User talk:AdhesiveRegex
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Primary sources
[edit]Hi! Welcome to Wikipedia. I'm writing some comments about the page L Ninnius Quadratus. I don't at all want to discourage you from writing; we definitely need more active editors to maintain and update the huge number of articles we have.
But I do want to encourage you not to base your articles on primary or obsolete sources. While nobody doubts the value of the primary sources, they should not be used as a basis for an entire article pursuant to Wikipedia policy: WP:PRIMARY. There are substantial issues with their reliability – see WP:CLPRIM – as with sources that many times repeat primary source claims uncritically, such as the Smith DGRBM.
WP:LIBRARY provides a lot of access to scholarly material which is a much more reliable basis for article sourcing. If you are to use primary sources, I also wrote some material on our access to them here: Wikipedia:CGR/Guides/Primary sources. Most of the time, the Loeb Classical Library access we have is of substantial use. (A counterexample are the positively ancient Perrin translations of Plutarch in Loeb, which were based on the Sintenis editions of the texts because the translation was done before both 20th century Teubners.)
The German Wikisource is also in the (very long) process of entering all the public domain portions of the Realencyclopadie der Altertumswissenchaft and has already mostly collated the relevant scans. If you are interested in republican prosopography I also highly recommend getting a copy of MRR and consulting the relevant entries in DPRR (eg L Ninnius Quadratus on DPRR). Unlike DGRBM, RE, MRR, and DPRR are actually cited in modern scholarship. Cf WP:USEDBYOTHERS. Ifly6 (talk) 15:15, 3 April 2026 (UTC)
- Thank you for linking the Wikipedia policies on primary sources. I'll be sure to ground any articles I write in more recent scholarship in the future. (Appreciate the links to scholarly material too, especially Broughton and the Wikipedia Library!)
- Many thanks,
- AdhesiveRegex (talk) 16:37, 3 April 2026 (UTC)
- Also, you can check some links on my user page if you want a copy of MRR's first two volumes. MRR 3 is still in copyright, however, which means you won't be able to find a legal copy of it just anywhere. Let me know also if you're not yet eligible for WP:LIBRARY and also don't have institutional access somewhere (if you're a student at a university or whatever it just doesn't really matter); if so, I can point you to some other resources. Ifly6 (talk) 16:55, 3 April 2026 (UTC)
- Oh, and see also WP:GRLIT and the really quite long discussion that went into it. Ifly6 (talk) 17:12, 3 April 2026 (UTC)
By the way, you can find a few portions of PIR2 here: https://refubium.fu-berlin.de/handle/fub188/37199. I'm not aware of any other partes available online.
But as to the content more generally, I wouldn't go too far beyond what the secondary sources can support. My view, not necessarily the consensus, is generally that primary source material or details which are not discussed or included in the high-quality reliable sources should not be included and that inclusion thereof would be inconsistent with WP:DUE or alternatively WP:OR. That is not to say that your contributions on this article should be removed; most of it is probably supportable with reference to secondary literature. I would definitely look in, if possible, to monographs or articles on the post-republican plebeian tribunate. Ifly6 (talk) 18:42, 3 April 2026 (UTC)
- The entry in the Tacitus Encyclopedia is also relevant. https://onlinelibrary-wiley-com.wikipedialibrary.idm.oclc.org/doi/epub/10.1002/9781119114567. Ifly6 (talk) 18:55, 3 April 2026 (UTC)