User:Jpbrenna/Achaemenid

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Achaemenid To Do & Rough Policy Proposal:

1. Someone fluent in Modern Persian should check the modern spellings beginning with Achaemenes. I created some based on guesswork.
2. Double redirects should be corrected
3. We need to round up some Unicode-geeks and see if they can help us work out a template that can force browsers to show Old Persian cuneiform (something like the Greek {{polytonic|}} tag).
4. General style and vocabulary cleanup. A lot of these articles have significant dumps from the 1911 Brittanica, which used prose that was excessively archaizing and verbose even 100 years ago. Now some of it sounds quite ridiculous. And we have a lot of earnest contributors whose native language is not always English, which occasionally produces some bizarre phrasing that has to be corrected. If the meaning is clear but the phrasing awkward, simply edit it for style. If it is completely unintellgible, try to find the original author of a section and contact him to try to find out the meaning.
5. If you edite on these topics a lot, use Babel tags on your userpage. If you're a Persian speaker with crummy English, or vice-versa (like me), it makes it easier to find someone who can help you out.
6. For this and all other ancient Persian dynasties, BCE should be used instead of BC. Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Zoroastrian or other dating systems should be inserted where appropriate (mention of Ending of Babylonian captivity, early Christian sites in the Persian Empire, marriage of Persian royalty to early Muslim leaders, earliest surviving Avestan manuscript copy - that sort of thing). Don't put it in next to every single date, only to a date in Persian royal history that is significant to the history of something else, or else the article will become cluttered with so many alternative dates that it will become unreadable.
7. Similarly, Modern Persian or other alternative spellings of names and other terms should be given in that particular subject's main article, not every time the subject is mentioned in another article (again, readability issues). Ditto for Greek, Arabic etc. It's important that these names be mentioned because the connection isn't always clear. Caesar and Alexander still have numerous Al Qaisariyahs and Iskandarias named after them throughout the Middle East, and in a similar fashion, sometimes Persian rulers pop up the same way in Arab, Hebrew, Greek and Indian history. But like dates, we should do this only where context-appropriate, or else it creates clutter with long strings of names in different languages and alphabets. Use the default English version of the name except in the main article and when really needed elsewhere.
8. And since a lot of these guys pop up in Herodotus and are still important to Iranians today, we might even want to have a default infobox with each alternative spelling (Old Persian - Ancient Greek - Modern Persian - Other] so that it's easily accessible for comparison.

--Jpbrenna 21:47, 25 May 2005 (UTC)