Talk:Roman Republic

July removals

@PericlesofAthens and T8612: Per

the amount of damage that this one editor inflicted back in July is monumental, ripping away vital context and without any warning, talk page discussion, or even edit summary just erasing and deleting tons of work, effort, and research into scholarly sources, wiping away cited material without any consensus, a truly shameful thing to happen, and quite frankly alarming how it has gone unopposed for so many months. An argument should be made for an immediate lock.

Can we start a discussion on these deletions and some examples on them? I can't say I reviewed them at the time. Not to assign blame – WP:AGF – who is this one editor and what are the content removals you are objecting to? Ifly6 (talk) 15:11, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

I don't think they were made in bad faith, but this editor didn't understand how Wikipedia works. It seems that any sentence that did not end with a reference was removed, as well as those with a "citation needed". T8612 (talk) 18:44, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

I'm going to be generous and also assume these edits were not made in bad faith, we don't necessarily need to discuss the intentions of the editor, but we should sure discuss the alarming amount of material excised from the article, some of it clearly attached to cited scholarly sources (so that wasn't even enough to save it). Most of the content I restored were images as well as image caption descriptions removed with zero justification or even an edit summary explaining what was going on. Providing profoundly terse one-word edit summaries while removing 3,000 KB of text at a time including cited sources is not how anyone should behave or conduct themselves here on this site. The editor in question did some good work in systematically transforming the citation style of the article, but the very intentional bulldozing of other peoples' hard work was totally unwarranted. This is especially the case for the removal of descriptions that muddled the context and ruined the purpose of image placements in several sub-sections. We should be making things easier for general readers to understand, and this quite clearly achieved the opposite effect. Pericles of Athens^Talk 20:33, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

Without diffs or an identification, I have to guess that you mean edits carried out after this article and Roman Empire were tagged as too long. If so, the discussion at Talk:Roman Empire/Archive 11#Length may be relevant. That was followed by much copy-editing of Roman Empire which, at least in part and rather to my surprise, skillfully and beneficially trimmed some longwindedness. I don't know if the edits here were similar; it may also be that to some extent they removed material which was and still is also in linked main articles and may even have been copied here from them, and that all that work, effort and research into scholarly sources remains in those articles. NebY (talk) 21:35, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

Yea the length basis was the main one as to why I didn't review any of the deletions: the article was too long and has been known to be too long. While I appreciate – especially after writing piles of articles on obscure topics or figures like Quintus Caecilius Metellus Celer, Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica Serapio, and the Marian reforms – that the detail that we could go into is near limitless, an article such as this really must be a WP:SUMMARY. Ifly6 (talk) 21:40, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

Who is the mysterious editor at hand? Regards, Thinker78 (talk) 04:34, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

Map in infobox

I just replaced the first map on the right with the second map on the right, which I created earlier today. Some comments.

• No idea on source for the territory in the top one. Bottom is sourced from a trace of a 1906 map called Hammond's 8 x 11 Map of Roman Dominions 44 BC. A copy of the Hammond map can be found here.
  • I am aware there are some differences between the top and bottom maps.
  • There are also some minor differences between the trace and the Hammond map.
  • If you can point out errors in the bottom map I'd be happy to fix them if they're specific enough to implement
• The map tiles I used are from the Consortium of Ancient World Mappers and include terrain, some water features, and exclude stuff like modern borders and urban areas
• I plotted using ESRI:102031 (Europe Equidistant Conic) which should render this region of the globe in a slightly more naturalistic fashion.
• I think the bottom map looks nicer.

I think this should be an uncontroversial improvement. Ifly6 (talk) 03:55, 22 November 2024 (UTC)

"Sullan Republic"

@Remsense, could you elaborate on your reversion of my edit earlier? For others who are reading this, I edited the 'Sullan Republic' section earlier today to read the following:

Cn. Pompey Magnus served the Sullan regime during a short conflict triggered by the republic's own consul, M. Aemilius Lepidus, in 77 BC. Afterwards Pompey commanded troops against the remaining anti-Sullan forces in Spain, which were being led by the proscribed general Q. Sertorius. Pompey successfully brought the hard-fought Sertorian War to a close in 72 BC. While Pompey was in Spain, the Republic faced agitation both foreign and domestic. The main domestic political struggle was the restoration of tribunician powers stripped during Sulla's dictatorship. After rumours of a pact between Sertorius's ostensible republic-in-exile, Mithridates, and various Mediterranean pirate groups...

Whereas Remsense reverted it to the current form, which reads as follows:

Cn. Pompey Magnus served the Sullan regime during a short conflict triggered by the republic's own consul, M. Aemilius Lepidus, in 77 BC and afterwards led troops successfully against the remaining anti-Sullan forces in the Sertorian War; he brought the war successfully to a close in 72 BC. While Pompey was in Spain, the Republic faced agitation both foreign and domestic. The main domestic political struggle was the restoration of tribunician powers stripped during Sulla's dictatorship. After rumours of a pact between Sertorius's ostensible republic-in-exile, Mithridates, and various Mediterranean pirate groups...

I can basically list the reasons for my edit as the following. First, the article as is does not introduce who Sertorius was prior to mentioning his "ostensible republic-in-exile" which may be jarring. Why not just make it clear in the first place, for a general reader? Secondly, the leaders of other revolts -- Spartacus, Eunus, even Cleon, a supremely minor figure in Roman history, are present and linked in the article. Does Sertorius, who led a revolt twice as long as Spartacus, really not warrant specific mention? It seems other rebels are accorded at least a sentence and name. On a related note, why is Spartacus not linked?

I do believe my earlier edit can be revised to flow better (removing "hard-fought", or perhaps combining it in a single sentence), but simply reverting and saying "better before" does not really justify it, so I would appreciate further clarification and addressing of my points. I would also like to hear the opinions of others here too, if any have the time. Best wishes! Harren the Red (talk) 01:12, 26 January 2025 (UTC)

Recent citation reformatting

@GoldRingChip: There was no need to convert {{harvc}} to {{citation}} with {{harvnb}} suffixes. The templates selected should be retained under WP:CITEVAR. I intend to revert this. Please also refrain from script-assisted cosmetic edits like capitalising every template invocation. They hugely clutter the diff. Ifly6 (talk) 20:36, 16 June 2025 (UTC)

• @Ifly6: Hold on… Please don't revert. I've added a lot of information. The Harvc to citation and harvnb was necessary to avoid the 1999a and 1999b citations. I'll switch back the capitals. —GoldRingChip 20:40, 16 June 2025 (UTC)
• @Ifly6: - There I've shifted back the caps templates. And I can do more to make you happy. Just please don't revert entirely. —GoldRingChip 20:45, 16 June 2025 (UTC)

  Thanks for telling me about other changes. I did manual changes back to the existing 1999a and 1999b style ie {{citation}} → {{harvc}} to maintain CS1 consistency. There are also a number of other formatting changes which I don't agree with: the reordering of |editor-last= to the end so it doesn't show alphabetisation; the inclusion of an indent parameter which makes it very easy to lose track of the indentation level; the overwriting of the customary short names for reference works like OCD⁴ and CAH² 9. I have no objection with keeping the longer disambiguations for the Lintott 1999s (Constitution and Violence): I noted that the latter is a second edition per its verso. I was momentarily confused since Violence came out in the 1960s, but that was cleared up quickly when checking.

  I also made some other substantive changes. I redated CAH² 9 from 1992 to 1994: this is the year with which it is customarily cited in the field (eg this review). The external links were all WP:ELNO stuff; I replaced it with WP:ELYES things like DPRR. I've trimmed some unnecessary citations to obsolete and outdated works like Abbott (which is appallingly out of date) and redated it properly from 2001 to 1901 per WP:CITE's guidance to date reprints to the first year of the edition's availability and the original publisher. I've added material from Ramsey 2016 on Clodius. Tatum 1999 should also be cited but I want to sleep. I joined up some citations. Ifly6 (talk) 07:03, 17 June 2025 (UTC)

Vervaet and the lex Valeria

@Theopedias: I added, in two edits, a citation for Vervaet 2004 ex Lex Valeria (82 BC) for the November 82 BC claim you added to the infobox some days ago. Ifly6 (talk) 13:46, 30 March 2026 (UTC)