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This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Constantinople article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the subject of the article.
Constantinople was one of the Geography and places good articles, but it has been removed from the list. There are suggestions below for improving the article to meet the good article criteria. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.
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"Parts of Michael Gove's levelling-up plan 'copied from Wikipedia'". The Independent. 3 February 2022. Retrieved 3 February 2022. One off-beat part of the report reads: "Constantinople was the capital of the Roman/Byzantine Empire (330-1204 and 1261-1453), the Latin Empire (1204-1261) and the Ottoman Empire (1453-1922)". The text is identical to the first line of the Wikipedia page for Constantinople, right down to formatting and punctuation.
Latest comment: 28 days ago1 comment1 person in discussion
This page has a serious problem of definition. This is apparently due to the misguided attempt at expanding its scope from the Byzantine to the Ottoman period. I can see that we discussed such an expansion back in 2019, with "no consensus" to do so, but then people went ahead and silently did it anyway. The result is an utter mess.
This article is incoherent about what its topic is, and how its topic relates to that of the main Istanbul article. Is it an article about a phase in the history of that one city, Istanbul? Or is it meant to be an article about a city as such, which constitutes its own topic, i.e. a historic entity with a distinct identity of its own, different from modern Istanbul? It can't be both.
If it's meant to be a history period article, then it should be clearly marked as such. It must be structured as a subarticle of History of Istanbul, within a clear WP:SUMMARY style structure. But then, it must also be merged with the History of Constantinople article, which somebody also wrote in the meantime, because evidently a history article can't have its own "history of…" article duplicating it.
Alternatively, it could be an article about a historic city as if it were an entity in its own right. Such a construct is always somehow problematic, but we sometimes choose to do that with ancient predecessor settlements, like Londinium or Lutetia (or of course Byzantium). We very rarely do it with more modern places. To make such a construct viable, it would at the very least need a clearly motivated cut-off date – a time where the identity of a place changes so radically (in terms of urban structure, population, governance or cultural identity) that you could at least partially speak of distinct entities before and after. In the case of Constantinople, the only reasonable candidate for such a cut-off point is 1453, but most certainly not 1930. Nothing about Constantinople changed so radically in 1930 that it would justify treating the before and after in different articles as if they were different cities.
Crucially, the 20th-century change in foreign naming habits ("Istanbul not Constantinople") doesn't constitute such a cut-off point. We structure articles by unity of topics, not by unity of names, since we are an encyclopedia, not a dictionary. "X during the time foreigners called it Y" and "X during the time foreigners called it Z" aren't sensible definitions for splitting an article topic in two.
Of course the article as it now stands is again over-emphasizing that naming change, perpetuating that old canard that Constantinople was "renamed" to Istanbul in 1930. People, can we once and for all get rid of that nonsense? There was only one point in history when this city was "renamed", and that was in 330. The only thing that changed after 1930 was what foreigners called it. That's not a "renaming". The gradual obsolescence of the elevated-register terms "Kostantiniyye" or "Dersaadet" isn't a renaming either.
Somebody recently tried to rescue the article by rewording the intro sentence, but in doing so only made matters worse. Now we have: "Constantinople was the historical name for the city of Istanbul, used particularly by foreigners up until 1930, located on a peninsula at the southeastern tip of Thrace in Europe". Really? The name was located on a peninsula? People, why is it so difficult to keep statements about names separate from statements about the things those names signify?
The extension of coverage into the Ottoman period was done in an inconsistent and haphazard way. For example, the current sections on "Women in literature" and "Media" are about the Ottoman (more narrowly 19th-century) period exclusively. In contrast, the sections on "Markets", "Education", "People from Constantinople", and the architecture "see also"s ("Secular buildings and monuments" and "Churches, monasteries and mosques") are about the Byzantine period exclusively. The History of Constantinople article also treats only the Byzantine period, making the relation between these articles even more muddied.
I intend to reword the intro and change the overall scope back to the Byzantine period only.
level-4 vital article is rated B-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
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