Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Siege of Oricum

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 keep. Consensus to keep the content is clear. Where, and under what name, is an editorial conversation with third opinion, if necessary to mediate. Star Mississippi 16:29, 15 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Siege of Oricum[edit]

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Not a siege (creator himself couldn't find any evidence that this is one) or notable event. Was deprodded on a promise of good sources and content (why this couldn't be added anywhere else other than an article about a spurious event is beyond me), but the only reliable source added doesn't give any details, and the others are unreliable and primary (those don't add significant details either). This is just a routine and ordinary surrender among many others that took place during the period in question, and there is no reason to have an article about it. Avilich (talk) 14:38, 7 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of History-related deletion discussions. Avilich (talk) 14:38, 7 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose as the editor who spent time remedying the nominator's failure to do WP:BEFORE yet again. One would think that the advance of an army on a city and its subsequent surrender during one of the most important wars in antiquity would qualify as "notable". Certainly it was notable enough for Appian to discuss it, notable enough to be discussed in classical encyclopedias, and if Wikipedia doesn't have room for it, I don't know why. The nominator doesn't think anything written in antiquity is a reliable source, which is absurd; clearly WP:PRIMARY has not been read and understood. And it's not clear which of the two modern sources he considers unreliable, but he's wrong either way, as both are perfectly reliable for their contents. Additionally, WP:BEFORE expects editors to look for sources before nominating articles for deletion based on inadequate sourcing; once again that was not done, since reliable sources could have been located with even the most cursory of searches—and the nominator is too well-acquainted with the sources available to have been unaware of that; he simply chose to disregard WP:BEFORE, leaving it to other editors to do what he was supposed to do in the first place. The argument about the event not being a "siege" is not relevant to AFD; it's an argument about the best title for the article. I suppose the original author couldn't think of a better description; maybe "Surrender of Oricum" would be more fitting, and I used it in the lead when rewriting the article. But that's not relevant to this discussion. P Aculeius (talk) 14:57, 7 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Primary sources don't confer notability, notability is not inherited, content forking is a reason for deletion, and a single-sentence mention of a WP:ROUTINE event in a source from 2 centuries ago (the one you added) is not significant coverage. You know all of this already. Avilich (talk) 00:34, 8 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Please stop trying to synthesize unrelated policies and guidelines to sound like something else. The first question is whether the topic is notable, not whether "primary sources confer notability", which is not under discussion. But as we seem to be going down that rabbit hole anyway, if you were at all familiar with WP:PRIMARY, you would be aware that 1) primary sources are not excluded from use in Wikipedia, provided they are used appropriately; 2) Appian is not a primary source, as neither he nor anyone he knew was either a participant or a witness to any of the events described. His history is by definition a secondary source independent of Caesar.

Notability not being inherited has nothing to do with this article; there is no claim that "everything that Caesar did" is notable, but the capture of a city by a daring night march and the unwillingness of its inhabitants to resist the authority of a Roman consul at the head of an army is notable, and certainly does not become non-notable because the consul was Caesar. You may also have missed this warning at the beginning of WP:NOTINHERITED: "Caution: This section is not a content guideline or policy. Nor does it apply to speedy deletion or proposed deletion, as they are not deletion discussions. It only applies to arguments to avoid at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion." [emphasis supplied]

This is not a discussion of content forking. That would be a valid matter to raise in a merger discussion, but this is a deletion discussion. The article has been nominated for deletion, which means that all of the content and its sources would be deleted from the encyclopedia, not merged into another article where they might be covered instead. Your argument is that the subject is not notable, that it is "routine" and not deserving of being discussed anywhere—so describing it as a content fork is a complete non-sequitur.

Your blatant misuse of WP:ROUTINE should be obvious to anyone who reads the guideline, but to save others searching for it, here it is in its entirety:

Per Wikipedia policy, routine news coverage of such things as announcements are not sufficient basis for an article. Planned coverage of scheduled events, especially when those involved in the event are also promoting it, is considered to be routine.[4] Wedding announcements, sports scores, crime logs, and other items that tend to get an exemption from newsworthiness discussions should be considered routine. Routine events such as sports matches, film premieres, press conferences etc. may be better covered as part of another article, if at all. Run-of-the-mill events—common, everyday, ordinary items that do not stand out—are probably not notable. This is especially true of the brief, often light and amusing (for example bear-in-a-tree or local-person-wins-award), stories that frequently appear in the back pages of newspapers or near the end of nightly news broadcasts ("And finally" stories).

The capture of a strategically-important city by Caesar during the Civil War—however quickly or bloodlessly—is not "routine" in the sense that a wedding announcement, sports score, crime log, or bear-in-a-tree is "routine", and no reasonable person could possibly think that WP:ROUTINE is describing such events (although according to your argument, the fact that the city was captured by Caesar during the Civil War makes it less notable than if it had been captured by an obscure person, with no relation to other events).

Wikipedia doesn't have an expiration date for sources—a particularly important thing to remember in the field of classics, where much of the best scholarship occurred between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. There needs to be a better reason for excluding an apparently reliable source than the date of first publication—and it's hard to see what reason there could possibly be to object to the account in "the source that must not be named". Is it supposed to be biased or confused in some manner, or proven incorrect by subsequent discoveries? If not, then there is no argument for excluding it.

You've adopted an interesting strategy: come up with enough arguments to eliminate this source and that source, and then you can claim that there isn't significant coverage because you've eliminated all but one or two sources. "This source doesn't count because it's primary. This source doesn't count because it's Roman. This source doesn't count because it's old. This source doesn't count because it's a passing mention. This source doesn't count because it's a bear-in-a-tree. Only one source remains, so there's no significant coverage." I wish I could treat this line of attack with dignity. No, I don't. It's a mess of outcome-driven arguments with little or no merit. Someone thought this article shouldn't be deleted, so now it's imperative to attack it with every weapon in the arsenal to try to get it deleted—just throw everything against the wall and see if anything sticks.

I'll ignore the "you know all of this already" because it's a transparent retort to my claim that you were well aware of where to find reliable sources on this topic when you proposed deleting the article and then when you started an AFD, without bothering to look for any. Instead you based your argument entirely on the state of the sourcing already in the article, in direct contravention of WP:BEFORE. But in either case, the burden is on the nominator to make a good-faith effort to determine whether there are (or are likely to be) reliable sources to support an article that lacks sufficient sources, and in each case you have avoided that and demanded that unless other editors find and insert them, the article must be deleted (of course, when reliable sources were inserted, you then argued that all but one of them was unreliable, and therefore the article should be deleted because it has only one source, which means that there is no significant coverage—a mind-boggling feat of reasoning), and that the topic isn't notable and therefore ought to be deleted even if there are reliable sources, which supposedly there aren't.

But to return to WP:BEFORE, if you feel that the sources in an article are inadequate, then find more. If you think they're too old or outdated, find newer or better ones to supplement or replace them. Don't just assert that because the existing sources are no good, no further effort need be expended on discussing or improving the article—don't try to shift the burden to other editors to do what you should have done in the first place, and then do your utmost to dismiss their work as irrelevant when they take the time and effort to improve the article. P Aculeius (talk) 04:33, 8 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Before is automatically met if the nominator has an idea of the external sourcing available. In this case, the original sources only say that 'person A immediately surrendered this city to person B', and, for this reason, no secondary source is ever going to have significant coverage of the topic. The mere fact of one town surrendering, among a dozen others, is not by itself notable, and the fact should instead be mentioned as part of some other notable topic. If you had noticed that the surrendering governor's article already indeed mentions the fall of Oricum, you might've improved that one instead and saved us both some time. In fact I would do that straight away if I were you; I won't be able to 'dismiss' your work as irrelevant if you do so because there are no grounds to delete that article. The only thing that matters here is that there is not enough information about this ordinary town surrender that it needs its own page: it's a content fork that adds nothing useful. Avilich (talk) 14:32, 8 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

This idea that the best scholarship occurred between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries seems little more than a dismissal of the last hundred years of scholarship. Views have changed substantially over that time.

The racially-motivated ideas for the origins of the plebs in Niebuhr (along with his idea that ballads transmitted Rome's early history) are no longer accepted. Cornell, Beginnings of Rome (1995) pp 12, 116, 242. Mommsen's History is now recognised as highly polemical: eg Rebenich, "Theodor Mommsen's History of Rome and it's political and intellectual context" in Arena, Prag (eds) Companion to the political culture of the Roman republic (2022). Mommsen's conception of a highly legalistic republic also are rejected in favour of flexible theories of republican practice. The most annoying are the primary source claims that the Gracchi's efforts were always in vain when we keep finding boundary stone after boundary stone with the agrarian commission's names on it. See eg Roselaar, Public land (2010).

Sure, there is no "expiry date". There is also no reason these days to be going first to long-aged material which is known to be relatively uncritical when we have access to the latest edition of the entire Oxford Classical Dictionary in the Wikipedia Library. We can even follow bibliographies in the OCD relatively easily because we have access to lots of recent books through Wiley, Oxford Scholarship, and DeGruyter (also on Wikipedia Library). We should prefer newer sources not because of some perverse fetish, but because we can do it easily and without difficulty and without falling into their pitfalls. Ifly6 (talk) 14:56, 9 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

This is a nonsensical argument. We do not stop using or citing authorities because the views that they held on topics other than what they are being cited for are outdated or even offensive to modern sensibilities. The examples provided are completely irrelevant to this discussion; the article does not cite Niebuhr or Mommsen, but if it did cite them for simple factual statements that are nowhere disputed and for which there is no evidence of obsolescence, then there would be no legitimate reason to excise those citations; in fact it would be extremely bad scholarship to disregard the opinions of experts merely because their opinions on unrelated matters are obsolete. This article does not discuss, nor touch upon in any way, racial attitudes of the 19th (or 20th, or 21st) century, or abstract concepts of legal formalism.

Nobody here contends that anything in the article—or in any of the sources cited—is inaccurate, except whether the article has the best title, which is not really relevant to a deletion discussion. So to insist that the sources need to be deleted or disregarded even if they are accurate and reliable as to the facts for which they are cited, serves no useful purpose other than to justify the deletion of the article on the grounds of insufficient sources—itself a dubious notion in articles about classical antiquity. If you want to add more recent sources and their analysis, fine, do it, especially if they have something useful to add to the topic. But if you don't have any, if there's no evidence that what's cited to the extant sources is in some way wrong, inaccurate, or misleading, then don't attack those sources out of sheer prejudice—the belief that their authors must somewhere, somehow, have held wrong beliefs about some other things, and therefore cannot be regarded as reliable sources for anything that they ever wrote. P Aculeius (talk) 16:45, 9 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

So to insist that the sources need to be deleted or disregarded Sources which you yourself added in the past two days! ; which you can simply copy and paste elsewhere; and which you made a point of adding in the trashiest of articles rather than actual legitimate ones which genuinely need improvement. They are not being deleted or disregarded, they were never there to begin with; if you insist on adding them to the worst place possible then the problem is a different one. Avilich (talk) 00:37, 10 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Rename to Fall of Oricum, obviously. It's not the main subject of any of the sources, but in my view there's enough detail in enough scholarly sources to merit a brief article.—S Marshall T/C 16:20, 7 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@S Marshall: Can you share some of those 'scholarly sources', and while you're at it, explain why 'person A surrendered this city to person B' is notable enough for an article? Avilich (talk) 16:39, 7 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

After reviewing (and adding) some material to what I rewrote yesterday, I think the original title is okay. It seems that there were two interconnected events—Caesar's bloodless capture, which is sometimes referred to, perhaps dubiously, as a "siege", and then Pompeius' retaking of the city from Caesar's deputy Acilius, which was definitely a siege, and so described in scholarly sources. So either way, "siege" seems to work now. P Aculeius (talk) 14:31, 8 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Keep per the arguments above. There's a decent chunk of information in the Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (1), plus the ancient sources. 𝕱𝖎𝖈𝖆𝖎𝖆 (talk) 17:23, 7 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The 'decent chunk', the source for which is already in the article, consists of "the governor, delivered up the keys of the fortress to Caesar". This fails SIGCOV and WP:ROUTINE. GNG requires sigcov in multiple secondary sources, and none of what you said fits that description. Avilich (talk) 18:05, 7 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The "decent chunk" of information in DGRG (which imo is not a reliable source) is verbatim Caesar, after he had disembarked his troops at PALAESTE ... marched to Oricum ... The Oricii declared their unwillingness to resist the Roman consul; and Torquatus, the governor, delivered up the keys of the fortress to Caesar. It is not notable:

We require "significant coverage" in reliable sources so that we can actually write a whole article, rather than half a paragraph or a definition of that topic. If only a few sentences could be written and supported by sources about the subject, that subject does not qualify for a separate page, but should instead be merged into an article about a larger topic or relevant list.

Ifly6 (talk) 00:59, 8 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Keep — provides important context to Julius' campaign in the future Illyria Graeca. The deletionist arguments do not hold water.XavierItzm (talk) 00:07, 8 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

That's great, do you have any opinion on the sources or the fact that this is already covered elsewhere? Avilich (talk) 01:04, 8 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Merge. The idea that this topic is WP:NOTABLE, especially in terms of significant coverage, is laughable. Appian's entire description can be summarised, almost without losing any content other than names (because Appian writes verbosely) to Caesar went to Oricum. He then took the city without a fight. The defenders fled to Dyrrhachium. Caesar followed them. The depiction in Caes. BC is similarly short once you summarise it: Caesar landed troops and went to Oricum. The guy there wanted to resist but the Greeks refused "to fight against the imperial power of the Roman people"; (which is a NPOV description if I've ever heard one) the town surrendered; Pompeian commander was spared.

A short survey of Goldsworthy's at-least-acceptably-regarded books do not mention Oricum at all in books on the topic: Goldsworthy, Caesar's civil war (2003), mentions the city not at all. In the name of Rome (2003) says only On the night after he had landed, Caesar force-marched to Oricum ... and forced its surrender. Caesar (2006) says, on the "siege" itself, verbatim, only On the night after the landing Caesar marched against Oricum, which quickly surrendered when the townsfolk turned against the small Pompeian garrison. He then spends more time discussing BC's characterisation of the reasons the Greeks surrendered than the battle itself. The fall of this city is not notable; the city itself is, and the content here should be moved, probably there. Ifly6 (talk) 00:55, 8 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I now believe this should be merged to Caesar's invasion of Macedonia. Ifly6 (talk) 23:07, 9 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

This source, which is the very first found by a Google Books search for this title, has far more than a single-sentence mention. Phil Bridger (talk) 08:52, 8 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Which is quite relevant, although it actually refers to the attempt by Pompeius filius to retake the city following its capture by Caesar. That probably ought to be discussed in this article too, but I was a little confused about the sequence of events yesterday, and didn't have time to work out exactly what happened while rewriting it—glancing at the various sources some look like they said Pompeius took the city by storm, others that he tried and failed—I need to review them carefully to be sure of what they say. I may take a stab at it later on. Thanks for the find! P Aculeius (talk) 12:39, 8 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Expanded the article a bit with what Pompeius did after Caesar departed, which actually seems to have been a siege. The two events were clearly interconnected, and ought to be discussed together. Thanks to the source you found, I was able to make better sense of the other materials, and improve the article! P Aculeius (talk) 14:31, 8 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Do quote the relevant excerpt, as the only thing I'm finding is "Caesar did capture Oricum" with no elaboration whatsoever. The subsequent mention is completely unrelated to this topic. Avilich (talk) 14:32, 8 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Keep, perhaps renamed -- A neutral name might be Oricum in the Roman civil war. The objection to Primary sources in dealing with a historical subject is stupid: they are inevitably the best sources. Secondary sources can only provide a commentary on events. If there is a conflict between primary sources that should be expressed and discussed using secondary sources. Peterkingiron (talk) 14:38, 8 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
The primary sources for the Roman republic are in fact terrible sources, not "inevitably the best". Caes BCiv is obviously partial; absolutely nobody should believe what Caes BCiv says when it "objectively" recounts that the town surrendered because they didn't want to oppose the dignity of a Roman consul. App BCiv is not a "primary source" except for us; it is an anachronistic amalgam of then-existing sources written almost two hundred years after the events themselves. Primary source errors abound in the corpus. That does not mean there is no value to those sources (as P Aculeius seems to think Avilich thinks) but it does mean they need to be analysed critically with the support of modern scholarship and are surely not "inevitably the best". Ifly6 (talk) 13:48, 9 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. The only thing wrong here is that it needs renaming to a more appropriate title. The event is covered in detail by Caesar himself in 48 BC, by Appian in the second century, by George Long in the nineteenth (Decline of the Roman Republic vol. 5) and by Richard W. Westall (Caesar's Civil War: Historical Reality and Fabrication ISBN 9004356150) in the 21st century. How long does something have to be discussed and written about before it counts as lasting notability? SpinningSpark 15:44, 8 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Comment Several sources have been put forward here but nobody it seems has bothered to ask the important questions, so here is a source assessment table:

Source	Reliable?	Significant coverage?	Count source toward GNG?
Source assessment table:
Broughton, Magistrates of the Roman Republic, vol. II		Trivial mention: "Pompey placed him [the governor] in command of Oricum"	✘ No
Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography, vol. II	? old and probably outdated	Trivial mention: "the governor, delivered up the keys of the fortress to Caesar"	✘ No
Meijer, History of Seafaring in the Classical World, p. 200		Trivial mention: "Caesar did capture Oricum"	✘ No
Richard W. Westall, Caesar's Civil War: Historical Reality and Fabrication		Trivial mention: garrison "expelled ... upon receipt of the news of Caesar's arrival"	✘ No
George Long, Decline of the Roman Republic	? old and probably outdated	Trivial mention: "Pompeius hearing of the capture of Oricum"	✘ No
Appian, Civil Wars	primary source	value not understood	✘ No
Caesar, Commentaries	primary source	value not understood	✘ No
This table may not be a final or consensus view; it may summarize developing consensus, or reflect assessments of a single editor. Created using {{source assess table}}.

None of the sources count toward GNG. Avilich (talk) 16:05, 8 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

It's funny that the sources seem to write so much more than your alleged summaries. And so does the article. SpinningSpark 16:10, 8 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

You're not telling the truth about the article, and you're not telling the truth about the soruces either. I'll just leave it like this until you can come up with a proper argument and source analysis. Avilich (talk) 19:32, 8 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: my attempts to improve the article so that it is sufficiently detailed to justify its existence, includes all of the relevant and verifiable facts, and is appropriately titled—as mentioned above, it seems there was a siege, which the previous version of the article omitted to mention—have been reverted twice by Avilich, the person who nominated it for deletion on the grounds that it is too short and lacking in detail to justify its existence, and that no siege occurred. And he insists that I can't re-add any of that material before a decision has been reached about deleting the article, unless I can justify it on the article's talk page, which I have attempted to do, although I am not optimistic of convincing him. As for the so-called "source access table" shown above, it is the pure invention and opinion of one editor, and neither reflects any policy of Wikipedia, or a consensus among editors with regard to any of its claims—it masquerades as something official, and as such should be stricken from this discussion in its entirety as an improper attempt to influence the outcome. P Aculeius (talk) 03:04, 9 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I agree that this is relevant, and I also agree that it is improper that the AFD nominator is doing the reverting. I would have added this material myself, but chose to wait till the AFD closed to avoid wasting effort. The retaking of the city by Pompey's son is not the same event as Caesar's capture of the city (obviously) but it is connected and immediately following. It is just as relevant as Caesar's landing on the coast and approach to the city. I still think siege is a misdescription (although it is the word used in some sources). This was a naval (or amphibious) action and was part of a larger naval blockade of the entire Adriatic to try and prevent Caesar from resupplying and reinforcing. SpinningSpark 10:32, 9 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
If that's the case, it would deserve mention in an article on Caesar's initial eastern campaign during the civil war. Ifly6 (talk) 13:31, 9 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Is there such an article? There is nothing on the Illyrian actions beyond what is in the top level article, Caesar's civil war. Arguing that an overseas deployment of seven legions under hostile conditions is not notable is really a failure of WP:COMMONSENSE. SpinningSpark 14:24, 9 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know if such an article exists. If it doesn't, it perhaps should. (Though, frankly, such an article should probably be more of a timeline rather than a narrative; the source material is otherwise too sparse.) Your preempt seems to imply that you think that I think that Caesar's initial eastern campaign in this war shouldn't have an article? If the content were to be put somewhere, I think it probably shouldn't be the main article (Caesar's civil war): that precedent, if applied generally, would make that article far too long. Ifly6 (talk) 14:42, 9 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
So, no article on the Eastern campaign exists to merge this to, you think it should exist, this is the only article we've got on the topic, and yet you are at delete. <sarcasm>That makes a lot of sense</sarcasm>. SpinningSpark 15:34, 9 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

This is not an article about the topic, so your point is moot. The right thing to do would be to put this in a prelude section at Battle of Dyrrhachium (48 BC) or add it to Caesar's civil war (despite what Ifly6 says, it may fit); or perhaps an entirely new article dedicated to the campaign, though this should only come about as an article split. What makes no sense is to have an article whose content amounts to 'this town surrendered' + background/aftermath filler, as the keep and move side wants. Nor do the sources support a grouping of only two specific captures of one specific town to the exclusion of everything else in the same campaign: the common sense thing is to mention these events as part of the campaign itself, not separately. Avilich (talk) 18:56, 9 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

So the right, common sense thing to do would be to merge this elsewhere. Deleting it would not allow that to happen. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:30, 9 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

No, the common sense thing to do is for the editor who added the content a mere two days ago to add it to the right place instead of shoehorning it into a page that is not compatible with said content, while a would-be straightforward deletion discussion is taking place, and thereby unnecessarily confusing the topic being discussed and just wasting a lot of time. Avilich (talk) 19:56, 9 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The common-sense thing to do would be to stop obstructing work to improve the present article as Wikipedia's AFD policy encourages, on the grounds that it's "repurposing" the article by including accurate and relevant details relating to the article's initial contents. There is no policy that "significant changes should not be made to the content of articles while there is an ongoing discussion about deleting them"; that is the opposite of the actual policy. Articles should be deleted because they can't be improved, not because one editor keeps reverting all attempts to improve it. You might be referring to the article's talk page, although it's really tied up with this because you're the one who demanded that the material couldn't be added during this discussion unless discussed on the talk page—which you didn't want to do until I started the talk page discussion at your demand. And simply disagreeing with the material being added—in part because there's an AFD going on at the same time—cannot be used to justify keeping it out—much less deleting it three times, although at least two experienced editors here believe it belongs in the article. An AFD in progress cannot be used to justify preventing the improvement of an article, nor can a content dispute in the article—or a dispute about its name—be used as an argument for its deletion. P Aculeius (talk) 00:34, 10 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The only thing I try to oppose the purely administrative and procedural decision of having a standalone article for this topic; it has nothing to do with the amount of content which I allow. If you feel obstructed that's just because you insist on adding stuff here and not the several other actually notable articles which need improvement and where your content additions would fit better. Avilich (talk) 00:51, 10 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Okay. I'll accept that deletion is hasty (though, given the current article is based entirely on App BCiv, Caes BCiv, and MRR, this isn't that big of a deal) and amend my position. I now believe that the content here should be merged to Caesar's invasion of Macedonia. Ifly6 (talk) 23:07, 9 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

An article that you created—today—for the sole purpose of winning this deletion discussion and controlling the narrative of the article, along with the complete collection of sources. I hope you appreciate the irony of creating a content fork in order to justify the deletion of this article as a content fork of an article that didn't exist yet. But the creation of the new article doesn't make this article obsolete: the article nominated for deletion has a much narrower focus and more detail than is in, or would reasonably belong in, an article about an entire campaign. Just as modern wars have articles that are overviews of the entire war, focused on separate theatres of conflict, specific campaigns by each side, and individual battles occurring during those campaigns, there can be no fundamental objection to having articles about individual confrontations, provided there's enough detail to justify an article. And pretty much any time there is more to say about a conflict than reasonably fits in an article about a broader topic—such as an entire campaign—there is room for such an article.

By all means, develop your article—it could use more sources, including lots of citations to Greek and Roman historians, as well as other scholars that people might have access to instead of or in addition to the two very recent books you've cited for nearly all of the contents. But don't demand that your article clear the field of all other articles, such as the present one, that treat one particular episode or topic that fits within the scope of the one you've written about. If you want more sources, or some of them offer new and different perspectives, feel free to add them to the present article. You've chosen a broad topic to write about, and there's plenty of room for topics about various aspects of it. P Aculeius (talk) 00:24, 10 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Ignoring your non-topical conclusory accusations, I see no irony. This specific surrender does not meet your standard: provided there's enough detail to justify an article. SpinningSpark convinced me that deletion would be worse than moving it somewhere else. As to the article I created and your feedback, I'd appreciate it if you could move it to the in-progress article's talk page. Ifly6 (talk) 08:48, 10 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Keep per all of the arguments above except those of nominator. That source analysis table in particular is a very poor attempt at motivated reasoning. Atchom (talk) 20:02, 13 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Note: the nominator keeps reverting my attempts to improve the article ahead of the closing of this discussion—this is the fourth time he's reverted to a previous state during this discussion, although multiple editors there and here seem to think that they're productive. Having abandoned his argument that changes were prohibited (1) during a deletion discussion, (2) until there was a talk page discussion, and (3) while a talk page discussion was "ongoing" (i.e. unless he agreed to the changes, even though nobody had said anything for days), he's now arguing that it's OR:SYNTH and that the burden is on the editor wishing to make improvements to prove to the satisfaction of the objecting editor that they're justified. Going to take this to ANI if it continues, but before that I thought it was relevant to this discussion, because if participants only see the reverted version, it might affect their decision about deleting the article. P Aculeius (talk) 21:53, 14 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I've pointed out this editor's ownership behaviour in the past, which gives the impression that they are the only classicist on Wikipedia. It needs to stop or be stopped. Phil Bridger (talk) 22:06, 14 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

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.