Talk:Scythians

Add Armenian, Greek, and New Persian transliterations

(Old Persian: Sakā; New Persian: ساکا Saka; Greek: Σάκαι Sakai; Armenian: սկյութները Skyout'nerə; Latin: Sacae, Sanskrit: शक Śaka), and Sai (Chinese: 塞; Old Chinese: *sˤək), respectively.[8]

A solution I propose to short the article

A solution I propose to short the article is to split it into time periods or at least have a separate article for the people and the history, but please feel free to discuss. Legendarycool (talk) 06:22, 13 September 2024 (UTC)

I would short the article of everything required to shorten it. The shorted material should go in other new shorter articles. The topic should not be shortened. It would totally be comprised, then, by a series of articles. I recommend we use more formal English for this making it sound more professional. No, I don't think time divisions best fits the material. Yes I do think people and history matches it. I would not simplify it to pigin-English. Use good English or at least defer to it. My two main divisions would be just Scythians, which would contain introductory definitions, etymology, geography, and history. The rest of the material would be under [[Anthropology of the Scythians]]. However there are a lot of specialized topics, such as [[Rulers of the Scythians]]. These can be taken out any time. I suggest we use anthropological terms for the anthropological topics. Botteville (talk) 02:37, 24 September 2024 (UTC)

Longer article

Last year I had endeavoured to overhaul this article, but this had the result of creating an unusually long page. After discussion with @Carlstak and @Buidhe, we decided that I should move the update to my sandbox and trim it there before moving it back here.

However, despite my best attempts, I haven't been able to adequately the rewrite to make it shorter without losing any essential information. Therefore, I would like to do some special pleading to be allowed to move this longer rewrite back into the mainspace and allow other editors to trim it as necessary. Antiquistik (talk) 12:20, 24 September 2024 (UTC)

Antiquistik good news is that the length is much easier to fix than other problems, so if you think that your draft is an improvement over the current article, I would suggest putting it in with a length tag and hope that the length can get fixed later on.

Still, the length is something that should get addressed at some point because it greatly exceeds the recommended size. To me, it looks like a big part of your draft is the "history" section. So a good start would be to split that off per WP:SUMMARY to History of the Scythians and leave a much shorter summary in this article. (t · c) buidhe 12:27, 24 September 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. I'll move the sandbox's content to mainspace first, then I'll work on splitting the article. Antiquistik (talk) 13:08, 24 September 2024 (UTC)

The "Pontic Scythian kingdom" section should be largely split off to Scythia, which is already a political article. "Warfare" section should be split off into a Scythian warfare article. I am referring to the existing article here (not the longer one in the sandbox). Srnec (talk) 13:03, 24 September 2024 (UTC)

Scythia was meant to be a geographic article while the political information was to be contained on Scythians, though, as per the discussions regarding the mergers which created the present Scythians page. Antiquistik (talk) 13:11, 24 September 2024 (UTC)

The article needs splitting. You just increased it by 163,223 bytes and yet seem resistant to the idea of splitting off political information... So what sub-articles are you planning, since the article is now prohibitively long? Srnec (talk) 16:03, 24 September 2024 (UTC)

We need to think positive on this. Antiquistik has done a lot of work so I vote we allow it in. We have to call a spade a spade here. The topic is a big one in ancient studies comprising a whole lot of topics. We are discovering this by trial and error. I think by now we all recognize that one article just is not doing it. Why don't we let Antiquistik do his thing and when we see where we are headed we can contribute better. The goal is a coherent topic of multiple articles linked togther with blue links. We don't need to trail off into an extended carp. Think positive. Botteville (talk) 00:07, 25 September 2024 (UTC)

Thanks, @Botteville. @Srnec I am not against splitting per se, but the way Scythia was turned into a political article was sloppy, since it only consisted of summarising parts of Scythians there.

If splitting needs to be done, I would suggest that the "History" section be made into a History of the Scythians page, and the "Warfare" sub-section be made into a Scythian warfare page.

In general, this is being a headache for me, because the more documented a historical culture is, the more likely the page covering it is going to be similarly huge, e.g. if the page for the Neo-Assyrian Empire was properly overhauled, it would be as big or even bigger. And neither do I have magic answers for how to deal with such situations, nor do I think Wikipedia itself is equipped for these situations either. Antiquistik (talk) 06:31, 25 September 2024 (UTC)

We seem to be in a situation of "who is going to bell the cat." For myself I want to wait a little more to see where the article is going. Then I will study it again to see what can be chipped off. Previously I suggested Scythians and Anthropology of the Scythians. Your History of the Scythians can certainly be chipped off Scythians. It seems to me we need an initial main split with subdivision of those. I only want to point out we need to see the material as a collection of articles and get busy deciding what goes where. It won't be easy but there is plenty of time. Botteville (talk) 10:22, 25 September 2024 (UTC)

"If splitting needs to be done". The article is almost half a gigabyte—that is ridiculously too long. It must be split. As Antiquistik said in the edit summary for the addition of an excessive 163,223 bytes to an already very long article: "Moving content from sandbox to mainspace per discussion. Article to be split to reduce size later." The addition of so much content at once has made dealing with the article too burdensome and it should be reverted to its previous state to facilitate the splitting. The extra content should be apportioned among the resultant multiple articles. Carlstak (talk) 13:05, 26 September 2024 (UTC)

@Carlstak: I said so because I still want to try trimming the page first before we go for a split. Provided I am allowed to try, of course. Antiquistik (talk) 11:55, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

FYI that there is a Reddit thread about all this. Ed ^{[talk] [OMT]} 17:36, 2 October 2024 (UTC)

Just as an aside, the thing that strikes me most about that Reddit discussion is is how civilized and positive it is. Carlstak (talk) 18:47, 2 October 2024 (UTC)

Since this discussion ground to a halt, the article has grown slightly with no trimming or splitting in sight. Is it really that hard to split a large article into sub-articles? Srnec (talk) 03:08, 31 October 2024 (UTC)

No, it's not that hard, and if Antiquistik won't do it, as it seems they have they no inclination to do so, I know that you are more than capable to handle the task, Srnec, if you want to do it. I'm working on an offsite project and checking in when I can. Carlstak (talk) 17:19, 31 October 2024 (UTC)

Battle of Carchemish

Wiki article by this name reports Scyths allied with medes and babylonians toppling Neo-assyrian empire. 2600:1011:B30E:8F2F:D979:BEA1:3ACC:9316 (talk) 15:24, 18 November 2024 (UTC)

"After the Scythians' disappearance..."

This statement in the preface is neither sourced, nor reasonable. Why would "authors" especially "ancient" (being much closer in time) persist in applying name Scythians to various non related people? Stupidity or just knowing much better about "disappearance"? 91.230.101.219 (talk) 05:12, 3 December 2024 (UTC) The statement needs to be deleted or replaced with something like "Modern historiography consensus on Scythians' extinction through having been totally assimilated ca 5th century AD disregards the abundance of references to Scythians in medieval and early modern sources". — Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.230.101.219 (talk) 10:18, 3 December 2024 (UTC)