Template talk:Nymphs

Set index articles

@Deiadameian: It's worth noting that the template was designed so that it excluded set index articles, which is why Plexaure (mythology) and similar articles aren't present. It might be possible to include them, but we'd end up with some pages appearing multiple times, and the resultant template would be much longer. Linking to an entry in a SIA also technically qualifies as linking to an entry in a stand-alone list, which didn't seem quite right to me. Thoughts? Thanks for creating Sinoessa. – Michael Aurel (talk) 04:48, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

I didn't know, apologies.

edit: Shouldn't Clymene be added to the template? She's explicitly a daughter of Oceanus. Deiadameian (talk) 09:03, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

I was on the fence about that one. I've added her now, particularly per Gantz's explicit designation of her as an Oceanid on p. 31. The general approach taken here is that figures are included in a section (or in the template at all) only if modern scholarly sources explicitly and fairly consistently describe them as such. (This means that a primary source calling a figure a "daughter of Oceanus" doesn't necessarily mean they should be included in the template, even if an ancient Greek would have found it very silly to attempt to maintain a distinction between those two things.) Part of my confusion with Clymene was that I wasn't sure whether Clymene (mother of Phaethon) and Clymene (wife of Iapetus) were in fact separate figures. Gantz, p. 901, seems to distinguish them, and Hard, p. 44, is certain that they are separate (she must obviously be distinguished from the Okeanid of that name who is the wife of Iapetos in the Theogony). But other sources treat them as though they're the same: the LIMC, Brill's New Pauly, the RE, Grimal, and Tripp.

By the way, I created this navbox while attempting to overhaul our Greek mythology templates, but the discussion at WT:CGR sort of ran out of steam. As you're probably more active on pages about "minor" Greek mythological figures than anyone else, it might be worth asking: do you have any thoughts on what should be done with our templates covering the gods? Template:Greek mythology (deities) is functional, but it's incomplete and a bit disorganised, and the only templates left from the old cycle of sidebars are now Template:Greek deities (water) and Template:Greek deities (primordial). – Michael Aurel (talk) 18:22, 27 May 2026 (UTC)

@Michael Aurel My first thought was organising Template:Greek mythology (deities) by type (water, underworld, sky, etc) after removing the personifications, but admitedly this would cause several gods to be listed twice or multiple times, while others would be hard to place. Or you can sort them by lineage, but the obvious problem here is conflicting versions. A radical idea would be to throw away this template entirely and break it down into smaller parts, like a Twelve Olympians one, a Greek health deities one, a Greek sky deities one, etc and maybe some god-specific templates (like one about Zeus). Deiadameian (talk) 18:19, 30 May 2026 (UTC)

Groups of Nymphs

Currently all of the nymphs named in the Template as Hesperides are pages that now redirect to the Hesperides. Does it make sense for them to still be in the template? I assume the list is governed by whether wikipedia has a page of that name rather than anything else, but that is a rather arbitrary thing, and causes... well. If someone was looking at that bar and saw the names listed for Hesperides, they might assume that that's all of them, that there's a fixed list, etc. when actually, those pages should never have existed, and in written sources other names crop up more often (Aegle, Erytheis, Hesperia). Likewise with the list of the Hyades (the page for which I will definitely finish rewriting soon): this logic leads to only two being listed in the template despite there being many more names. I assume this talk has been had somewhere before already, but... would it not be better to just make that part 'other groups' (i.e. drop the 'and names') and let readers click those if they want to find a list of the individual nymphs in those groups?

If a reader doesn't understand the logic behind which names appear in the box and which don't, then they might reasonably assume that the names are there because they are the most well attested, or the only names. Endlesspumpkin (talk) 09:12, 28 July 2026 (UTC)

I've removed the redirects. As to the second point: yes, the criterion determining a figure's inclusion is whether Wikipedia has a page about them. (In this case, I decided that this shouldn't include set index articles.) Beyond that, the main principle governing the way these templates operate is WP:BIDI. As you note, this results in the link to Hyades being followed by brackets containing only two individual figures. I think the general hope is that the reader understands that a navbox is simply a collection of links to the pages Wikipedia has on a subject, and isn't intended as a comprehensive list of anything. The template lists four dryads and hamadryads, but hopefully the reader understands that this doesn't necessarily mean there were no more than four such nymphs. If we did want to address this, we could perhaps list those individual nymphs separately from the link to Hyades (in the "Other nymphs" section, for example), although consistency would dictate that we should then do the same for the Ionides and Pleiades. – Michael Aurel (talk) 12:41, 30 July 2026 (UTC)