Talk:List of Roman nomina

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Merger proposal

Like list of Roman gentes, this article lists all actual and potential gens pages (only in their masculine rather than feminine form), plus a few other nomina which couldn't have have their own standalone gens pages. So, list of Roman gentes is basically a subset of list of Roman nomina, and it makes sense that it should be merged here. There is already a Category:Roman gentes which lists all gentes in alphabetical order, making its article counterpart even more redundant. Avilich (talk) 15:41, 20 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The two articles have different scopes. When the "List of Roman gentes" was started, it was far from certain that the two would ever overlap to a significant degree—this was a neglected backwater, with lots of names that were here by mistake or unverifiable. Many of the entries had vague explanations, although few of them were helpful. However, it was a much longer list, and it was unclear whether the "List of Roman gentes" would ever approach the same size. It eventually did, and the overlap became substantial only because I kept updating this page as new articles about various gentes were written, and occasionally pruning names that couldn't be verified. The "List of Roman gentes" actually has explanatory material, and is in much better shape overall; if one of the two articles has to go after more than ten years of co-existence, it should probably be this one. But the "List of Roman gentes" is limited to families that can be shown to have existed in one manner or another. This one has the potential to be expanded far beyond its present size, or that of the "List of Roman gentes", but it's in want of editors to do that at this point in time. I don't see the existence of overlapping categories as especially relevant; I expect most list articles would have overlapping categories, but categories don't provide the same opportunity to provide relevant context and information about their contents, and the existence of an overlapping category shouldn't generally be a reason to delete the corresponding list article. P Aculeius (talk) 16:58, 20 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Explanatory material is or should be a feature of any list per MOS, but the explanation you speak of is mostly borrowed from gens itself. The list of Roman gentes is, to my understanding, a catalog of gentes that fulfill WP:GNG. As it happens, so is the category. WP:NOTDUPE indeed says lists and categories "are considered to be complementary, not inappropriately duplicative", but their functions and even their format (displaying the entries in alphabetical order) are similar in this case. It seems reasonable to list gentilicia whose corresponding gentes won't ever have their own Wikipedia pages (e.g. 'Saturninius' and 'Macrobius', which I myself added here not long ago), whence this very article. Since individual gentilicia don't meet the usual requirements for a standalone article, a special page designated for listing them (i.e. this one) is needed. This is not the case for gentes, whose articles presumably do meet GNG standards and are thus automatically listed in categories. Thus, a third list which mostly overlaps with the other two seems, IMO, redundant.

I don't feel strongly about this, but note that, whenever a gens page is moved/created, both the lists of nomina and gentes require updating of the entry in question. If only a single list existed, this would not be the case. Avilich (talk) 17:58, 20 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Updating both pages has never been an issue, although in most cases known gentes have been prefilled as redlinks in both categories, and so no updating is needed anyway most of the time. The explanatory material is appropriate in scope and length for the "List of Roman gentes", and I don't see much relevance in the fact that it's taken largely from a larger and more expansive stand-alone article on the topic. I would expect most of the explanations in list articles to summarize material from related articles that have more space and go into greater detail. I believe that WP:NOTDUPE, cited above, explicitly prefers the existence of list articles to the extent that they overlap with categories; it clearly says that the existence of such a category is not a valid reason to delete the article, and I believe the same would hold for merging, since apart from preserving the article history the effect would be functionally identical.
You're right that the two lists currently have a very high overlap, but that's the result of the process by which articles about Roman gentes were written, and names added to each list and/or edited simultaneously. But that probably won't be the case forever, particularly if gentilicia for which it's unlikely that an article could be written are never added to that list, but are added here. Although one might argue that anything that's clearly a gentilicium could go there, and we're using nomen to mean gentilicium, there are, as you point out, names classified as nomina that are at best, borderline: we have no idea whether their bearers were related, or regarded themselves as such because of them, and there is no evidence of these names being used as part of the classic tria nomina (or the older duo nomina of the Republic), and for this reason they haven't been added to the "List of Roman gentes", and probably won't be in the future. There is much epigraphic material that could be trawled for such nomina—as well as obscure gentes that could arguably be included—but that's something I haven't had time for, since my long-term goal is still to finish the last two or three letters, and go back to pick up some of the obscure ones that a well-meaning editor added, without actually writing any corresponding articles.
At some future point these lists are likely to diverge more noticeably in scope; we just haven't reached that point yet. But there's no rush: nothing bad happens if they continue to overlap for a while, and we're not saving Wikipedia space by combining them. The lists were created for different purposes, and can best serve those purposes as they are. P Aculeius (talk) 00:34, 21 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]
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