User:Bacchiad
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The Bacchiads were a clan of petty despots in Archaic Corinth. For some reason I chose it as my screen name. Anyway, my edits focus mostly on Ancient mythology, poetics and cult practice; comparative religion; and a weird corners of Late Antique mystery cults and modern occultism.
I like to poke around in the more obscure corners of knowledge, and I try to bring rigor to fringe or obscure subjects that don't usually attract them.
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Greek myth Template experiment
You may have noticed a whole buttload of new annoyances on the Greek mythology pages. If so, it's my fault. Template:Greek myth and its cousins are my doing. I'd like your feedback.
Right now, I think the project's a partial failure.
A navigational box seems to work well for categories that are small, well-defined and flat. Greek myth is not any of those. On the other hand, certain aspects of it are: Even with the Hestia/Dionysus/Demeter shuffles, the Twelve Olympians are a pretty well-defined group of fifteen to sixteen. The Twelve Titans are a discrete company of 13 or so. I think those are worth keeping.
Possibly also (sea) and (Hades). Anyways, feedback in discussions. Bacchiad 00:39, 18 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Stuff I've worked on
Some articles I've started: aulos, Georges Dumezil, Anahita, Hargrave Jennings, Emerald Tablet, Bakis, Aristeas, Lasus of Hermione, dithyramb, Late Antiquity, Erwin Rohde, William Blake's mythology
Some articles I've significantly re-worked: Orpheus, Pythagoras, Nyx, Mitra (and the late Mithra), Trophonius, Life-death-rebirth deity, Homer, Titan (mythology), Hermetica, Abaris, Epimenides, Onomacritus, Jupiter (god), Zeus, artificial mythology, Greek mythology
Other articles I've contributed to: Mithras, asura, Roman mythology, Hesiod, Theogony, Pindar, Gymnopaedia, Korybantes
{NB: I did some of this work before I signed on as a user.}
I also started [[Category:Late Antiquity]], [[Category:Classical oracles]] and [[Category:Artificial mythology]].
How I think about Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a conversation. A conversation should be easy to follow, should concern real people and things and deeds, and should be an open dialogue rather than a closed monologue
Easy-to-Follow Articles
You can usually see my hand in an article if it's broken down into a lot of =Sub-Sections=. I bet some people find it annoying, but it helps me to hone in on what's important and visualize the flow of the article. Articles of even medium length tend to have information about each particular aspect of the topic strewn around without order. Bringing them together under well-thought-out headings makes it easier to synthesize and analyze information.
People, Things, Deeds
I hate nothing more than doxography. It is easy - I know because I do it myself - to speak disembodiedly about ideas and mythological constructs as things in themselves. This sort of writing gets my back up.
What I want to know about is [who] thought these things; [where] they thought them; [when] they thought them; [what they were doing] while they were thinking it; [what kind of objects] they used to do the things they were doing.
I strive as much as possible to populate my articles with concrete people, places, things, and deeds.
An example
As an example of what I mean, take a gander at any given article on any given Greek god. I betcha it starts out with InGreekMythology. If you are considering starting out an article this way, please do me a favor and let me know where I can get tickets to GreekMythology, cause Yahoo! Travel ain't got 'em.
GreekMythology is not a place; it does not exist. Greek gods and heroes didn't abide in some kind of airy sky castle out of which third-grade book reports and learned Jungian commentaries flutter like the pure driven snow. They had real altars and real shrines, built of real stones, carved with real inscriptions and real art, smoking with the fat and wetted with the blood of real victims sacrificed by real worshippers. They leapt off the tongues of real bards, some of whose names we know, at real poetic competitions, some of which we know about. The stories we know about them were transcribed by real authors in real books, on real papyrus, and copied by real scribes onto real parchment.
If we want to speak at all of Greek gods and heroes, common decency requires at least cursory mention of these people, things, and deeds.
Openness
I try to be as fanatical as I can about sources and NPOV not because they're good scholarly practice, but because they open up possibilities for our readers. Sources allow them to run out and verify things for themselves if they want - even better, to discover something wholly unrelated by chance as they look up the relevant info. NPOV allows several alternative viewpoints to be advanced, opening up possibilities that the reader may never have imagined.
The architecture of Wikipedia is open; our writing should be as well.
One of the most important guarantors of openness is doubt. Broad assertions presented as fact without support or attribution have to be rooted out like vermin. If you see one of mine, please re-cast or delete it.
Some of my favorite Wikipedians
Table Tests
Greek Table Test
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