NovaRoma talk:Wiki Editing for Romans

Latest revision as of 13:49, 28 October 2006

Italics and Bold

This wiki is going to contain lots of Latin words used within non-Latin articles. It would be much easier to read such articles if the Latin words were clearly marked as such. There is already a convention in academic writing that italics are used for words in languages other than the main language of the text. With all that in mind I'd like to suggest that we use italics exclusively for words in languages other than the main language of the article, and make this usage compulsory. This will leave us with only one level of emphasis (bold), but do we really need more than one? Cordus 11:23, 25 June 2006 (CDT)

I don't disagree at all. Making it compulsory won't be easy, particularly in cases where we see "Consuls" in one place and Consules elsewhere, but it seems a reasonable suggestion. Q. Caecilius Metellus 13:28, 25 June 2006 (CDT)

Yes, we'll probably never get complete consistency, but we can get close to it by a two-armed strategy: the first is to ask people to follow this policy when editing articles, and the second is to give tinkerers like myself carte blanche to italicize Latin words in other people's articles. At the moment what's holding me back from doing is that we have no officially stated policy to do it. Cordus 07:11, 26 June 2006 (CDT)

I think we can go one better. I think we can make a bot that we can load up with a Latin wordlist and then unleash on the wiki. It would check for italics and provide them when missing. First: policy. Second: army of 'bots. M. Lucretius Agricola 07:42, 26 June 2006 (CDT)

I say "Go for it!". The bots could certainly help, though, of course, they can't get everything, but giving "tinkerers" Cordus will help us get it through. I don't forsee any problems other than the ones already mentioned. Q. Caecilius Metellus 13:22, 26 June 2006 (CDT)

Sounds like a consensus. I'll make the necessary changes. Cordus 16:26, 27 June 2006 (CDT)

Footnotes & references

I've mentioned on a couple of occasions that I think it would be a desirable and realistic objective for this website to become, within the next five to ten years, the internet's most useful single resource for the ancient (and modern) Roman republic. That means being fairly academic when we need to be, and that means backing up statements of historical fact with references to sources. So we're going to need a standard format for references.

Having looked here I can see that this is a bit of a problem for wikis. Having little numbers which link to a block of footnotes at the bottom of an article is annoying because it means you keep jumping around. Putting the references in brackets within the text interrupts the flow of the prose and is likely to overload the non-academic reader with unwanted information.

In some ways the ideal option would be to have a little number which would open a mini pop-up window containing the text of the footnote, so you could have both the main text and the note visible at the same time. But that would annoy people who don't like pop-ups, and it may not be technically feasible anyway.

Any thoughts?

- Cordus 19:02, 27 October 2006 (CDT)

You are correct. Footnotes are not easy in mediawiki, in-text citation harms the flow, pop-ups are annoying to many (including me). In-text citations are the easiest, and I think the least evil of the options. It is also helpful to have a "References" section at the end, even if there are refs in text, and this section might include full biblio, even ISBNs. People eventually get used to in-text citations, and it is a good thing to get people used to seeing things referenced in that way (or referenced in any way).

If we have an article "Macrobius" and you cite him as (Macr.. xx) with Macr. being a link to "Macrobius", (i.e., [[Macrobius|Macr.]]) do note that "Macrobius" will appear as hover text. Agricola 19:36, 27 October 2006 (CDT)

Hmm. Okay, I'll try the in-text method on the 'senate procedures' article and see how it goes.

- Cordus 08:48, 28 October 2006 (CDT)