Disputatio:Index Communium Rhenaniae Septentrionalis et Vestfaliae

Footnotes for sources?

Over time, I have changed a lot of place names in this list to Latin names I found here and there (it must be more than 80 by now). When the name was a redlink, I added my source in hidden text. Now Andrew Dalby suggests footnotes instead, which is not something I'm necessarily against, but I never did that because it seemed to change the nature of the page, which I didn't want to do without some consensus (I've done it on other pages, too, e.g. here). So here's the question: Should we put footnotes everywhere in this kind of list? When I started, in my mind it was some kind of temporary measure pending creation of the relevant pages, but then I doubt anyone will create all these pages during my lifetime (I sure won't)... Sigur (disputatio) 20:45, 4 Octobris 2019 (UTC)

Our discussion began elsewhere, and I didn't realise until now that we were talking about a whole-list page -- I had seen this page of course, but I hadn't ever clicked on "edit". It is true that this list will initially have a lot of footnotes, whose eventual resting-place (when Vicipaedia is finished and we are pouring the champagne) will be on the pages of the individual communes. Footnoting, not hidden text, is our regular practice and I see strong reasons not to change.

• So far as I know, Helveticus Montanus was the first to adopt this practice: when he used a dubious word or an uncertain proper name, he would regularly footnote the dictionary (or whatever) from which he got it. He must have been doing this from as far back as 2005 or 2006, and I don't think anyone ever suggested a change. I sometimes remove his footnotes when I am enlarging his pages, but that's not because they are wrong, it's because a relevant page has meanwhile been created so that the footnotes are no longer needed at the point where he placed them.
• The long term anonymous contributor who makes pages about countries also does this, especially when embedding a list of cities or regions. If we're lucky, on the more recent of those pages, any such name not already linked to a page will have a none-too-precise footnote to a source. On the older such pages there are no such footnotes, but the anonym began to notice that un-footnoted names were very often ignored or changed or deleted and adopted this good practice in self-defence.
• I picked up the idea from Helveticus, and I'm sure others have also.

The page containing the newly-documented names gets more footnotes than it will eventually need, but so what? The footnotes meanwhile help any user who wants to know if the Latin term is justified, and -- even better -- any user who is going to create the relevant page. Links in footnotes can be clicked on. On the other hand, hidden text has serious downsides:

• Links in hidden text can't be clicked on. It would be strange, when pasting in a link, to make it deliberately difficult to use.
• Any hidden text that's not in Latin (in English, German, whatever) does actually discourage editors who don't use that language: it can have the effect of creating a walled garden. There has been evidence of this and we really need to guard against it. The only language all editors use is Latin.

Postscript: I spend a fair bit of time on the depressing task of deleting the hidden text that editors occasionally leave on their pages. [I mean, I do it while improving the page in other ways. I don't go hunting for hidden text :)] It will be a relatively cheerful job to convert this hidden text to footnotes, so I'm willing to do a share of it! Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 10:16, 5 Octobris 2019 (UTC)

Some of these details are new to me. I've always assumed that footnotes were standard practice for attestations, IacobusAmor (disputatio) 13:26, 5 Octobris 2019 (UTC)

Indeed, footnotes generated by {{Convertimus}} and {{FD ref}} are standard practice for the lack of attestations. IacobusAmor (disputatio) 13:29, 5 Octobris 2019 (UTC)

and I believe they should be. Rarely, however, I've inserted a hidden gloss when it appeared that a future editor might go astray. Exempli gratia, heri in commentario de libidine, scripsi "omni sensu omnino carens<!--unconscious-->." Surely ordinary readers don't need to know (hence the hiding), or to be distracted by a visually disruptive footnote, but it might help an inexperienced future editor (and if history is a guide, plenty of them will be dropping in) to know that this phrase doesn't mean "entirely lacking all sense," but according to both Cassell's & Traupman involves an idiom for "unconscious." (Footnote: This means that we may have trouble coining a Latin lemma for "the unconscious," not least because that topic isn't the same thing as "the unconscious mind," which can conveniently be mens omni sensu carens.) IacobusAmor (disputatio) 13:26, 5 Octobris 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for your comment -- you always start new trains of thought --

Hmm, not quite sure if it's true that ordinary readers don't need to see such things ... well, anyway, if I wanted to add a comment about your hidden note, I would add it on the talk page; so at that stage I'd have to copy the hidden note to the talk page. So isn't the talk page the place where it should be all along? ... that's my tentative suggestion. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 15:17, 5 Octobris 2019 (UTC)

Maybe . . . but once again must run. . . . IacobusAmor (disputatio) 15:22, 5 Octobris 2019 (UTC)

The adjective "inconscius" turns up in late antique Latin, for what it's worth. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 17:06, 5 Octobris 2019 (UTC)

Excellent! It's not impossible, then, that the noun inconscientia is going to be turning up in the early twenty-first century! IacobusAmor (disputatio) 20:18, 5 Octobris 2019 (UTC)

OK, I'll start. I'll also put the sections into proper alphabetic order. For now, they remain in the order of the German names, but that doesn't make much sense. Sigur (disputatio) 18:51, 5 Octobris 2019 (UTC)