Talk:List of Olympic winners of the Stadion race

Articles for Deletion merge templates

Greek Names

Instead of eliminting useful links would it be possible to have the names of these winners in original Greek language?--93.45.152.38 (talk) 12:07, 9 June 2015 (UTC)

• IP user 93.45.152.38, this is the English language Wikipedia, so the first statement of the athletes' names should be the English transliterations of those names. That said, there is ample support for including the Greek language statement of their names in a parenthetical in the first sentence of each article in the interests of historical and linguistic accuracy. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 12:27, 9 June 2015 (UTC)

That's what I mean. Can you add them?--93.45.152.38 (talk) 12:32, 9 June 2015 (UTC)

Sir (or ma'am), I am not fluent in modern Greek, nor am I a scholar of ancient Greek. My personal command of Greek is limited to being able to recite the Greek alphabet before a lit match burns my fingertips. There are, however, several editors who are working on this article who are at least knowledgeable in the pertinent history of the ancient Olympics, and presumably have access to sources that have statement of the athletes' names in Greek. I endorse your request, and I will mention it to those editors actively working on the article. If you have a list you of Greek names you can post below, or an online reference to which you can link, that would be helpful. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 13:12, 9 June 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, that's very kind. Unfortunately I have no Greek list, that's why I was looking here.--93.45.152.38 (talk) 14:47, 9 June 2015 (UTC)

@Hyphantes, Pishcal, Andrew Davidson, Calathan, Elassint, Jpbrenna, and Mr. Stradivarius:@Peterkingiron, Qwertyus, Sadads, Samwalton9, Sillyfolkboy, Spirit of Eagle, and Srnec: Hey, y'all. The sounds like an excellent suggestion from the IP user -- it's fairly standard to include native language name statements in Wikipedia bios. Does anyone have the references and/or Greek language skills to implement this idea? Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 15:38, 9 June 2015 (UTC)

A good idea indeed. Unfortunately I have neither of these things! Sam Walton (talk) 16:02, 9 June 2015 (UTC)

A partial list appears in Olympic Victor Lists and Ancient Greek History (p. 528). I've added two of the names. Unfortunately, Eusebius's Greek original only survives in Latin translations. QVVERTYVS (hm?) 17:48, 9 June 2015 (UTC)

You're a gentleman and a scholar, sir. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 17:51, 9 June 2015 (UTC)

It's a good idea. I can type in Ancient Greek, but I do not have a good, complete source for these names from which to type. The Greek Wikipedia list uses modernized Greek versions of the names that employ post-1982 accentuation reform spellings, and in some cases, modern place of origin conventions using the preposition apo, "from". The winner of the 5th race, for example, is listed at Greek Wikipedia as Αισχίνης από την Ήλιδα "Aeschines from Elis" instead of the ancient "Aeschines the Elean", who by English-language convention is called "Aeschines of Elis". The expected Ancient Greek form would be Αἰσχίνης ὁ Ἠλείος, but I can't find any source online that gives that; in fact, Google doesn't turn up any ancient spellings of Elean except in the accusative plural; in the nominative singular it is confused with ἥλιος and the Epic variant ἠέλιος ("sun", "Helios". (I just corrected a Czech article on that point).

It's not quite true that Eusebius survives only in Latin translations: there are numerous Byzantine Greek pericopes, and there are nearly-complete Armenian translations; these were the source for the Latin translations beginning in the 18th century. There is also a chronicle of Saint Jerome that was drawn from the second part of Eusebius and records all of the stadion victors in Latin. The Latin translator who tried to do the most thorough job of all of combining all of these sources and checking them against each other lost the race to publication to a less scrupulous printer, and later translators demurred when confronted with the project of re-constructing precise Ancient Greek spellings by back-translating the missing parts into Greek. You can read about it here: http://www.attalus.org/translate/eusebius.html

Post-1982 Modern Greek sources are usually going to be aimed at a popular audience and written in the most accessible variety of Demotic Greek. The Liddell Scott, while a very good Ancient Greek-English dictionary, doesn't cover many of these names, neither in the print edition that I have on my bookshelf nor the online Perseus edition, nor do most of the other reference works that I have. In my experience, the best source for the attested Greek variants from mediaeval Greek pericopes would be exactly the sort of 19th/early 20th century Katharevousa Greek reference works that Hyphantes has, and that are difficult to find outside of Greece except in the stacks of major university libraries. I no longer have access to IU's library, and such works are generally non-circulating, which means that someone outside of Greece who doesn't have this type of reference at home will have to volunteer to take copious notes, or have a laptop and Wi-Fi access from the stacks so that he can type directly into Wikipedia . It seems that Hyphantes had the resources and the interest to contribute in a way that few others can, but he seems to be on Wikibreak if not WikiRetirement now. And even if we had him or someone like Hyphantes, we would still have the problem of the missing Greek portions where we have no attested Greek name. If he appears in Dionysius of Halicarnassus or another author, we can supply the name that author uses; in some cases, we will have more than one source, and they will vary. We should include all of them, unless we have a scholarly source that argues for a "correct" native name based on other evidence. --Jpbrenna (talk)

Thanks, Jpbrenna. It might be helpful if all participants created a set of online reference links on this talk page -- English, Greek or otherwise -- for all persons capable of using them. Obviously the online Greek references present challenges for those of us who are English-speakers, but apparently several of us do have Greek language skills. Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 14:12, 10 June 2015 (UTC)

Lost categories

Sad story: Here, everybody seems to come up with promises on how things will be improved, but nobody steps in to do it.

Actually the page is a real mess, with athletes having only their names and others having some additional info, some having blue links, some red links, some no links, and some blue links redirecting to a redirect redirecting to the same page. The only consistent change is that the merged athletes have disappeared from the categories system, and that is hardly a progress, because it is a loss of information and leaves me to repair the untold consequences, when a category is deleted because apparently empty.--Borsanova (talk) 16:19, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

@Borsanova: I agree that the merge has not been done well and information has been lost. Please feel free to take any non-merged info and condense it into the list here (which was the intention of the merge discussion). It's worth bearing in mind that the category system is principally for categorising articles. The good news is that WikiData is a perfect place to include the categorical information that has been lost in the merge. The conditions for creating a data item are much more open, it being a database: the specific point for notability of the athletes would be "refers to an instance of a clearly identifiable conceptual or material entity...in the sense that it can be described using serious and publicly available references." All the athletes clearly pass that bar. SFB 20:08, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

Not that I understand much of your tech talk, but I do understand that the category is empty again. Not your fault, though.--Borsanova (talk) 12:45, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

@Borsanova: Sorry, it wasn't my intention to be obtuse. Wikidata can be used to store facts on a topic in a structured manner. For example see the Wikidata item for Eurybus of Athens. You can gather quite a lot of basic information this way. There's a "create an item" link on the right which you can use to make pages for the other athletes in the stadion winner list if you like, using Eurybus as a model. SFB 22:09, 13 December 2015 (UTC)