Talk:Greco-Persian Wars

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: not moved. (closed by non-admin page mover) BilledMammal (talk) 11:39, 6 March 2024 (UTC)Reply

Greco-Persian Wars → Persian Wars – Not only is "Persian Wars" the overwhelmingly COMMONNAME of the conflict [1], but it is also more WP:CONCISE. Persian Wars (disambiguation) lists three other conflicts, all of which are WP:PARTIAL title matches that cannot be primary topics since they are never referred to as simply "Persian Wars". There is also Persian Wars (video game), which is obviously of negligible notability. Greco-Persian Wars dwarfs every other article listed on the DAB page in terms of pageviews, and Persian Wars already redirects here. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome lists "Persian Wars" as the common name and "Greco-Persian Wars" the extended form, as does The Oxford Dictionary of the Classical World, the World History Encyclopedia, ThoughtCo, history textbooks [2] [3], English translation of Herodotus [4] [5], etc. InfiniteNexus (talk) 08:10, 28 February 2024 (UTC)Reply

Note: WikiProject Military history has been notified of this discussion. Vanderwaalforces (talk) 09:08, 28 February 2024 (UTC)Reply

Note: WikiProject European history has been notified of this discussion. Vanderwaalforces (talk) 09:08, 28 February 2024 (UTC)Reply

Note: WikiProject Classical Greece and Rome has been notified of this discussion. Vanderwaalforces (talk) 09:10, 28 February 2024 (UTC)Reply

• Oppose. All your sources are written from the perspective of Greek history. From the perspective of Persian history, they are not the "Persian wars". Walrasiad (talk) 09:31, 28 February 2024 (UTC)Reply

  Is there a significant body of English-language scholarship about these wars written from the Persian perspective? Quite early on, the article says, "[a]ll the surviving primary sources for the Greco-Persian Wars are Greek; no contemporary accounts survive in other languages." And given the number of different successor states and the fact that these wars might not be regarded as a major episode in the viewpoint of modern Iran, it may simply be that, as descriptive as the current title is, it isn't widely employed in English-language sources. I think that there is a better objection to this proposal. P Aculeius (talk) 13:51, 28 February 2024 (UTC)Reply

• Comment: you may well be correct in that the proposed title is the one typically used in English. However, taken out of the context of Greek history, readers may not know which wars they refer to from the title alone; the current title is more descriptive. I know that Persia existed in various forms over many centuries, and fought many wars. While the only ones I'm at all familiar with are the ones with Greece, I wouldn't know from the title whether those are the wars in question, or whether the article concerned wars with Rome, or Indian states, or some other powers, or a combination of all of them. Perhaps it would be better to keep the current title, noting in the lead that in Greek history, they are simply the Persian Wars, and subsequent mentions can simply call them that. P Aculeius (talk) 13:51, 28 February 2024 (UTC)Reply
• Oppose While "Persian Wars" is a thing, many secondary sources that I see, as well as Britannica, use "Greco-Persian Wars". Also, Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome cited by nominator says "[...] more accurately called the Greco-Persian Wars". Brandmeister^talk 10:07, 29 February 2024 (UTC)Reply
• Oppose The proposed title "Persian Wars" embodies a point of view (the ancient Greek and "classical" point of view). This no doubt occurred to the Britannica editors too. The decision of the editors of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome is different, because that whole encyclopedia adopts a Greek and Roman point of view, but they also confirm that the name we've been using is "more accurate". We, like Britannica, have to take a whole world point of view, so no change is needed. (I'm using the examples already cited by @Brandmeister: here.) Andrew Dalby 11:34, 29 February 2024 (UTC)Reply
• Oppose. Not specific enough. It made sense for ancient Greek authors to refer to their wars against the Persian Empire as the Persian wars, but that was two and a half thousand years ago. There were wars against the Persians before then, and many many since then. Even the British have fought wars against the Persians (the first in 1856-57, the second in 1941).-- Toddy1 (talk) 15:08, 29 February 2024 (UTC)Reply
• Comment. Names should be chosen based on the relevant academic nomenclature, which I believe is Persian wars (capitalised or uncapitalised), not our guessing as to "sides". I suppose there is a countervailing concern re other Persian wars; keeping the prefix is a reasonably natural disambiguator. Ifly6 (talk) 15:52, 29 February 2024 (UTC)Reply
• Oppose The Persians were involved in many wars. (1) This, however, is not a war that was fought only by Persians, nor against random peoples, but a war with two unambiguously clear sides, one of which was ancient Greece. So Greeks are part of and have contributed to these wars just as much as the Persians, if not more, since thanks to them we have their documented history. (2) As such, I don't see how and why their exclusion from the title improves in any meaningful way the article. I can, on the other hand, see the title becoming a lot more ambiguous. (3) They were called the Persian wars in Greek historiography because they were seen from the Greek pov and in the context of the broader ancient Greek history. When they are taken out of this ancient context and are put into the modern npov English-language wikipedia, they need to be titled in a way so that the average, and the not so knowledgeable, reader unambiguously understands who are the main parties involved. (4) The proposed name is already acknowledged as an alternative in the very first sentence of the article, so it's not at all ignored. (5) The argument regarding the usage of the name in modern literature is valid, but this alone is not a compelling factor for a move; I happen to know numerous wikipedia articles that follow titling conventions that don't reflect the most used nomenclature in english literature. Also, most modern books discuss these events within the context of ancient Greek history, so they don't need to repeat the term "Greco-Persian wars" every single time when referring to them, since the "Greco" part is always self-evident, which is not the case for a stand-alone wikipedia article. Piccco (talk) 22:10, 29 February 2024 (UTC)Reply
• Comment In response to the several arguments above that "there were multiple Persian wars": indeed, there were. As such, this article should not be titled Persian wars; WP:DIFFCAPS matter. None of the other Persian wars are referred to as simply "Persian Wars". This is like arguing War of 1812 needs to be disambiguated because there were (most likely) many other wars going on in 1812. To look at more recent history, 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine was moved last year to just Russian invasion of Ukraine despite Russia having invaded Ukraine several times before 2022. The Persian Wars between the Greeks and the Persians is the primary topic of term "Persian Wars", capitalized — probably because it is the only topic with an exact match. It is irrelevant as to how this came to be ("history is written by the victors" and all that); we do not care if a title is "biased" toward one side or note as long as it is the most common and concise name (WP:NPOVNAME), and in this case, the ngrams leave little room for doubt. I will also note that Persian Wars already redirects here, so a move would have zero negative effect on readers, and the hatnote can point readers to other Persian wars if they were some reason looking for another Persian war but omitted the first half of its name and deliberately typed a capital "W". InfiniteNexus (talk) 23:36, 29 February 2024 (UTC)Reply

  Overall I understand your logic and the argument has weight, but I just don't see this title change as a compelling act or an improvement in any meaningful way. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has not changed from that to simply being "Russian invasion" (a very ambiguous name). Both Russia and Ukraine (the main opponents of this conflict) are unambiguously mentioned in the title; it's just the year that's omitted. It would've made sense to compare if this article was called "5th century Greco-Persian Wars", in contrast, let's say, to the other wars with Persia, like those of Alexander, but that's not the case. The title is already perfectly balanced. Piccco (talk) 01:34, 1 March 2024 (UTC)Reply

  Persian wars is ambiguous; Persian Wars is not. If the (overwhelming) common name for the Russian invasion of Ukraine were Russian Invasion, I would support a move on the grounds of WP:DIFFCAPS and WP:CONCISE. There were other Persian wars, but no other Persian Wars. And even if there were, this is the clear primary topic that satisfies both PT1 and PT2. By the way, if people really think Persian Wars is ambiguous, please send the redirect to RfD after the RM, and then fix the 258 incoming links after that. InfiniteNexus (talk) 16:25, 1 March 2024 (UTC)Reply

• Oppose on POV grounds, as per many above. Johnbod (talk) 20:10, 1 March 2024 (UTC)Reply

  But NPOV is not a requirement for article titles. See WP:NPOVNAME. We give the most weight to the five CRITERIA, which includes recognizability and concision. InfiniteNexus (talk) 17:56, 3 March 2024 (UTC)Reply

  I don't think neutrality is the real issue here: it's recognizability. The present title is clear; the proposed one is not, even if you treat both words as part of a proper name. It would be perfectly reasonable to use "Persian Wars" within the body of the article, once you've established through the lead which wars you mean. But prior to that point, the title is ambiguous, because even people who know about "the" Persian Wars would expect there to be other wars involving Persia that might be covered under this title. If this article had been at the proposed title for a long time, then I could see leaving it there, as it wouldn't seem to be confusing anyone. But the current title is a good one, and the proposed title doesn't improve on it, so the logical course of action is to leave it where it is. P Aculeius (talk) 03:51, 4 March 2024 (UTC)Reply