Talk:List of 5th-century religious leaders

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The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was to merge.

Merger proposal

I propose that these lists be be merged.

• Merge List of religious leaders in 451 into List of 5th-century religious leaders
• Merge List of religious leaders in 452 into List of 5th-century religious leaders
• Merge List of religious leaders in 453 into List of 5th-century religious leaders
• Merge List of religious leaders in 454 into List of 5th-century religious leaders
• Merge List of religious leaders in 455 into List of 5th-century religious leaders
• Merge List of religious leaders in 458 into List of 5th-century religious leaders

All of the content in these can be (and already is) contained in the destination with much less total text. In fact the destination is barely any longer than the longest sub-page; yet the destination has all the years of the sub-page. This has already been done with the 20th- and 21st-century lists of religious leaders. There are three important reasons to do this.

1. This page can be better maintained with less work. Since religious leaders typically change infrequently (less often than political leaders) it is very difficult to maintain each sub-page, and they are not maintained. (At best) when a leader dies the death date is put in a succeeding leader is added. Editors should go back and change the 10 or 20 year pages since the leader came to office from "Pope Joe, Bishop of Klingon (1995–present)" to "1995–2013", but no one ever does this.

2. More content can be maintained with more completeness and with less or the same amount of work. Even in this last 12 year period (it is typically worse for 20th-century religious leaders) the list get longer over time as more religions and sub-groups are added from year to year. Again, no one wants to go back and add leaders for every year since the groups started. Groups are added to the current year and that is it. I personal might have done all the back creation that have ever been done for these 13 pages.

3 A system of religious leaders by century allows finding leaders even when only the century (but not the years) that the leader served. If I want to find the name of Pope John Paul I I can find it much faster on List of 20th-century religious leaders than on List of religious leaders in 1978. tahc ^chat 02:38, 2 December 2013 (UTC)

I think I'd support this as this is a very early era, so specifying by year might not be as exact or necessary, and the articles are small. I mean this is before Islam or the Second Council of Nicaea, which I think is the last council agreed on by the Eastern Orthodox Church and Catholic Church. Also it's maybe not the best time for recorded records of some religions. That said List of state leaders in 455 exists and isn't merged to anything, but I might be willing to give less significance to that in this case.

Now then that will hopefully be all for the rest of Advent. See you next year!--T. Anthony (talk) 10:57, 2 December 2013 (UTC)

• Support unhesitatingly. I see no need whatever for giving so similar list for these immediately (or almost) successive years. Esoglou (talk) 17:19, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

Pseudo-hatnotes

@Tahc: you reverted [1] my deletion of "pseudo-hatnotes" at this article, and at other articles in this series up to List of 5th-century religious leaders. My edit comment was "Remove inappropriate hatnote"; yours was "Rvt -- Please seek WP:CON before making controversial edits". The text I removed was:

;[[List of 4th-century religious leaders]] - [[List of 6th-century religious leaders]] - [[Lists of religious leaders by century]]

which renders as:

List of 4th-century religious leaders - List of 6th-century religious leaders - Lists of religious leaders by century

I don't regard the removal of badly-formatted preamble as contentious. The editing guideline for hatnotes is Wikipedia:Hatnote. A hatnote should be formatted properly using an appropriate template, and its purpose is "to help readers locate a different article if the one they are at is not the one they're looking for." In this case the hatnote does not use a hatnote template – it incorrectly uses markup for a description list (MOS:DEFLIST) to use inappropriate bold formatting. Even if an appropriate hatnote template was used, it would still be inappropriate because the page title is unambiguous (WP:NAMB). Furthermore, on this page only (not the others in the series) there is a redlink.

WP:MOS has appropriate guidance for article formatting including hatnotes and the lead and these "pseudo-hatnotes" meet none of those guidelines. The place for links to other related articles is at a See also section, or there may be a template available like Template:Year nav topic or Template:Leaders by year. Shhhnotsoloud (talk) 09:54, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

I don't object to removing the red link.

I do think that these pages, and pages like them, should have at the top a way to link to the the preceding and succeeding pages, such as this page or this other page, and many others do.

What do you propose as an alternative? tahc ^chat 14:12, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

@Tahc: Your first example List of state leaders in the 18th century uses three {{See also}} hatnotes at the top: these are inappropriate because there are three rather than one (WP:ONESHORTHAT) but more importantly because, as the directions at Template:See also makes clear, "Do not use this template on top of a page, where hatnotes are for disambiguation and not for related topics." Your second example is Category:17th-century Christians: did you mean Christianity in the 17th century? All those hatnotes are clutter and should be removed and the links placed at See also. I disagree that articles need these links at the top: the place for links to related articles in the See also section, or, maybe, in an infobox. Shhhnotsoloud (talk) 15:46, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

• Brought here by the comment at Wikipedia talk:Hatnote#Pseudo-hatnotes: These hatnotes are non-standard, and unexpected for the reader. I suggest that a better way to provide this navigation would be to create a navbox template {{Lists of religious leaders by century}} which could then be used in all the pages in Category:Lists of religious leaders by century. PamD 17:06, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

@Shhhnotsoloud: No, I did mean Category:17th-century Christians. It has a navbox in the upper center with links to the preceding and succeeding pages.

I repeat, what do you propose as an alternative? tahc ^chat 17:20, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

@Shhhnotsoloud: and @PamD: Yes. See my changes to List of 5th-century religious leaders and List of 6th-century religious leaders. tahc ^chat 17:18, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

@Tahc: those examples looks good tahc, thank you. Shhhnotsoloud (talk) 17:22, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

Better, but I'd still think that a template based on {{Navbox}}, at the foot of each list, would be preferable: then you have just the one template which you can add to all the relevant articles, it can include red links if appropriate, etc. Someone well versed in templates could put it together very quickly ... sadly it would take me quite a bit longer. PamD 17:32, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

Agree with PamD -- why hard-code a pseudo-template? Better to just use {{Navbox}} or one of the similar available boxes. older ≠ wiser 19:46, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

• How about this one: {{Lists of religious leaders by century}} giving:

PamD 21:04, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

@Bkonrad, Tahc, and Shhhnotsoloud: I forgot to ping anyone... Any suggestions for improving that navbox? PamD 10:13, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

This is okay, but I prefer the naxbox as I created for the upper right. Having both would be fine. tahc ^chat 12:57, 7 April 2021 (UTC)