Talk:Decline of Spain

Problematic title

At the very least the title needs changing to something less comic in English. Calling OKA fan-boys User:Joe Roe and User:Piotrus. Johnbod (talk) 19:16, 30 July 2024 (UTC)

@Johnbod Not sure if it is typical, but it is not a great article. IMHO it is fine for mainspace although I downgraded rating from B to C-class due to low inline cite density. Title-wise - GS query suggests this term is used in English. It is a bit funny but that doesn't mean it is wrong (see also Talk:Bikini boys...) and blame some academics for coining bad (funny/inaccurate) translation in English. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 10:10, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

The title is used but the "decadence" bit should probably be in lowercase since most sources don't seem to capitalize it. PARAKANYAA (talk) 15:01, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

Nonsense! That useful search shows pretty clearly that the term is used in English a) mostly to describe far later periods (19th & 20th centuries) and b) not as a fixed phrase to capture a period (as it may be in Spanish) but as a passing description. It seems from this this article, which begins with a survey of English historiography, that the best term, the title of both the most important papers cited at the beginning, is "The Decline of Spain". Unless anyone comes up with a better suggestion over the next few days, I will move it there. Dates could well be attached to the title, but as is typical with such things, opinions seem to differ as to the most relevant ones. Johnbod (talk) 16:38, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

A search of books via ngrams strongly supports this title, and I've made the move, and adjusted the article accordingly. One minor point: it isn't clear whether decline should be capitalized in sentence-medial position in running text when the two-word phrase is used (clearly not when decline is used alone). A further search shows a rough tie, and I went with upper case 'D' for now. Mathglot (talk) 19:24, 1 August 2024 (UTC)

As an additional test, I ran a modified version of Piotrus's search with an OR'd expression to pick up both candidates, and it clearly shows that 'decline of Spain' is the more common. Mathglot (talk) 20:37, 1 August 2024 (UTC)

In-line vs. general references

I've tagged all five body sections as unreferenced sections. (I do this rather than having one tag at the top, because I am a believer in the added value of the "find-sources" parameters of the {{unsourced}} template in helping to resolve the lack of in-line citations per section, and they have different param values in each case.) The article does have a § Bibliography section in the Appendix (which I am about to rename), and Spanish Wikipedia (and others) may be more amenable to the use of general references than English Wikipedia is, but even here having only general references is not forbidden, it's characterized as a sign of an "underdeveloped article", which this article is, at least wrt to citations. Mathglot (talk) 00:18, 2 August 2024 (UTC)