a few brief sentences which mostly say the same thing with much overlap. Condensing these into a single article would boost readability and content density. I believe the bible articles should be moved to wikisource (something I would personally undertake after taking a specific vote on the matter) and prefer 'arabic' (indian) numerals to roman numerals. As for the alphabet, I consider j, k, ð, þ, w, y and z not to be part of the Latin alphabet, and would specifically try to move/rename articles with W and J in them, and make such amendments to articles' content where appropriate. I am undecided about words such as Boötes, but believe ligatures are best handled by the users own glyph renderer rather than inserting them into the underlying character stream in the wikipedia database.
I wish to take charge of running the Votes for Deletion and Speedy Deletion pages (we don't yet have either, AFAIK) and in re-organising parts of Wikipedia:Taberna and User:CalRis25/Temp 1 into some sort of structured "How to make la.wikipedia better" system. I am aware of the deletion policies on en: and would apply the same principles, namely 80% of the vote and the same strict guidelines for speedy deletions. There are only two active admins at the moment, Adam and Justin.
Wikipedia History
If one cares to read my talk page one would see that there are basically two things I have been involved in which drew comment, the naming of towns where I have lived which had no article yet, and the marking of many one-line stubs for deletion, the contents of which are saved here. I do not want to delete content from wikipedia, but wish instead to consolidate it into fewer articles and remove/redirect all the dead ends. I am always open to discussion on any matter and as shown by my Callunacampus/Hatfeldia discourse with Justin, am willing to accept someone else's opinion over my own. I would also try to get a vote on whether Pagina prima/Nova should replace Pagina prima, as I have put a lot of effort into improving the front page there (templates, CSS, less HTML tags) and would like to see it used. Thank you for taking the time to read my request. — Nicolus 12:21 oct 28, 2004 (UTC)

Pro

• Adam Episcopus 04:45 nov 1, 2004 (UTC)
• CalRis25 11:08 nov 1, 2004 (UTC)
• Robin Patterson 21:57 nov 2, 2004 (UTC) (With only 6 current admins out of 220 registered users, I think the addition of a keen sensible learner of the language is a good idea.)
• André Müller 15:29 nov 8, 2004 (UTC)

Contra

• Myces Tiberinus 16:18 nov 1, 2004 (UTC) fastidire y et zeta nimium strictus es (et k! sequenter h erit!). Voto contra quia pro pleroque quod vis facere non necesse administrator es. Et, multas recensiones habet sed plerumque minores et quasi semper sine summariis... Etiam— nolo te facere iniuriam, sed non credo quod excedis directoria usualia per mensuram magnam.
  • The requirements for self-nomination on en: are much higher than they would be here if written down. There is a constant supply of willing users there. Here that's simply not the case. And I do believe more admins are necessary as there remains things which have been decided upon but not carried out, such as removing the vulgate bible. How about a compromise? Temporarily +op me, I will remove Liber Exodus 1 and the rest of them, but do nothing more, then de-op me and give me a few more months to improve my Latin before considering again. — Nicolus 03:37 nov 11, 2004 (UTC)

• --Iustinus 18:12 nov 1, 2004 (UTC). I'm sorry, Nick. I do like you, and I'm glad you're working here, but a) I don't think your Latin is currently anywhere near good enough and b) there is seems to be no strong consensus about the programs you wish to pursue as a moderator. I would definitely consider you if you ran again after these two situations had changed.
  • (a) will definitely change. I am spending about three hours a day every day teaching myself from course books. (b) whilst true, does not really matter. Whilst I can explain why I think what I do, it is out of my hands what others ultimately decide. However since as a responsible admin I wouldn't do anything that people didn't agree to beforehand, the lack of consensus on some, all or none of what has been mentioned above is not of too much consequence. I have yet too see anyone arguing in favour of keeping those stubs, people either agree with me or sit on the fence and say "Well I don't like them but I don't really think they should be deleted. Somebody might edit some one day." :-) What do you think of my suggestion in response to Mycēs above? — Nicolus 03:37 nov 11, 2004 (UTC)
    • Nick- Contact me on AIM within the next couple of days. --Iustinus 19:03 nov 11, 2004 (UTC)

Notanda

• As you note, Latin ≠ Roman, so I would caution you on removing letters from articles as "not ... part of the Roman alphabet." If <w> was good enough for Wolfgangus Amadeus Mozart, then it's good enough for me (note also that in Carolus Darwin we are dealing with an un-Latinized family name, on which see Usor:Iustinus/Translator's Guide#Latin Names of Historical Figures). <J> we can argue about (and indeed, I have), but my general feeling about it is that it may be permissible in certain cases in the body of an article, but should not be used in the actual page title. Same with diaereses: they can, and should be used where appropriate on the first citation of the headword in the article, but not in the article title itself (cf. Alcaeda). Boötes should be changed to Bootes not only for this reason, but also because the diaeresis only makes sense there in English and other languages that use a <oo> digraph. --Iustinus 23:50 oct 28, 2004 (UTC)
  • Thanks, I wasn't aware of those subpages of yours, they make quite interesting reading. Is there a central page that links to all this sort of information yet? Also, I did say not part of the (modern) Latin alphabet, which is different from that of antiquity (lower case, for example). It's hard to make oneself clear when characters like ß, ø, <eth>, ? etc. are called 'Latin letters' by the likes of Unicode. http://web.nickshanks.com/images/emoticons/smile.png — Nicolus 16:21 oct 29, 2004 (UTC)
    • Ah, I had assumed you already knew about my Translator's Guide. I really need to hammer that into shape and post it somewhere more public. Was there any more information you were interested in? As for the "Latin" alphabet, i totally didn't notice that you had included y and z in the list of questionable letters. As CalRis25 and Myces have already pointed out, those should definitely not be included. The Romans essentially used them only in forreign words, but they did use them. Likewise k: the Romans hardly ever used it at all, but they difinitely considered it a letter of the alphabet for some reason, and that is why it somehow managed to survive to the present day. --Iustinus 18:16 nov 1, 2004 (UTC)
• I agree with some of your ideas, although I'm not sure we necessarily need to get rid of very small stubs (although sometimes I do think we should, so I'm kind of undecided myself). I think you've been doing a lot of good work and we could use another admin who is willing to devote a lot of time here. Adam Episcopus 04:45 nov 1, 2004 (UTC)
• CalRis25 11:08 nov 1, 2004 (UTC): thumbs up re your request for adminship. Some notes:

• stubs in la.Wikipedia: I absolutely agree with you. I'm a fervent enemy of those, especially of sub-stubs. Less is more, at least in this respect.
• Roman Letters: According to a book of mine the letters Y and Z were borrowed from the Greeks, but already at the end of the Roman Republic! So they are not all that foreign.
• Bible source texts: don't bother with a vote, just remove them. There has been consensus that those shouldn't be here.
• Pagina Nova: your draft looks good to me. By all means get along with it.
• Restructuring User:CalRis25/Temp 1: Good! That should have been done a long time ago. Some of it can be archived, however, as things have been agreed upon. Especially there should be some modus operandi regarding these suggestions. After some discussing a decision should be made, and after that that part should be removed from this How to make... and moved to an archive.
• Consolidating content: seems good to me; one reason why I started the Glossarium astronomiae.
• Suggestion: we definitely need some more or less canonical guide lines regarding translation of names of places and persons. Some of the translations are rather ludicrous. The ones by Iustinus may be a start, but in the end those should be incorporated in the Auxilium.
• Empty articles: most date-articles don't yet contain any content, but that should be rather easy to remedy. So don't remove those.

Good luck and ad multos anno!