Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Dark Ages (Europe)

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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 delete. I'm closing this as delete and redirect--there is no consensus for keeping the content--or which content to keep. Obviously the user is blocked as a sock, and there's another good reason to do away with this and not leave it hanging around. Drmies (talk) 23:15, 2 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Dark Ages (Europe)[edit]

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Dark Ages (Europe) (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)
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Delete or Redirect to Dark Ages (historiography). Merge content/ideas there and/or Early Middle Ages. Dark Ages (historiography) is already about the term. Early Middle Ages is about the period. We don't have multiple articles for the same period of history. Page is a WP:CSPLIT (content split) of Early Middle Ages and WP:POVSPLIT of Dark Ages (historiography). The term "Dark Ages" is non-neutral and pejorative and abandoned by professional medieval historians. Wikipedia follows the lead of academic historians. The term "Dark Ages" has been disparaged by academics and is now relevant as historiography, not as a neutral term of history. GreenC 02:32, 28 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  • Keep The article was rated "GA" by SDZeroBot. See User:SDZeroBot/NPP sorting/History and Society/History. That's two levels higher than the proposed redirect target. A historiography is a "history of the history." The existence of a historiography article should not preclude the creation of a conventional history article on the same subject. ThuDauMot (talk) 02:55, 28 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Update. Perhaps I should explain why I wrote this article. Currently, if you look up "Dark Ages" you get "Dark Ages (historiography)." This article focuses on the terminology of lightness and darkness. It was once GA, but was later delisted to C-Class. Any reader who is looking for information about the actual historical period will go away unsatisfied. There are complaints along these lines on the talk page by @Shenqijing: @MadScientistX11: @Dudley Miles: @Florian Blaschke: @Mike Christie: @Deedman22: and @Dimadick:. ThuDauMot (talk) 12:19, 28 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Dark Ages (historiography) begins "The "Dark Ages" is a term for the Early Middle Ages or Middle Ages in Western Europe ....". Clear enough. Johnbod (talk) 12:35, 28 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
ThuDauMot, the article was never a Good Article. You have been told that multiple times (here and in the talk page), provided links and explanations of what happened, continue to say it was a GA anyway. If it was a GA, link to the GA consensus discussion. You can't because it doesn't exist. It is indicative of reckless, incompetent and combative behavior, using the n-word below is another example. -- GreenC 15:59, 28 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
GreenC, to be fair, ThuDauMot said Dark Ages (historiography) used to be GA but is no longer, and there is a box on the talk page that seems to indicate this is true, although this may have been before formalization of GA processes. older ≠ wiser 16:45, 28 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Oh I see, I thought they were continuing the maintain Dark Ages (Europe) is a GA. I misread. They have said it repeatedly. The status of Dark Ages (historiography) has nothing to do with this AfD and honestly I don't normally care what the status of articles are, just that when someone says something that is so plainly false, then sticks by it over and over, it's indicative. -- GreenC 17:13, 28 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
See this 2006 talk section - it used be a GA back in ahem Wikipedia's Dark Age, but has not been for 15 years. As you say, this has nothing to do with this discussion. Nor does what some bot rates this article now. Johnbod (talk) 17:23, 28 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • This is a laughable defense. No bot on Wikipedia rates articles GA; an article has to pass the Good article nomination process. Honestly this is such a fundamental component of ratings on Wikipedia, it seriously doubts my beliefs in the nominators competence if that is what they first present as a rationale. The second comments has been thoroughly debunked by GreenC below. Aza24 (talk) 05:12, 28 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Here is an explanation of what the bot is doing. It is part of a process to select articles for Wikipedia:Version 1.0. In "88 unreviewed articles as of 28 December 2021," "Dark Ages (Europe)" is one of four articles rated as GA. According the information page, "many of the structural characteristics of articles seem to correlate strongly with good writing and tone, so the models work very well in practice."
I ran the relevant articles through the bot. The scale it uses goes FA-GA-B-C-Start-Stub. So it's slightly different than what the projects are doing. This article ranks as a "GA". "Dark Ages (historiography)" is a "B," and Early Middle Ages is a "C." ThuDauMot (talk) 22:45, 28 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
As pointed out on the article's talk page, ORES scores are a prediction of article quality. The article falls short of GA quality and the ORES scores has little bearing on the point of this discussion. Richard Nevell (talk) 23:14, 28 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support redirect of title to Early Middle Ages, and probably merging some new content to Dark Ages (historiography) (there's a discussion on my talk page). Johnbod (talk) 03:26, 28 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete and redirect (as OP). Prejudiced Original Research article that cherry picks negatives and ignores positives then coatracks it under the term Dark Ages. It creates a major fork in our Medieval history articles that is not justifiable by sources. Modern scholars do not like this term it has been replaced by the neutral Early Middle Ages. We have lots of coverage of the term Dark Ages in the historiography article. It is not a neutral historical descriptor, professional academics reject it:
  • "modern scholars cringe at any reference to the term 'Dark Ages'". New York Times (2021)
  • "A popular if uninformed manner of speaking refers to the medieval period as 'the dark ages'". Dunphy, Graeme (2007). "Literary Transitions, 1300–1500: From Late Mediaeval to Early Modern" in: The Camden House History of German Literature vol IV: "Early Modern German Literature".
  • Dark Ages is "shunned and deemed inappropriate.. preferring instead early medieval". "Introduction: Dark Ages"
  • "The term “Dark Ages” is now rarely used by historians because of the value judgment it implies." Encyclopedia Britannica (2021)
  • Dark Ages "has mostly been abandoned as a name for a historiographical epoch" in Late Antiquity sourced to Late Antiquity: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford 2011), pp. 1–2.
  • "In the course of recent decades, the very expression 'Dark Ages' has fallen into disrepute among historians." Joseph Gies (1994). Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel: Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages. HarperCollins Publishers. p. 2.
  • "Historians and archaeologists have never liked the label Dark Ages". Snyder, Christopher A. (1998). An Age of Tyrants: Britain and the Britons A.D. 400–600. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. pp. xiii–xiv. ISBN 0-271-01780-5.
  • "The stereotype of the Middle Ages as 'the Dark Ages' fostered by Renaissance humanists and Enlightenment philosophes has, of course, long since been abandoned by scholars." Raico, Ralph. "The European Miracle". Retrieved 14 August 2011.
  • "These used to be called the Dark Ages. That label is best set aside. It is hopelessly redolent of Renaissance and Enlightenment prejudices." Kyle Harper (2017). The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire (The Princeton History of the Ancient World). Princeton University Press. p. 12.
  • "Just as astronomers no longer call Pluto a planet and paleontologists no longer recognize the Brontosaurus, historians have stopped referring to the European era from A.D. 400 to 1000 as the Dark Ages." New Yorker book review (2009)
  • "In the twenty-first century, medievalists of all stripes continue to find themselves countering the misnomer of the "Dark Ages" and all that mentality implies". Jennifer Awes Freeman (Winter 2018). "Medieval Europe by Chris Wickham (review)". Lutheran Quarterly. 32 (4). Johns Hopkins University Press: 488–490.
  • "The Myth of Dark Ages". Rabia Umar Ali (Summer 2012). "Medieval Europe: The Myth of Dark Ages and the Impact of Islam". Islamic Studies . 51 (2): 155–168.
-- GreenC 03:56, 28 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • If you are going to argue that "Dark Ages" is history's version of the N-word, then we need to delete Dark Ages (historiography) as well. Every major dictionary has a listing for Dark Ages and none of them feature a label discouraging you from using it. Here is the entry for "dark ages" in Oxford English Dictionary: "a term sometimes applied to the period of the Middle Ages to mark the intellectual darkness characteristic of the time; often restricted to the early period of the Middle Ages, between the time of the fall of Rome and the appearance of vernacular written documents." I can't believe I have to do this, but, yes, dictionaries are recommended in the Manual of Style: "if unsure, check a dictionary." "see notable entries at...Dictionary § Major English dictionaries." ThuDauMot (talk) 10:21, 28 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Could you tone down your usage of the N-word? There are no sources from reliable secondary sources that unambiguously argue for the use of the term, and countless sources saying it has/should be abandoned. Non-specialist general dictionaries are not appropriate for determining things like this, it is not their purpose or place to proscribe usage of a historical concept, they provide definitions. Wikipedia is a secondary-source encyclopedia, not a dictionary. WP:Wikipedia is not a dictionary, Wikipedia:Dictionaries as sources and Wikipedia:Tertiary-source fallacy. -- GreenC 15:59, 28 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • I find the New Yorker example you just added you just added to be a telling one. Merriam-Webster has usage labels for "brontosaurus" and "Pluto, but nothing equivalent for "Dark Ages." ThuDauMot (talk) 19:56, 28 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Webster is a general purpose non-specialist tertiary source comprising a single sentence. They don't even have an entry for Early, High or Late Middle Ages or Late Antiquity or Migration period, to show how outdated and non-specialist it is. -- GreenC 20:15, 28 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
How about Oxford's A Dictionary of World History? Their entry on "Dark Ages" is about a page and a half long. Google books shows only part of it, but I access to the whole thing. There is no disclaimer to discourage use of the word. ThuDauMot (talk) 22:45, 28 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Not a secondary source (tertiary), not a specialist medieval source (world history). The front matter says the dictionary is derived from the Oxford Illustrated Encyclopedia (Volumes 3 & 4) which dates to 1988, 34 years ago (out-dated). Oxford University Press lists each volume that contains "Dark Ages" and says it is an "old fashioned term" ie. out of fashion. -- GreenC 02:15, 29 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
You're going with the definition from The Oxford Dictionary of Local and Family History? If you type "Dark Ages" on Oxford Reference, you get 614 results, including World Encyclopedia and The Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages. ThuDauMot (talk) 02:31, 29 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
It's hard to unpack all that without seeing full text and context including when the text was written, Oxford appears to recycle old text in new titles. Look no one denies that a minority of historians have used the term to refer to a limited number of years, which is why Early Middle Ages says "sometimes referred to as the Dark Ages" and why everyone in the AfD says redirect to EMA. There is no separate school of history/thought for the Dark Ages, it is synonymous with Early Middle Ages, the same thing. Compare with Late Antiquity which is a distinct school, it can't be replaced with Early Middle Ages or Migration Period because of it's inherent assumptions ie. gradual cultural transition vs. sharp political change. Likewise Migration Period (an old term itself) emphasizes history as seen from the perspective of the tribes, not Rome, since historians used to only tell history from a Roman perspective (eg. Gibbon). For historians Dark Ages is nothing more than an old biased term that has been mostly replaced by Early Middle Ages. There is no school of thought or POV around Dark Ages, but there is historiographical interest over usage of term. I think you conflate these things. You see historians rejecting the term and believe they are also rejecting the history, and therefore you see a split in the history POV, but that is not the case. -- GreenC 05:04, 29 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I hope this solves the problem: "The so called "Dark Ages" was a period of alleged decline in European history that ran from AD 476 to roughly 1000."[1] I am also partial to "The "Dark Ages," a term which has fallen into disrepute among historians, was a period of alleged decline in European history that ran from AD 476 to roughly 1000." ThuDauMot (talk) 15:48, 29 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
We already have an article for the historical period which goes by multiple names. We already have an article that discusses the term and it's disrepute. -- GreenC 17:33, 29 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Talk:Dark Ages (historiography) is full of editors complaining about the current setup, so I wasn't expecting a reaction like this when I wrote the article. After all, "Dark Ages" was moved to "Dark Ages (historiography)" to make way for a history article on the subject, which I have now written. ThuDauMot (talk) 16:41, 30 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Incorrect - Early Middle Ages, under that name, has been the main account of the period forever. For example this is what it looked like in June 2006. It co-existed with "Dark Ages" under that name, as an article about the term, this is what that looked like in 2005.Johnbod (talk) 17:08, 30 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
[edit conflict with Johnbod]. ThuDauMot, don't make things up. Dark Ages was moved to make way for a dab page *not* a history article. And that was 10 years ago, before you had an account on Wikipedia: your first edit to Wikipedia is November 22, 2021. An amazing in-depth knowledge of Wikipedia in a few weeks BTW. The other problem is the term Dark Ages has been usurped by nationalists, racists, colonialists, and others who promote a reactionary agenda. (Sourced in Dark Ages (historiography) non-scholary use section first paragraph). -- GreenC 18:42, 30 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
That's a bit unfair - it's just that no one else wants to touch it with a bargepole. Johnbod (talk) 12:49, 31 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I wrote the article in my user space. I moved it to article space on December 23. It got PRODed on December 26. So there wasn't much time for anyone else to edit it. But I can't take all the credit. My starting point was User:Crotalus horridus/Dark Ages. ThuDauMot (talk) 17:58, 31 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Redirect to Early Middle Ages- I would have said this could be merged to the Dark_Ages_(historiography) article, but as people have pointed out, that's not actually an article on the dark ages, its * an article on the history(historiography) of the concept of the Dark ages*. My assumption here is that Dark Ages and the Early Medieval Period are synonyms. If that's actually not the case, then a dark ages article should be created. Deathlibrarian (talk) 05:26, 1 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • ThuDauMot, stop it with the quality ratings. It has been explained by several editors that the bot ratings cannot be directly compared to human evaluations. They are apples and oranges. Your repeatedly coming back to that false comparison only serves to undermine your arguments. There is NOTHING in this article that is not already covered in other articles. older ≠ wiser 13:35, 1 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • If this article is deleted, I assume there will be a redirect to the historiography article. No aspect of this article duplicates anything in that article. As for EMA, a few paragraphs of material is duplicated. After all, Wikipedia is not paper and all. ThuDauMot (talk) 16:42, 1 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • ThuDauMot is blocked. They are a puppet of long-term master User:Kauffner see Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Kauffner. Kauffner's history with Dark Ages (historiography) goes back to 2006. They are known for promoting alt-right and reactionary positions, among other things. There are likely other Kauffner socks in the talk archives including some IPs, none thought to be currently active. Expect new Kauffner socks in the future related to Dark Ages. -- GreenC 21:48, 2 January 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.
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