Talk:Titus Cloelius Siculus

Infobox Issue

P Aculeius Reason for reverting my edit are opinion based. Those are the reason why the infobox should be kept

1. I have not had a issue with my infobox on other pages, and if it was not truly useful like P Aculeius is saying then they would have been reverted. Keep in mind I have the same type of infobox on over 50 pages over previous Consuls with no complaints.

2. The infobox does have purpose it makes it easier for the reader to find the information, instead of having to read the whole article, and go all the way down to the bottom to bibliography to find who served with Titus Cloelius Siculus and who preceded and susceed him.

3. The box does not violate any Wikipedia guidelines and has a proper source.

4. It not guessing about the the dates and where Titus Cloelius Siculus was born, Roman Republic required at the time that one had to bee a Roman citizen and had to be born in Rome for one to hold the office of Consul. Also the date in which he served was not guessing its based off a source that mentioned that during this time consul started there term on the thirteenth of December and ended the twelve of December the next year. BigRed606 (talk) 18:17, 12 September 2020 (UTC)

The purpose of an infobox is to assist readers in navigating complex articles by summarizing important and relevant facts from an article. The infobox offered on this—and many other short articles about Roman consuls and consular tribunes, which formerly got along fine without infoboxes—served no useful purpose. The entire body of this article currently consists of six paragraphs, two of them very short, followed by a succession box listing the consuls of the preceding year, the consular tribunes who served alongside the subject, and the consuls who succeeded them. The very brief lead says what the subject's name was and gives his year of office.

The infobox, which constituted 10% of the article's size, and was as long as the lead, table of contents, and first body section combined, contained the following information:

• The subject's name, found at the very beginning of the lead sentence.
• The office that the subject held, found in the lead sentence.
• The assumed dates that the subject's term of office began and ended, not found in any source. (1)
• The names of the subject's colleagues, found in the succession box
• The names of the subject's predecessors, found in the succession box
• The names of the subject's successors, found in the succession box
• The assertion that the subject was born at an unknown time.
• The assertion that the subject was born at Rome, something not found in any source.
• The assertion that the subject died at an unknown time.
• The assertion that the subject died at Rome, something not found in any source.

(1) I say "assumed", because no source explicitly states when the subject took office or provides the exact date of his resignation. The former date is inferred based on the most recent scholarship concerning when Roman consuls usually assumed office during this period of time—but this is at best a general assumption, which historians have long argued over, and which may not have applied without exception to every year, and we have no statement of authority as to the dates for this particular year or person. In fact most modern sources don't even address the issue, but merely give the year for which the annual magistrates were elected. So this is information not known from any source for the subject of this or most other articles about Roman consuls, and not included in most discussions of them, which raises the question of whether it's appropriate to include in each and every article about Roman magistrates—much less to repeat it for each and every year that they held an annual magistracy.

If we exclude the details that merely duplicate details from the lead paragraph or the succession box, the infobox contains:

• A claim of when the subject probably assumed and left office, based on when other officeholders are thought to have entered and left office during this time period.
• A statement that we don't know when he was born or when he died, but that both must have occurred at Rome, because (fill this in when someone digs up a source).

Infoboxes like this are discussed at length at WP:DISINFOBOX: an attractive but useless collection of factoids (not facts) that promises a useful summary but provides nothing useful. It duplicates what one can find in the lead, or in other tables and templates, and is otherwise devoid of context or useful detail.

It is not a "fact" that Cloelius entered into office on December 13. There is no statement to this effect in any of the Roman historians; in fact the dates that consuls and consular tribunes took office are hardly ever mentioned, and when mentioned they are only described in broad terms: no Roman writer says, "from this year to that year, all of the annual magistrates entered into office on this day, except for A, B, and C..." which is why the topic has been investigated and discussed at length by modern historians. These writers cannot offer specific guarantees that the date that was generally observed during a particular period of time was always strictly adhered to, so in the absence of any authority as to the date that Cloelius and his colleagues entered into office, it's only an inference: an educated guess based on the general rule. This is why most modern historians refer to "the consuls of 478" or "the consuls of 433", rather than saying, "on December 13, 433..." But for some reason, when we have an infobox on Wikipedia, we have to provide as much detail as humanly possible, even though we're only dealing with a rough probability. It's a "factoid", a fact-like thing—it looks like a fact, masquerades as a fact, but in reality is just a scholarly guess in this or almost any other instance. Which is what a disinfobox does: it asserts facts devoid of all subtlety or nuance.

If we don't know when someone was born or when he died, and can't even provide a reasonable approximation, it's better to leave it out completely than use "unknown" to pad out an infobox. If we would normally expect to know this information, but don't in this one instance, then I could see including it. But 99% of the time, we have no more than the vaguest notion of when Roman statesmen were born or when they died. Which means that if we put infoboxes on all the Roman consuls who have their own articles, they're just going to say "unknown", "unknown" endlessly for nearly every consul who didn't fall in battle or die of plague during his year of office.

As for where they were born and where they died, it's undoubtedly true that the great majority of Roman statesmen were born at Rome, and (at least in the early Republic) died there, but contrary to the assertion above, there was no law requiring anyone to have been born at Rome or even a Roman citizen in order to hold the consulship. Appius Claudius, for example, was a Sabine in the prime of life when he came to Rome in 505 BC, and was given Roman citizenship; he held the consulship ten years later. Roman citizenship was frequently granted to foreigners who were seen as acting for the good of the Roman people; and even assuming that nearly all consuls of the early Republic were born at Rome, Roman territory extended far beyond the city walls, and encompassed numerous towns and villages whose inhabitants were considered Romans. At best we have a mere probability in favour of any particular consul being born at Rome, and a slightly lower probability of dying at Rome, given the availability of land in the countryside. But even if nearly all Roman statesmen were born and died at Rome, we don't have statements in any authorities to the effect that any particular consuls were born or died at Rome in more than a handful of cases. In other words, it's a guess. A very likely guess, but not given in any source—and usually not stated by modern historians either, in the absence of any statement from ancient authorities.

The bottom line is, infoboxes are meant to convey meaningful, useful information that one can't gather merely by glancing at an article. But most Roman consuls have short articles, only a few paragraphs in length. They invariably give the subject's name and most important offices in the lead, and almost invariably contain a succession box listing their colleagues, predecessors, and successors. There is no point in an infobox that merely repeats this information, just because it adds colored bars and variable text sizes. And without repeating that, all it tells you is that we don't know when he was born, we don't know when he died—details that are the same for nearly every Roman who didn't die during his year of office, and guesses as to when he entered office and that he probably was born and died at Rome—again, details that are the same across hundreds of Roman politicians, in that they're probably true, but can't actually be proved for any of them individually, because no ancient source says when or where they were born, or gives the date they entered or left office. What's the point of inserting details into an infobox that are only sort of "true-ish"? Factoids that need to be footnoted and explained in detail on every occasion that they occur—endless repetition of largely unverifiable details.

I'm not unaware of the irony of taking so much space to explain why a short article doesn't need an infobox that just takes up space and looks pretty. But the same can be said of many other short biographical articles in CGR—which is why we should be hesitant to add infoboxes unless they're actually needed, and contain useful details, instead of regurgitating information from the lead and succession box, or rattling off a list of things we don't know about people. P Aculeius (talk) 05:15, 13 September 2020 (UTC)