Talk:Erasmus

Second Splitting Proposal

I am proposing to split the article further, by making another page "Life of Erasmus". This is motivated that even after the previous split to Works of Erasmus, the article is large and an editor re-flagged it for splitting. I already added extra sub-headings, in case that was useful.

In concrete terms:

1. Make new page Life of Erasmus with minimal lead.
2. Move Biography section over
3. Add Main tag and 1 para biography to main article
4. Move over Personal/Clothing, Representations, signet ring and personal motto, and exhumation to Life of Erasmus
5. Fix citations

I am thinking that making a Life of Erasmus article would be better than, say, a Thought of Erasmus because of topic cohesion (and ease) and because his notable thought is probably what people are more interested than his interesting life? Rick Jelliffe (talk) 02:56, 7 July 2024 (UTC)

Y I have split the article again. Instead of the Life of Erasmus idea or the Thought of Erasmus idea, which I think would go against the expectations that the main article is about life and ideas, I have split out the Legacy and Evaluations sections (and the Character Attacks section) into a new article Legacy and Evaluations of Erasmus.

This new article is a good chunk of the main article:

HTML document size: 555 kB
Prose size (including all HTML code): 55 kB
References (including all HTML code): 230 kB
Wiki text: 123 kB
Prose size (text only): 33 kB (5125 words) "readable prose size"
References (text only): 28 kB

So I am removing the "this article is too long and needs to be split header." However, it may be that even with this second split (the first made the Works of Erasmus article, some may feel the article is too long. I agree it is still long, but given his complicated life and extraordinarily broad influence in so many areas, there may be some value in keeping things together, despite the length? Concrete ideas would be useful, of course. Rick Jelliffe (talk) 06:15, 10 August 2024 (UTC)

Content Rating

Before Aug 5 2024, the Erasmus article had a B rating but has clearly become too long. The editor Tpbradbury flagged it as too long and moved the content rating to C on account of the size. On Aug 10, about 1/3 of the article was split out into new article Legacy and Evaluations of Erasmus. I have not moved the rating back to B yet (on the grounds that if a B article is moved to C because it is too big, and then substantially split, it should be B again) to give editors a chance to comment (or in case it is not the way things are done), but I propose to do so within a week if that is OK? Or some other editor might like to do it first? Rick Jelliffe (talk) 00:36, 11 August 2024 (UTC)

accusations of vandalism

At this edit and this edit, Editor Rick Jelliffe accuses me of vandalism. I do not vandalize.

I came to this article to fix ref 178 (permalink) which was added to the article at this edit. The fix was to restore the {{citation needed}} template (line 611 in this diff). I did that, because the cited source, right at the top, has this: "This text was copied from Wikipedia on 2 March 2025 at 3:10AM." Wikipedia and sites that mirror it are not reliable sources; see WP:WPNOTRS.

As part of my normal 'cite repair' work, I:

• removed |url= and assignments when they link to the same source as existing persistent DOI and JSTOR identifiers
  • removed |access-date=, |archive-url=, and |archive-date= which require the now removed |url=
• fixed violations of MOS:CURLY
• hyphenated ISBNs
• removed the meaningless parameter/value pair |url-status=dead
• changed |pages= that identify a single page to |page=
• removed whitespace ahead of <ref> tags
• removed whitespace ahead of colons separating a title from its subtitle
• cleaned up |volume= parameter values that held some form of the word 'number'; I didn't get them all

I do not vandalize. Editor Rick Jelliffe should restore my edit.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 15:03, 10 March 2025 (UTC)

• • I completely apologize to user Trappist the monk for saying he had vandalized the article: I don't know how but I utterly misread the history page that the 6000+ characters deleted were the notes themselves, rather than the result of his excellent hard work in the notes and citations. I have reverted the reversion, I am mystified/embarrassed, and I need to be much more careful in the future. Rick Jelliffe (talk) 05:13, 11 March 2025 (UTC)

Poor sourcing regarding Erasmus' quote about English music.

I removed a quote that I believed to have been from his journals concerning England, but is actually paraphrased from a book that doesn't talk about English music at all. This is poor quote verification by non-human means that I will notify administrators about. Eurostarguage (talk) 18:02, 12 November 2025 (UTC)

Structure

Why does the Works section precede the Life? Srnec (talk) 01:01, 1 February 2026 (UTC)

Because his works are more notable than his biography, in his case. The trouble is that his life is so full of incident and contacts and motion that it can overwhelm or overbalance what he was most influential for: for example, that he was at Oxford University or at the Field of Cloth of Gold or was intolerant of fish or wrote love letters are all quite interesting in their ways, but not of the same notability as that/how he compiled/translated his path-breaking New Testament, or all his Patristic editions, or that many of suggestions in his Annotations were directly taken up as authoritative by Luther, or that he wrote the Praise of Folly, or his championing of peace, etc. I think this is a clear problem in many of the summaries of his life (e.g. in YouTube videos) which e.g. mention his illegitimacy but never really get any deeper than the lazy repetition that he was "the prince of humanists."

There is another notable theologian whose salacious life details can swamp his works, which is Peter Abelard. I see that his entry also handles this by putting his "Career, philosophical thought, and achievements" before his "Life", and I think it is an appropriate model for Erasmus too.

I wonder if the answer is to move out the detailed Life into a new page? The Works summary would not be swamped by a Bio summary, no matter which order they went in? Rick Jelliffe (talk) 07:43, 2 March 2026 (UTC)