Ifly6

Usage of templates such as Template:Cite book and Template:Cite journal ought to be compulsory (and you should use all the relevant paramaters, especially edition). There are clear network effects from having a consistent, widely used, easily parseable citation system.^[2] They ought to be put in hand in earnest. It is impossible to overutilise Template:Sfn and Template:Harvnb. Pinpoint citations also should be compulsory. Even worse is when editors point to a source nobody else can find or read;^[3] Wikipedians should reject such sources which are so reliant on assertion and faith. Both are little better than saying "trust me".

I feel also that there is a major problem with old sources on Wikipedia. Just because you found something in some hundred-fifty year old book does not mean that it is reflective of the current scholarship.^[4] Just because Herodotus, Plutarch, Suetonius, or some other ancient historian said "this is how it happened" does not make it true.^[5] The factual validity of the ancient (and, for us, primary)^[6] sources is heavily questioned in modern scholarship.^[7] Nor should we be accepting things simply on Mommsen's reputation; scholars and archaeologists have done excellent work since the 19th century and yielded many much-needed corrections.^[8] Also, if your contributions are literally just regurgitating what you saw in HBO's Rome, please stop.

Textual criticism has gone a long way since the 19th century. It is simply not the case that the classical texts are "unchanging" or otherwise that somehow people in the 19th century got everything right even on the texts themselves. For example, D R Shakleton-Bailey, writing in the 1999 Loeb edition of Letters of Atticus, summarises significant advances in critically correcting previous "fragments of earlier manuscripts, and, importantly, reports from a variety of sources" and similar advances in chronological assignment of Cicero's letters.^[9] If you want to read a lot about the (somewhat dry) but very important field of emendation just read extracts from A E Housman.

Similarly, editors ought not rely so heavily on mass market books, inter alia Tom Holland,^[10][11] which repeat discredited interpretations or regurgitate the ancient sources reflexively. Archaeological evidence is not some idle boast. It is extremely important. We know much of the extent and magnitude of Gracchan land reform only because we have recovered their boundary stones. We know about the Roman market economy's extent in trade of staple goods only because we have recovered the amphora.^[12][13] Modern academic sources that engage with multiple disciplines should always be preferred.

It feels at times as if some editors are writing articles by reading some reference, like Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography or the Oxford Classical Dictionary, for the primary sources. Then they read the primary sources and base the article on those. This is, frankly, really bad. It runs into the exact problems that plague those primary sources. The primary sources (eg Plutarch, Appian, Livy, etc), although secondary sources in their day, are not internally reliable enough to base a whole narrative around. There is great suspicion that the stories in them are purposefully embellished and not wholly factual.

Even if we ignore the issues with the primary sources and the need to use them with care, editors should be honest about where they are getting their information: if you found it in Smith or the OCD, say so. Don't lie like Robert Graves and pretend that you did your own original research when you just copied the primary sources from a reference work.^[14] We have modern sources. They are readily available. You can cite both them and the primary sources like Plutarch and Appian, after reading the modern assessment of accuracy on some point. These are not ancient Chinese secrets.

These are links from the Wikipedia Library. A lot of classics scholarship is published in book form (for some indiscernible reason) rather than journal form, making Jstor less useful than one might hope. These links might be helpful.

You can find some books summarised in précis on reviews on the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, which is usually very helpful. It also helps determine whether something is or is not a bad book (provided it has been out for more than a few years). Recall, however, that non-academic books will normally get no reviews.

In the category of not useful links are things like YouTube videos. It is basically impossible for anyone who is not a specialist to know enough to make a weekly series of videos on, say, Roman history. Channels like Kings and Generals are among the worst: they constantly disseminate inaccurate, obsolete, or uncritically-read primary source accounts of events. Various blogs across the internet are similarly of little value unless the author is prima facie credible: I would put a minimum there to be a PhD in the relevant topic.

This section details what I think are some annoyances. These are my views only.

Omit all unnecessary punctuation. Thus, not e.g., but eg, T. R. S. Broughton but T R S Broughton. As to capitalisation, in general I agree with WP:NCCAPS' deference to academic styles:

[T]he Wikipedia MoS and naming conventions are a consensus-based balance between them, drawing primarily upon academic style, not journalistic or marketing/business styles...

I also think the standard should be raised from consistently capitalised in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources to almost universally capitalised in academic sources. Thus, if there is any doubt about capitalisation, decapitalise it.

For classical names, you can use a trailing apostrophe alone. I don't think anyone should bother changing whole articles one way or the other, but I will defend that the trailing apostrophe alone is entirely and absolutely acceptable.

I'll just quote:

Use an apostrophe alone after classical or classicizing names ending in s or es: ... Herodotus'... Venus'... Xerxes'... Erasmus'... Themistocles'... This traditional practice in classical works is still employed by many scholars. Certainly follow it for longer names... as well as for the post-classical Latinate names favoured throughout the Middle Ages.^[15]

The citation templates all support the addition of archive links: |archive-url=. Adding archive links for live sites is a waste of your time and is, as far as I can tell, largely done to pad edit counts.

1. WP:ARCHIVEEARLY is not a policy, guideline, or recommendation. WP:DEADREF does not require or recommend addition of archive links as much as it does creation of archives. Now...
2. Archives for every single link added to Wikipedia are created automatically by Internet Archive.^[16]
3. Internet Archive bot already edits all links that become dead to include the archive link.^[17]

Thus, adding archive links to live sites to preempt their (not always likely) death like this is completely unnecessary. They are also many times cruft-inducing or plainly useless. First, on the cruft. The following is from a single reference on an old version of Julius Caesar. It should read Suet. Iul., 1; Plut. Caes., 1; Vell. Pat., 2.41. Instead, it reads:

<ref>Suetonius, ''Julius'' [https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Suetonius/12Caesars/Julius*.html#1 1] {{Webarchive|url=https://archive.today/20120530163202/http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Suetonius/12Caesars/Julius*.html#1 |date=30 May 2012 }}; Plutarch, ''Caesar'' [https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Caesar*.html#1 1] {{Webarchive|url=http://webarchive.loc.gov/all/20180213130122/http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/e/roman/texts/plutarch/lives/caesar%2A.html#1 |date=13 February 2018 }}; Velleius Paterculus, ''Roman History'' [https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Velleius_Paterculus/2B*.html#41 2.41] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220731043323/https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Velleius_Paterculus/2B%2A.html#41 |date=31 July 2022 }}</ref>

This is hard to parse in the editor and when multiple references are chained in sequence, extremely difficult to get through. Removing them shortened the article by around 28,000 bytes. Furthermore, the "archives" automatically generated for many links, especially those to paywalled sites, are completely useless. See, for example, these archive links to Jstor, a site which is almost certainly not going down any time soon:

<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Steel |first=Catherine |date=2014 |title=The Roman senate and the post-Sullan "res publica" |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/24432812 |journal=Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte |volume=63 |issue=3 |pages=323–339 |doi=10.25162/historia-2014-0018 |jstor=24432812 |s2cid=151289863 |issn=0018-2311 |access-date=26 May 2022 |archive-date=26 May 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220526152815/https://www.jstor.org/stable/24432812 |url-status=live }}</ref>

That archive link points to a blank page. It does not help that the archive dates commonly added are wrong and postdate |access-date= (though not in this instance).

Among other discussions, see:

There is no consensus in favour of mass addition of archive links to live websites. Some articles have clear consensuses against doing so. I think the same rationale applies elsewhere. Regardless, this "archive everything" mind virus is of extremely middling value to the encyclopaedia while incurring substantial costs for editors.

There is absolutely no need to constantly add And XYZius' actions led to these other actions that eventually led to the formation of the Roman empire. This is classic whig history in the exact way Butterfield criticised English historians of anachronistically projecting parliamentary-democracy-awesome into the English Civil War. The Parliamentarians were not democrats.^[18] Nor were the Gracchans or Marians proto-democrats or secret Augustan-style autocrats.^[19]

Tiberius Gracchus did not set up the Roman empire. He was not intending to set up the Roman empire. Land reform was connected to (1) gaining political power and clients and (2) dealing with the shortfall of soldiers in the census.^[20] Gaius Marius also did not set up the Roman empire. He was not intending to set up the Roman empire. While he did do some murdering at the end of his life – which nobody should be defending – hiring soldiers from the poor was temporary and meant to find men to fight without resorting to unpopular (but still feasible) conscription.^[21] Both men need to be understood in terms of their times and not as an modern politicians or as proto-autocrats in hindsight.

If you're going to do a This eventually led to the Roman empire! sort of comment, some kind of explanation would be needed. Who believes this? For what reasons? How did it contribute to the later event? Is there consensus on that attribution? Teleological history, regardless, should be avoided.

They were not political parties. Some scholars think they were ideologies, a topic of heated debate.^[22] And recent work has shown they are modern label of which Romans knew nothing.^[23] I will grant that there is a long history of using populares and optimates to describe Roman politics, made famous by Mommsen. I will also grant that there is a reason for us to have stuff like categories for populares as an affordance for readers. But this party politics standpoint is not where the scholarship has gone.^[24]

What that means, I think, for Wikipedia editors, is that we shouldn't be putting populares in everywhere. We need to be judicious. This is especially true with infoboxes, which per the Manual of Style are supplements to articles. First, if the article does not say that a person is popularis, it should not include it in the infobox. Second, if the populares are not political parties, they cannot also be factions in a civil war. This also requires us to reflect critically about the sources we use. Many old sources, especially before the 1930s, talk in party politics terms. That does not make them reflective of current scholarship. Age matters. Classical scholarship moves slowly, but that does not mean it is still.

I keep this list largely so I can keep track of my own projects. But if you see something that you think is interesting here, do feel free to set up (if not present) or comment on the relevant talk page. Constructive feedback is always appreciated.