Talk:Origin of the Romanians
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| This article is within the scope of the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Archives |
|---|
 |
This is a controversial historical topic that may be disputed. Please read the talk page and discuss substantial changes there before making them. Please also consider the particular importance of using proper citations when adding information to highly controversial articles. |
 |
Please be neutral when editing this highly sensitive article. It discusses a topic about which people have diverse opinions. |
 |
Discussions on this page may escalate into heated debate. Please try to keep a cool head when commenting here. See also: Wikipedia:Etiquette. |
Contents |
[edit] Article reorganization
The article the way it is right now is just a huge mess. The wealth of unorganized information makes the article unreadable. This is the main issue of the article, as most of the information in it is OK and in most cases referenced. If anyone has issues with specific sections or paragraphs, they should tag the respective section and paragraph using the available tags. Tagging the whole article does not bring us any further, as the editors don't know were they should concentrate their work.
I support a rewrite along the lines outlined bellow: subarticles for the daco-roman continuity and the migration theory, refernced in this page, where there should also be an overview including the reason why the topic is controversial beside the summaries. The subarticles should NOT contain any comparison to the alternative, the intersted reader, could then judge for himself.Octavian8 (talk) 19:08, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
[edit] This is an article?
You call this an article? to me it looks like you guys just make lists of all the arguments you can find for or against MULTIPLE theories in the same article.
First of all: jotting down argument after argument isnt a way to write an article. This is an encyclopedia, not a discussion board. Remove the entire lists, and instead change it into something readable. Secondly: I assume the article didnt start off like this but was expanded and expanded and expanded as time went on. The result is that the theories simply do not fit in the same article anymore - it is confusing because there are so many arguments put forth and against multiple theories that its hard to see the forest through the trees. I suggest you create sub-articles for each theory, and provide summaries here. 77.250.25.165 (talk) 20:13, 31 May 2009 (UTC)
[edit] Tags
The article as a whole needs reorganization, which includes rewrite. For the rest of tags, like unbalanced, original research etc. please continue to tag the sections and in the sections the paragraphs. I do not think that the entire article is based on, e.g., original research.Octavian8 (talk) 14:14, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
[edit] 'Standing' of authors
Octavian, did you archive all previous discussions of this page? I myself came to this page after having seen an Italian television science program about the conquest of Dacia by Trajan. The title was : "Il racconto segreto della colonna Traiana" i.e. "The secret tale of Trajan's column". This is no children's tale, it was written by the most authoritative Italian professor of Roman history, Dr. Livio Zerbini, Professor of Roman History, Head of the Archeology Department at the University of Ferrara, Italy. Dr. Zerbini reconfirmed to me in a personal E-mail that indeed he was the one who "curated" this movie. Dr. Zerbini has published two books on the subject of Roman Dacia in recent years. In February of 2009 Dr. Zerbini gave a presentation of a documentary entitled "Dacia Augusta Provincia" at the Italian Cultural Institute in Bucharest. You can read about this at http://www.omnigraphies.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=1751. For October of 2009 Dr. Zerbini organized an international conference entitled "Rome and the Danubian Provinces". All major scholars of this subject will participate. Dr.Zerbini set up the "Ancient Danubian Provinces Laboratory" at the Department of Historical Sciences at the University of Ferrara, Italy under whose auspisces this conference will be held. I highly recommend for anybody interested in the subject of Dacia to try to legitimately download this movie, try to understand it or have friends traslate for you if your Italian is not proficient. I myself translated and quoted some key sections from it here on these discussion pages. When a scholar of such international standing such as Dr. Zerbini says today that after the Roman conquest Dacia "was ethnically cleansed, completely depopulated, and resettled by great masses from the Roman Empire" such a statement must carry some weight. You may argue otherwise but whom should we beleive? Ceausescu era trained Romanian historians or Professor Zerbini and others who are saying the same thing? Such as Dr. Neil Faulkner, foremost British expert on Romanization who says the exact same thing? (See the citations in the main article.)
The truth is that if this question of Romanian origins is important at all (and is it more important than the origins of any other nation or people?), it is now open to free debates and discussions, unlike in the Ceausescu era when anybody dissenting from the dictator's personal views risked not only his livelihood but even his personal freedom (jail). Eravian (talk) 18:16, 15 June 2009 (UTC)
—Preceding unsigned comment added by Eravian (talk • contribs) 18:05, 15 June 2009 (UTC)
- I have nothing with your sources, although they are just some comments on the respective internet sites. My problem was with the emphasis on the 'high international standing' of the two authors. If you say such a thing you should also describe the framework by which the international standing is measured. To make myself more clear, this thing about 'standing' is just a pointless digression. If we leave it here it will not be long before each citation and each author in this Wikipedia article will get similar descriptions about how good they are... About Romanian historians, I'll look over your obvious bias and say just that 1+1=2 even in communism. Besides it is not only Romanian historians that believe that the 'ethnical clensing'of the entire population in the portion of Dacian land conquered by the Romans is just an exaggeration and that Eutropius and his friends were referring chiefly to the ruling elite and had no actual mean to properly estimate the number and density of Dacian population particularly outside the cities.
- If by Ceuasescu's opinion you mean the daco-roman continuity, then you should know that this was not his ideea to begin with, but he adopted it and sometimes misused it for his political purposes. Octavian8 (talk) 16:05, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
Octavian, I have no ax to grind on this issue, I do not have an opinion on this subject of my own. But when I came accross this Italian science film, broadcast on RAI Italian national television last December, I was very surprised at the strong language used there about the fate of the Dacian population. This was, is a major Italian TV production, filmed in large part on location in Romania. It is a one and a half hour film. Most of it is about the Roman legions, but maybe 10-15 minutes of it deals with the actual events of the Dacian wars and the conquest and its aftermath. This film should be seen by every Romanian, including yourself. Try to get it from the Italian Cultural Institute in Bucharest or try to obtain or download it from legitimate sources. I investigated who was the author of the ideas expressed in this film - which was viewed by millions of Italians -, (this "Ulisse" series is very popular), and found out about professor Zerbini. Unfortunately, Wikipedia does require sources to be cited, and these sources must have NOTABILITY. Please, read Wikipedia policies. This is not a bias on my part. There are respectable Romanian historians, who have published internationally. These would include Dr. Lucian Boia, Florin Curta, Niculescu, Mutu, Elena Oltean. They do not have to agree with Dr.Zerbini. However, when you qoute from their publications it must be done properly. General WEASEL statements such as "Romanian historians believe.." are not acceptable.
Why do not we just leave the first passage as it was? There are indeed several theories. The Migration from the south theory (Roesler theory) is as old as the Daco-roman theory and despite of what I or Romanian historians think about it, it is an existing theory and as such it is not original research. The listing of the various theories are all based on well documented, currently extant, citeble sources. Unless you are an expert yourself, and you have internationally peer-reviewed publications under your own name, you should not attempt to interpret ancient sources yourself. You should restrict yourself to qouting acceptable, notable sources, who have the proper training, expertise in ancient languages, archeology etc., for the interpretation of ancient sources.
Please, also read the Carpi page and Italian Wikipedia's Dacia page very carefully. From these, Dacia before the Roman conquest appears to be an ethnically, linguistically diverse area. I have cited Oltean previously, who admonishes against attempting to project backwards a unified, national state into an ancient historical time when such concepts were unknown and unnecessary. Eravian (talk) 13:23, 27 June 2009 (UTC)
- Try to understand, there is NO system to appreciate the standing of authors! the rest is just an attempt to justify one idea over the other by the 'fact' that those supporting it are somehow 'better'.
- You also write 'I do not have an opinion of my own...' may I laugh :-)? Is this now supposed to make you impartial and give more weight to your anti-Daco-roman continuity opinions?
- For the 'likely' part, that was not my doing, but it is what YOUR source (Faulkner) says, perhaps you should read it better.
- I fail to found in my edits the WEASEL statement you are referring to. If you mean my post on this discussion site, then I ask you, did you read it? and do you know what 'weasel statement' means?
- Saying that the Roessler theory is as old as the idea of Daco-roman continuity just shows that you do not know that much about it.
- About the citations, perhaps you should start applying in practice the theory you put forth.
- And finally, for the last paragraph of your post, I fail to see the connection to our issue or to something I have said.
- If you have something to add about the standing of authors, please do so in this discussion. For other things start a new topic. Also please quit trying to put 'words in my mouth'. I do not like this.Octavian8 (talk) 12:47, 28 June 2009 (UTC)
-
- Octavian, I have Dr. Faulkner's paper right in front of me and it says (exact quote): "Dacia appears to have been laid waste, ethnically cleansed and re-settled by foreign colonists". (There are other things he says about the romanization process starting with the aristocracy and "most men of rank", "but there were limits to romanisation", "The culture of the conqueror often had little appeal to the oppressed".
Otherwise I think the text of that passage would be acceptable, with the minor change I made (and the few corrections of the misspellings.) I would be happier though, if you could actually provide exact page numbers for your references at the two places where I tagged it and at the two original places of your citations. The "relative high standing" of my references is based on the idea that while these authors have as impeccable academic credentials as anybody else in the business, their work was published by major international news organizations intended to reach millions of listeners, viewers, not just for a narrow scientific community. But I do not insist on mentioning this and elevate them above the others. Further down at the list of theories I added Lucian Boia as a reference. The more I am reading his book "History and Myth etc." the more highly I think of him. He has an ample review of the history of Romanian and other historiographies of the last few centuries (including Roesler's theories, otherwise known as immigrationist theories), and anybody can access most of it through Google books. I would also highly recommend the Thraco-Roman page. This has been greatly expanded and rewritten since about February of this year i.e. about the time of the start of my involvment with these pages. I also recommend the Proto-Romanian language page. The main thrust of all of these sources is that Romanian historians, especially during the Ceausescu regime tended to rely exclusively on archeology and ignored linguistics.
I would just add: Let us not speculate about likelynesses, probabilities of this or that scenario. With such sensitive issues we need to qoute our sources as verbatim as possible, with exact page numbers in the texts or in the case of the film minute numbers. Eravian (talk) 13:54, 2 July 2009 (UTC)
- I have read the book by Boia, I suggest you read it to the end, then start talking about it. If you want to make yourself an opinion about the issue also read the books of Djuvara and Constantiniu.
- Good that you've put the quote here, it says:'Dacia appears...' this should be also clear in text.
- Also, the fact that the two citations are published on the sites of 'major news organizations' said nothing for them but a lot against them. Major news organizations also reported about Irakian weapons of mass destruction... Again it would be better to just stay by the thoughts about citations from your posts. Also, citing documentaries is highly unusual and for good reason. A book or scientific publication is open to review by specialized public, while a documentary is open to review by the large uninitiated public. For example there are a lot of 'science programs' explaining everything in this world, including a lot of physical phenomena, but you will never see them cited in a 'real' physics article.Octavian8 (talk) 19:34, 2 July 2009 (UTC)
