Talk:Lines of amity

Overlap with Line of Demarcation

I question whether there should be a standalone article for Lines of amity, which was just moved to mainspace. There is a lot of overlap between this article, and the topic of the "Line of Demarcation" (a redirect to Treaty of Tordesillas currently) and it may be a WP:REDUNDANTFORK which needs to be merged. The argument for keeping it might be that it's a related article, not a fork, being a hypernym of LoD, and although it's true that the title of this article is more general than LoD, it's not clear where the (ahem) line of separation ought to be between the two, if they are indeed different-enough topics. The Lines of amity § Origin section here mentions the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis, but that content is not sourced, and our article on that treaty does not mention "lines of amity". This google search has plenty of passing mentions, not sure if there's anything more in depth (although this search in Portuguese may have more). These links may help:

• Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL
• France sources: Bing · Cairn · DuckDuckGo · E. Universalis · Gallica · Google · (books · scholar) · Persée · Qwant

Terms for "Lines of amity" exist in de, fr, es, and pt (see wikidata:Q124259653) (but not for ca, it, or nl afaict). There may be a notability issue, as it's hard to find in-depth sources, but even if it is notable, I don't think it passes WP:PAGEDECIDE separate from Line of Demarcation/Tordesillas. Or maybe we should just wait, and try mining some of the links to see what more can be found. Adding Gnat8 and LittlePuppers. Also, SMcCandlish, you usually have a good eye for these things; what's your take? Mathglot (talk) 08:24, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

@Mathglot: I haven't looked at this extremely thoroughly, but from what I remember of when I reviewed this I would say there seems to be enough coverage/usage in sources that we should probably at least mention this somewhere. It could be that that is better done by merging it into another article, but I haven't investigated that angle much.

I'm also not an expert on the subject matter, but what I'm reading (from this article and your link) is that this may have been a verbal agreement at the time of the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis, but not formally recorded in that treaty. LittlePuppers (talk) 08:38, 13 January 2024 (UTC)

There's also demarcation lines which is easily confusable with Line of Demarcation, though I guess capitalization of the latter helps a little. Anway, if LOA and LOD are not distinct enough, it might be better to merge LOD material into LOA, it being a broader subject. And just leave behind a smidgin of WP:SUMMARY at the treaty article? The treaty article doesn't seem like a great target for the LOA term unless it had no use beyond the context of the treaty. GScholar has a bunch of stuff on LOA [1], but it'll take someone fiddling around with their institutional access or WT:The Wikipedia Library to get at much of it. Ngrams tell me that capitalized "Lines of Amity" is rare (and it's an unusual term, so probably low false positives, which surely wouldn't be the case with [l|L]ine[s] of [d|D]emarcation). I don't know jack about this specific subject, though, unfortunately.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:47, 13 January 2024 (UTC)