Talk:Spurius Cassius Vecellinus

Confusing

This one is potentially confusing datewise, because the traditional fasti dates are going to be several years off from the Greek-area dates. I've used fasti dates in the Roman bits because everybody else does, while the Greek paragraph uses Greek dating instead. Stan 17:37, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

Edit war

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Spurius_Cassius_Vecellinus&diff=1182480373&oldid=1182019856 @P Aculeius:, let's discuss here. I initially added {{huh}} tags to two confusing sentences (describing the Romans' battle with the Sabines as having "great loss" but failing to specify to whom, and describing the Romans' position as "similar to that under the kings" without saying how it was similar). You reverted. I then added my own guesses as to the clarifications, and you reverted again. Before violating the WP:3RR, could you discuss here why you're reverting? Your edit comments indicate that you feel that the article shouldn't be "dumbed down" — presumably to cater to people without a classical education who might know things like "the Roman army outclassed the Sabines in this time period so obviously it was the Sabines who must have taken great losses," but I think Wikipedia actually benefits from this kind of clarity. It would also be nice to find some sources for these sentences; that would allow you the freedom to be more elliptical in the phrasing, because the interested reader could just go back to the primary source to find out the full story. --Quuxplusone (talk) 16:13, 29 October 2023 (UTC)

It's not an edit war; you've been reverted twice, both with perfectly clear explanations, which you chose to disregard on both occasions. Both of the sentences you call "problematic" are explained clearly so that anyone who reads them could be expected to understand—just read the following sentence in each case and the context makes perfectly clear what is meant. The interpretations that you're putting on them in order to justify your changes are nonsensical.

First, the statement that the Roman army under Cassius "defeated the Sabines with great loss" makes no sense whatever if interpreted to mean that Cassius and the Romans were the ones who sustained great losses—particularly as the very next sentence clearly states that the defeated Sabines sued for peace and yielded up a significant amount of their land. The only way to read it the way you insist it could be read is to disregard the context in which it occurs—and even then it would be illogical.

The second sentence says that the treaty placed the Roman Republic in the same position relative to the Latins and Hernici as it had been under the Kings; the following sentence says exactly what that position probably was: "the Romans, Latins, and Hernici agreed to share their acquired land evenly, with each receiving one third of the lands conquered by their mutual arms." There's nothing confusing or unclear here, unless you think—as your edit seems to imply, moving the reference to the relative position of the parties after the sentence stating what it was—that the explanation for a statement needs to precede the statement rather than follow it. But there's absolutely no reason to require that.

Wikipedia assumes that readers are able to understand ordinary English without being written down to. Your edits assume that readers are unable to make logical inferences from context, but need to be spoon-fed every fact or circumstance. This has nothing to do with whether they're experts on Roman history, whether they had a classical education or know which army outclassed which—you don't need any of that to understand what was written here. The issue is whether readers are able to read and comprehend plain English at a basic level of proficiency. If that's not good enough for Wikipedia, I haven't seen the guideline.

Contrary to your assertion, the sources are cited at the end of the paragraph: you just didn't look at them, because you assumed that the citations only applied to the the last sentence. But the paragraph describes a short sequence of events that occupies only a few lines in Livy, and not much more in the other sources, all of which apply to the paragraph as a whole. Citing all of them repetitively after each sentence in the paragraph seemed redundant and unnecessary, when reading all of them together explains the whole paragraph. It could be done, but if you checked the sources you wouldn't be so confused.

It would also be nice if you didn't use Wikipedia jargon like "edit war" and warn me about violating the three-revert rule—which I haven't done; I reverted you twice, more than forty-eight hours apart—and if I did so a third time, which I could still do within a twenty-four hour period without violating the rule—it would have been in a span of more than seventy-two hours. I'm not saying this to justify reverting you again, but rather to point out that I wasn't in danger of violating the rule, and so shouldn't be warned about violating it—least of all by someone else who's engaging in what he or she is calling an "edit war".

In fact, if you read that policy clearly, and cared about avoiding an edit war, you would have brought this to the talk page after the first time you were reverted—or the second—without re-reverting me to put in your changes for the third time, when you knew that another editor disagreed with your changes and had reverted them with explanations twice. Instead, you just re-reverted again and warned me not to violate the three-revert rule, even though that rule clearly did not apply with only two reverts, more than forty-eight hours apart. To me that comes across as "ha ha! I've reverted you again, and there's nothing you can do about it without being blocked from editing!" and gaming the system to get your way.

I could revert you again without violating the rule, and then maybe you'd be in danger of violating it if you re-re-re-reverted—if not for the fact that more than seventy-two hours have passed since the first revert. But I won't—that seems pointless. The article could stand to be improved; the parts of it that I wrote go back a number of years, and I'm a much better editor than I was then. Other editors have put their stamp on it since then, for better or ill. I think the wording you're introducing is completely unnecessary. You disagree, and given that you keep reverting back to your preferred wording, I see no prospect of you changing your mind now. Since continuing to argue about it seems futile, I'm just going to leave it as it is for the time being. Congratulations—you got your way. P Aculeius (talk) 23:06, 29 October 2023 (UTC)