Talk:Anemoi

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[edit] Moved from Talk:Zephyrus

Is there knowledge of when Zephyros died?

He lives whenever the West wind blows.


[edit] Roman/Greek Wind Gods merge?

Since this is the only Wikipedia article on the Greek and Roman wind gods that is at all substantial (though it's still not much longer than a stub), I figured I'd ask here: what do you all think about the possibility of merging all the wind god articles into a single article on the lot of them, with individual sections on the different wind directions and their Greek and Roman embodiments and such. I believe this would be more efficient and would provide all the same information in a more compact and readily-accessible form, avoiding redundancies (i.e. all the current wind-god articles repeat the same list of all the other wind-god articles, often filling the bulk of the article's information with repetition) and encouraging expansion of all the different wind-gods by making their articles more immediately accessible to people interested in any of them. Currently, the state of the winds on Wikipedia is:

  • East Wind
  • Greek: Eurus, a three-line stub
  • Roman: Vulturnus, a redirect to Eurus
  • South Wind
  • Greek: Notus, a four-line stub
  • Roman: Auster, a totally unrelated article (it's an airplane!)
  • West Wind
  • Greek: Zephyrus, a one-page article with a fair amount of information, a nice image, and an audio file; if merged with the other wind gods, would probably help encourage people to increase the size of the other wind god sections to match
  • Roman: Favonius, a one-line stub with a disambiguation to four things named "Favonius" that aren't; could either be made a disambig page (with a link to the general wind-gods page for the deity) or the links could be incorporated into Favonius' section on the wind-gods page since there's only one real page for anything with the name anyway (and presumably all the names derive from the gods' name, indirectly?)
  • South Wind
  • Greek: Boreas, a nice-sized article of a similar size to Zephyrus; not as well-organized or pretty, but has a references section
  • Roman: Aquilo, a redirect to Boreas
  • Southeast Wind
  • Southwest Wind
  • Greek: Lips, a disambiguation page (that doesn't currently mention the god anywhere)
  • Roman: Africus, a one-line stub (that is actually completely factually inaccurate, claiming to be the etymological source of Africa even though this is heavily disputed; also, for some reason someone removed the Lips mentioning from this page)
  • Northeast Wind
  • Greek: Kaekias, a broken link
  • Roman: Caecius, a broken link
  • Northwest Wind
  • Greek: Skiron, a broken link
  • Roman: Corus, a disambiguation page (that doesn't currently mention the god anywhere)

We could also mention other Greek and Roman wind gods in the article who may merit their own article a bit more, like Typhon and Aeolus.

I don't care much where the merged article is; probably the best name would be Anemoi (the Roman equivalent, Venti, is arguably not as common and in any case more likely to be confused with other things; it's currently an article on a network storage system), just because it's more compact, stable, and historically-based than an interprative name like "Greco-Roman wind deities". But anyway, I'd love to hear feedback on this. -Silence 15:13, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

Sounds good to me. If a section becomes big enough, it could easily be farmed off back to an individual page, leaving a summary on the Anemoi page. ;) ntennis 15:52, 23 December 2005 (UTC)
My thoughts exactly! We can easily eventually have pages for all the winds again, a year or so down the line, once the merger's helped facilitate growth by a few more pages. Or maybe we won't. Either way, this should be a help. So, with that in mind, I've finished creating the Anemoi page; tell me what you think, and do feel free to make any changes you want. If no one objects, I'll change all the above links to redirects to Anemoi. -Silence 18:27, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Post-move

[edit] Romanisation of Greek names

Firstly: Great work Silence! Secondly, I'd like to consider the somewhat daunting task of applying one consistent approach to Romanisation of Greek names. I'm not expert but there appears to be two basic systems in use; one that I guess transliterates the Greek letters (eg. "Karpos") and one that is more of a transcription into Latin (eg. "Carpus"); the latter tends to be more common, especially in older texts. I suggest that for characters central to the article, both (or all) spellings are shown in the first instance (eg "Karpos/Carpus") and thereafter only one is used. Silence seems to have already taken this approach in introducing the Anemoi, preferring the -os to the more common "-us" endings. I also prefer the "-os" spellings, but many of the other names on this page are in the "-us" form, and it seems cumbersome to include two possible spellings for every character named in passing, eg "With Chloris/Khloris, he fathered Ampyx/Ampycus/Ampykos, Mopsus/Mopsos and Carpus/Karpos." Adding to the difficulty, the page names themselves are inconsistently romanised (eg. Chloris but Karpos - the more 'Greek' spelling was chosen to avoid conflict with the article on carpus bones).

So i'm sorry to present a tricky problem and not offer a great solution! It just sticks out to me when (for example) the caption on the image reads "Zephyros and Hyacinth", using a different spelling system for each name. Obviously this is a broader issue than just this page. See for instance Similarities between Roman, Greek, and Etruscan mythologies, which contains a list of wikipedia articles on Greek mythological figures. Unforunately, if we had to pick only one spelling, I'm afraid it would have to be the "-us" system as it's just more common. ntennis 01:48, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

Consistency is most important. I'll switch to the Latinized versions of the names. I'd gone with the variants that were closed to Greek simply because we were also discussing the completely Roman versions of each deity, so going with the more Latinized names even for the Greek gods seemed unbalanced, but it's true that this leads to a lot of weird situations, so I've changed to using the "-us" endings almost exclusively. It's also true, and unfortunate, that there's very little consistency on this matter on Wikipedia. At least the current page name we have, Anemoi instead of the more common Winds, seems consistent with similar pages on Wikipedia: Charites instead of the much more common Graces, Moirae instead of the more common Fates, etc. Strange stuff. -Silence 02:10, 24 December 2005 (UTC)

All good now! As an odd aside, the sentence I took from the article to illustrate naming problems had been bugging me; I think the addition of Mopsus and Ampycus is a mistake. Now removed. ntennis 10:02, 4 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Interwiki?

How best to handle the numerous links to foreign Wikipedia pages on the specific wind-gods? The majority of non-English Wikipedias don't have a centralized "wind gods" or "Anemoi" or whatnot page, and all of them have pages on the individual wind deities, so I don't know how best to link to all those pages. Up until now I'm simply listed every page for the individual wind-gods on the main page along with the few general ones that exist (Česky, Español, and Latina), but that's led to a massive number of links. I don't want to simply not link to them from anywhere, because there are lots of good pages for the topic, but I also don't want the interwiki section of the page to be bogged-down and cluttered with countless repetitive and disorganized-seeming links. So, for now I'm moving these Interwiki links to the Talk page until we can work out how to deal with them: -Silence 22:32, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

  • Apeliotes
  • Boreas
  • Eurus
  • Kaikias
  • Lips
  • Notus
  • Skeiron
  • Zephyrus


How about a single line at the end of each section? eg, Eurus:

Interwiki: de, es, fr, he, hu, it, nl, pl, sv, tr

ntennis 00:05, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

I'd be fine with that, but would such an unusual method be acceptable under Wikipedia article-writing style? I've never seen anything like that done on any article; interwiki links outside of the interwiki section are very, very rare. Anyone have any objections, or any support for such a resort? -Silence 04:50, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

The guideline is at Wikipedia:Interlanguage links#Inline interlanguage links, and there has been some discussion of similar issues on the talk page (with not very useful outcomes, sorry). I've added a note there, but I suggest we put the interlanguage links into the article "inline" (as above) for now, where any possible objectors are more likely to see it. It can always be taken out again if there's strong opposition! I've left a note on the Wikipedia talk:Interlanguage links page. ntennis 07:27, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

The way it is now looks ugly to me, especially the redundant and somewhat self-referential links to InterWiki (itself a questionable article). I say if the language in question has an article that directly corresponds to this one, like es:Dioses del viento griegos, then no other links to that language are necessary. On the other hand, it appears some of the languages only have articles about certain wind gods and no general article that corresponds to this one, which is a problem. —Keenan Pepper 22:12, 7 June 2006 (UTC)
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