User talk:Bacchiad

Osiris-Dionysus

I have added two authors who make the Osiris-Dionysus-Attis-etc. connection to Osiris-Dionysus. Both from the 1st century BC.

I have also NPOV'd The Jesus Mysteries appropriately, and added a few counter quotes to the "critics say", which I note didn't actually specify which critics, i.e. was just as bad as the "some think that they are forms of Osiris-Dionysus".

CheeseDreams 22:31, 29 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Pythagoras/Pentagram

You keep annotating a link on the wiki-site about Pythagoras as a "modern contemporary occult interpretation". I feel that is not quite true. I assume you've read the link - It uses only ancient sources and archeological finds. Calling it "modern" is very misleading. It gives you the impression that "this link is only loosely connected to ancient Pythagoreanism". Why don't you annotate the other links as "modern contemporary interpretations"? I've visited those links as well, and they present little or no sources and hard evidence for what they say. In other words: they are less historical in their approach. ~August

It's the interpretation that's modern, not the sources. And hey, at least I'm not deleting it; I'm your friend here, August. If you'd like to annotate the other ones as well, be my guest. Bacchiad 14:48, 17 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Uhmm, okey. =) I might well be to quick on the defensive. Some masons tried to put the info in that article down, masons that happend to be driving forces behind those two other links on the Pythagoras-page! Soo ... I tend to be suspicious. Almost every single page on the internet that claims to deal with Pythagoreanism presents the pentagram as one point up and says it is an ancient sign for four elements plus spirit. That doctrine has nothing that backs it up, and as you can see on the coins niether does their direction of the pentagram as one point up. ~August

Speedy Delete

In the future, to ask a page speedy deleted, tag it with {{delete}}. Thanks! - Fennec (はさばくのきつね) 23:51, 14 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Thanks, will do. Bacchiad 23:55, 14 Jul 2004 (UTC)

"In Greek mythology"

In case it's not obvious, "In Greek mythology" is just a stock phrase we use to set context. As an encyclopedia of everything, it's very often the case that people connect via unexpected routes, for instance from obscure beetle genera that happen to have mythological names. It is possible to set context in other ways, but the "In XXX" gets you there with the fewest words, so it's hard to beat for reader efficiency, which is what you want in a reference work. Stan 07:09, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)

It does make navigation easier. I've started using it myself. Bacchiad 02:54, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Hey, do you know anything about the Bacchidae rulers themselves, or did you just like the name? I've written about Cypselus and Periander but we don't have an article about the dynasty... Adam Bishop 23:13, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I might be able to whip one up. As I recall, there was a story about how the last Bacchiad settled in Etruscan territory and set up a pottery studio. ;) - Bacchiad 23:15, 16 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Mythology taxobox

"Sinners" is a specific genre that shouldn't be applied to these impious characters. (BTW, proud to make your very short A-list, in spite of my crabbiness and Greek illiteracy... ) Wetman 23:13, 17 Jul 2004 (UTC)

The other one I thought of was "Inmates:". Bacchiad 23:48, 17 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Hey you building those mythology taxonomy boxes? If you are, my compliments; they look really cool. LMK if you'd like any input. Just out of curiosity, you ever read Friedrich Nietzsche's Birth of a Tragedy? --DanielCD 01:08, 18 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Suggestion for formatting taxoboxes

Hey, I noticed that you were removing some of the taxoboxes you earlier created in Greek myth. Unfortunately, you're doing this just as I'm working on a way to improve them. Check out User:Didactohedron/Greek myth. It's a three-tiered tree, of sorts; you should be able to figure it out. Right now I'm making taxoboxes just for the "gods" category; I'll get to the others later. I was planning on making all of the necessary changes to the actual boxes in the template namespace when I was finished making all of the boxes on my own page. Tell me what you think. - Didactohedron 17:35, Jul 18, 2004 (UTC)

Now that is some interesting stuff, sir. The extra tier is the really cool part. Also, don't worry too much about the deletions. I probably should have kept abstractions, but the god-specific ones were teh sux. Bacchiad 17:50, 18 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I don't suppose you still have them hidden away somewhere, though? Anything I could use to fill out the Gods category would be useful. At the moment, I've finished expanding that category for the time being, but it looks oddly biased towards particular "themed" gods. It seems to me as if the sections could be organized better, too. If you're still interested in the project, you're welcome to help me recategorize the "Gods" category, and fill out "Mortals" and "Sources" (I think I'm done with "Places"), if you like; you can do it on the page I made. - Didactohedron 18:14, Jul 18, 2004 (UTC)

You appear to have grabbed all the abstractions before the conflagration, so that's good. The stuff in Apollo was:

Dionysus had:

Pan had:

I was basically just throwing in anything related to them I could think of, because I like them.

More boxes

Have you thought about making a greater "world mythology" taxonomy tree? How about some of the mythical animals, like Pegasus and Hyppocampus? I think the taxonomy can improve as more people look at it. There's a book available that has the genealogy of the gods worked out: A Genealogical Chart of Greek Mythology by Harold Newman [1]. It's pricy, might see if a library has it if you're interested. --DanielCD 20:32, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)

My current thinking on boxes is that small is beautiful, both for the boxes themselves and for the hierarchies that underlie them. I think this makes sense from the point of view of both theory and presentation. Hence I like Template:Roman myth (small topic), Template:Greek myth (Olympian) and Template Greek myth (sea) (small sub-topics). Where a category is relatively discrete, link together articles and link back to the parent topics(s). Where it's not, do not harm. E.g. Should Minos go under "Theseus and the Minotaur Cycle", "Hades" (as a judge), "Early Greek Lawgivers", "Myths of Crete"? Big hierarchies break down: they make sense for small and natural groupings (e.g. the 13-15 Twelve Olympians) but they become nonsense when taken too far. I might try to flesh that out when I come down from this godawful caffeine high, but that's the thrust of my thinking.

In sum, let's make it easy on ourselves. Make the most obvious and easy-to-implement kinds of useful comparison possible (you suggested mythical monsters, which I think is a good idea) rather than building trees for their own sake. When we've played around in the sandbox a little we can evaluate the next step. So far I've got one negative comment on the box ("useless clutter") so we should be careful to grow them slowly and sensibly.

On the genealogy of the Greek gods book: I have to see it. Studying myth is pretty much useless without studying variants; and there are a lot of variants with Greece. It also matters where those variants come from. I'd have to see how it handles this, but my first reaction is extreme skepticism. -- Bacchiad 21:46, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)

On the subject of monsters: See User:Didactohedron/Greek myth#Creatures. I changed the fourth category in my reworked Greek taxobox tree from "sources" to "creatures", and made individual taxoboxes for several categories.

You (Bacchiad) suggest going easy on tree-growing for its own sake; do you think that the way I've reworked the taxoboxes is useful? I'm definately going for a three-tiered tree structure, in order to make it as easy as possible for someone to get from one topic in Greek mythology to another without having a box containing every single topic on every single page. I was going to finish making the reworked taxoboxes on my page, and then implementing them on the real article pages, but I'm now having doubts. To make a good "tree" which would encompass the whole of Greek mythology, I'd have to answer a lot of daunting questions: What subjects are important enough to get their own boxes? Where do I put people associated with all sorts of myths (like Minos)? What happens to people like Heracles who are as important as anyone in the Trojan War, yet don't fit well into any nice category - should there be an "Other heroes" taxobox, or should "Heracles" appear alongside "Trojan War" in the second "teir" of the tree?

More importantly, if we did make a tree which perfectly captures the entirety of Greek myth as it is generally perceived- that is, the "consensus" mythology usually found in popularizations of Greek myths that don't go straight to the primary sources- would this be an aid or a hindrance to understanding? In the former case, I'd be willing to tackle the challenge involved in creating such a tree. The biggest question involved, IMHO, is whether the benefits of having a taxobox tree that lets users easily find whatever Greek mythological subject they might be interested in outweighs the disadvantage of having the tree reinforce the idea, which you rightfully deride, that Greek mythology is a monolithic body of stories, rather than a varied collection of often contradictory tales. -Didactohedron 01:26, Jul 23, 2004 (UTC)

Gods fit into discrete categories better than heroes. E.g. Orpheus is an Argonaut but he also has the whole Eurydice thing, not to mention being a legendary seer. The gods have a few overlaps, (Poseidon:sea and Olympian, Mnemosyne Titan and abstraction, etc.) but those are corner cases. I think a two-tiered version of your (really nicely designed) improved boxes can be deployed immediately for gods.

For creatures, I haven't devoted a lot of thought to them.

For places, I think Hades is the only one that the poets described in detail, except maybe for Hyperborea.

For heroes. I'm stumped for something unified. There are a couple of ad hoc things we could do, though, like "Twelve Labors of Heracles", "The House of Atreus" and "Trouble in Thebes". Bacchiad 02:17, 23 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Incomplete line in Muse

Hi, please complete a partial line added by you in Muse. See Talk:Muse for more. Jay 21:12, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Sympson the Joiner

Sympson the Joiner survived VfD with two Del votes (including the nomination to VfD), three explicit Keep votes, and two arguable implicit Keeps (via mentions of Cleanup).
In accord with the WP:CU referral you advocated, it
1. went on,
2. got a one-word M(inor) edit after 18 minutes, and
3. was kicked off by one editor after 14 hours, with summary "nothing more is likely to turn up".
Your comment at Talk:Sympson the Joiner#Should this be Merged? would assist me in determining what next.

--Jerzy (t) 04:27, 2004 Aug 16 (UTC)

I hope my additions have saved Sympson the Joiner. If not, the material should be divided between Joiner (craftsman) and Bookcase don't you think? I owe you for the complete rehabilitations you've effected at Greek mythology and Roman mythology and elsewhere. Wetman 04:57, 28 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Wetman, o you best of those who are sodden: Sympson the joiner looks outstanding. I've been away from the 'pedia for a while, but nevertheless blush at your assessment of my sporadic efforts.

Bacchiad 05:16, 8 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Ceqli

We know you supported the Ceqli language. Help us save it by voting to undelete -- it's now up at Wikipedia:Votes for undeletion. Thanks! 24.4.127.164 02:32, 30 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Article Licensing

Hi, I've started a drive to get users to multi-license all of their contributions that they've made to either (1) all U.S. state, county, and city articles or (2) all articles, using the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (CC-by-sa) v1.0 and v2.0 Licenses or into the public domain if they prefer. The CC-by-sa license is a true free documentation license that is similar to Wikipedia's license, the GFDL, but it allows other projects, such as WikiTravel, to use our articles. Since you are among the top 1000 Wikipedians by edits, I was wondering if you would be willing to multi-license all of your contributions or at minimum those on the geographic articles. Over 90% of people asked have agreed. For More Information:

Multi-Licensing FAQ - Lots of questions answered
Multi-Licensing Guide
Free the Rambot Articles Project

To allow us to track those users who muli-license their contributions, many users copy and paste the "{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}" template into their user page, but there are other options at Template messages/User namespace. The following examples could also copied and pasted into your user page:

Option 1

I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions, with the exception of my user pages, as described below:

OR

Option 2

I agree to [[Wikipedia:Multi-licensing|multi-license]] all my contributions to any [[U.S. state]], county, or city article as described below:

Or if you wanted to place your work into the public domain, you could replace "{{DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Dual}}" with "{{MultiLicensePD}}". If you only prefer using the GFDL, I would like to know that too. Please let me know what you think at my talk page. It's important to know either way so no one keeps asking. -- Ram-Man (comment| talk)

Greek sea gods

What happened to you? Temporary insanity I hope! Your myth editing has always seemed so sensible. I try not to get possessive about my fine wording and all, but these are very commonplace middle-of-the-road interpretations... Come see the issues at Talk:Greek sea gods. --Wetman 09:54, 27 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Hi

I am interested in having a Wikipedian Classicists club. A Place where we can meet and talk and share things and common support. A list of people who are Classicists. I think it would be a great idea.WHEELER 01:09, 28 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I also started a category called Classical studies. Can you add all your categories to that it would be very helpful. ThanksWHEELER 01:11, 28 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Out of interest

Ever read The Two Babylons, by Alexander Hislop? - Ta bu shi da yu 23:02, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)

No. I just did the White Goddess last week. That puts me over my flaky scholarship limit for the next month or two. Does Hislop make the sought-after equation between Osiris/Dionysus and Attis, Adonis, Aion, Mithra(s), etc? Bacchiad 05:12, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Just a question really

You disappeared when CheeseDreams was most active [2]
You had knowledge about CheeseDreams' RfAr
You asked CheeseDreams to edit an article
You asked Grunt to ban CheeseDreams for doing so

So, whose sock puppet are you? CheeseDreams 00:15, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)