Talk:Erasmus

Birth date

The more I read, the less comfortable I am that he was born in 1466. 1469 is very plausible.

As I understand it, the year was calculated by taking the year of his ordination (1493 according to Beatus Rheanus) and subtracting the 25(or 24?) year minimum age for ordination: 1469 is barely possible.

However research of the Gouda archives (New Evidence on Erasmus’ Youth In: Erasmus Studies 2017) makes the 1493 year implausible, and suggests 1496: which means Erasmus could be born before 1471.

The attraction, to me, of a 1469-ish date is it makes much more sense of his biography: if his parents left Rotterdam after his first year (when his father started in Wouden,) he started school at 6 not 9, started Deventer at 9 not 12, was orphaned at 13 not 16, went to 's Hertogenbosch at 14 not 17, went into the novitiate at 17 not 20, fell for Rogerius and professed at age 18 not 21 (Thomas Cromwell professed at age 14 b.t.w), went to Cambrai at 24, became a priest under Bishop Henry at age 25 and started studying in Paris at age 26 not 29: otherwise why would such a brilliant man have such a delayed education?

I am not sure how to handle it: a little table with the two sets of dates for his life events? Rick Jelliffe (talk) 14:15, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

Routemap

I have added the following routemap

Cities and Routes of Erasmus
Oxford, Cambridge London Wokingham Reading Canterbury Deventer Utrecht Calais Steyn Delft Rotterdam St Omer 's-Hertogenbosch Paris, Cambrai Brussels, Antwerp Louvain Turin Cologne Bologna Mainz Strasbourg Florence Freiburg im Breisgau Sienna, Padua Basel Rome, Venice Konstanz Cumae

The justification for this is that Erasmus rarely stayed longer than three years in any location (and he lived to 70) and that these locations were key parts of his story, and this is can very easily be confusing, especially for those of us outside Western Europe who may not have a good grasp of its geography. (Plus he regularly popped over to whichever city his books were being published in, to oversee production.)

Also, so many of his colloquies and event are tied to places (the pilgrimage to Wokingham, the pilgrimage to Canturbury, his participation in the Field of the Cloth of Gold near Calais, his year spent with Aldus Manutius in Venice, and so on.)

I didn't see any way to show his individual trips (e.g. he went to England 5 times, to Paris numerous ties, to Italy twice, and so on) so I think this is a good compromise.

I used the places in the Wikipedia article, plus several biographies as source, such as CCEL and Huizinga, so I don't think there is any original research it. It uses the Wikipedia Routemap tags, so it can be maintained by anyone. It is pretty much North-South like a map: the red are trips he would have made on horseback or carriage, the blue is trips he would have made by boat (English Channel, Rhein River). (The Green is his first 25 years in the Netherlands.) Places he stayed only passingly are shown in a lighter colour. The thin line at the bottom is when he crossed the Alps.

On a larger level, a picture is worth a thousand words, especially if you are a "visual thinker" I guess. So also I hope it might stimulate contributors on other pages to take up this great facility of Wikipedia's!

Anyway, talk and help is very welcome.

• After reading this, I understand what is going on and agree that it adds value. But I think the meaning of the colours, shading, etc need to be explained in the article, since they're not obvious. Does the template allow one to include a legend? Furius (talk) 20:43, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

Y Routemap does allow a footnote: I have added some extra info (and may try to improve it following reflection, as of course, can anyone: though I think it is best if super-terse?) Rick Jelliffe (talk) 02:44, 24 October 2023 (UTC)

Brilliant! Furius (talk) 19:52, 24 October 2023 (UTC)

Splitting proposal

The current article is over 100kb long which Wikipedia:Splitting#Size_split says almist certainky should be split. Plus the material proposed for splitting is non-controversial and a good chunk. So I propose that the sections "Writings" and "Works" including all the book and publication lists should be moved to a new Article "Works of Erasmus". Some of the material from the On Free Will and New Testament sections may belong there too. This would leave the Erasmus article to be mainly biographical.

I believe it meets the criteria where I can make a bold action, however I wanted to check if there are any better ideas or reasons not to, etc. before going ahead. Rick Jelliffe (talk) 03:32, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

Go for it. You are a major contributor to the article, seem to know quite a lot about Erasmus. And I believe the split will serve the readership further..Paradise Chronicle (talk) 03:57, 15 July 2023 (UTC)

That size should only be determined by readable prose size, not byte size of the entire article. It says that on the page you linked. Is the readable prose size of this article too large? Because at a glance it doesn’t look like it. SaturatedFatts (talk) 07:59, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

When I cut the (non-footer) text from the browser (so there is no markup), save to a text file, and do a character count (using linux wc), it gives a bit over 97,626 characters and 14,800 words. So, yes,I think the readable prose of the rendered pages is too big.

B.t.w. According to XTextXTools https://xtools.wmcloud.org/articleinfo/en.wikipedia.org/erasmus the total raw file size including markup is 125kb. But it gives a prose size (of the unrendered page) of 49,466 and a word count of 8,000 words. I believe the prose count on XTextXTools is wrong, and based on an old version of the article: in fact there is a warning at the top of the XTextXTools report page that "some data may be inaccurate". (I checked that it was not encoding difference: that the cut-and-paste was not saving to UTF-16.)Rick Jelliffe (talk) 04:23, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

Hi Rick Jeliffe, the article has still many citation needed tags, is missing inline citations etc. and unverifiable sources. I guess a lot of what is written can be removed if there is no source for it. What sections do you intend to move to a works by Erasmus article? I'd appreciate if you move only sourced content. But I'll help you a bit to get the article in shape. Paradise Chronicle (talk) 06:58, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

Thanks!

I have been going through the article for the last half-year putting in citations where they are marked, and removing material where I cannot find the citation or where it is wrong. I think there are relatively few "citation required" tags now. I have also reviewed quite a few of the citations: The Wikilibrary access has been invaluable for this! Congratulations to whoever organized it! I have gone back to some previously blasted material to re-add it with citations, as I think there were some good contributions in the past. I have also tried to put in more graphical material (routemap, timeline, pictures from Wikisource) and more list-y less text-y material.

So, because I am actively doing this, I would really prefer if inadequately cited material were kept (or checked!) for now (2023?), if you don't mind, not just blasted. (There is another page that was vandalized by a guy removing all uncited sentences, so that some of the sentences left were cited but utterly non-sensical in their meaning as they lost context. Obsessive slash and burn can be counter-productive.) It is one thing to cull an article no-one is maintaining, after a few years of inactivity, but another to cull one that is being worked on.

Also, I and others tend to avoid putting citations to the same book or article multiple times in a run of paragraphs: so this can make it appear that the article has uncited text. I want to audit the article for this, to make more use of < ref name="XXX" .

So apart from not just removing uncited sections yet, what would be good? Yes: adding even more "citation required" tags where there are none. And double-checking that the cited journals etc do justify the phrase in the article.

As a side note, I would expect that the new article on Works of Erasmus would indeed (pretty much) be well-cited. It depends on how much material about on Free Will goes into: I think some of that material belongs in the existing strange article about On Free Will, or, better, into a new article on Erasmus and his alter ego Martin Luther. (That page would be subject to another split discussion, I am not suggesting it now.)

In general, I think the big problem with the articles on Erasmus is not that they are unsourced, but that the sources (explicit or implicit) often come from partisan sources (e.g. 19th Century Protestant and Catholic, both anti- or pro-Erasmian) that cannot resist sticking in unfounded commentary, or cod psychologizing. So even if officially WP:RS because they are academic books, we need to be careful to distinguish between what an academic historian says and what is true: those little phrases of spin... Rick Jelliffe (talk) 06:07, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

Readable prose size is 40kb, far under 100kb. What are you talking about?? – Aza24 (talk) 03:51, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

Where do you get your count from? As I wrote, the Xtools count is wrong (I called it Xtext by mistake: now corrected): indeed, the Xtools report warns "This page is very old. Some data may be inaccurate due to how revisions were stored in the early days of MediaWiki." I have described my method of counting words above using wc in the rendered text, which excludes tags, which got, then, 97,626 characters and 14,800 words.Rick Jelliffe (talk) 12:06, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

As of Feb 2024, the Page Length of the Info menu item gives 367,634 bytes. Rick Jelliffe (talk) 16:08, 7 February 2024 (UTC)

Y Following the article being tagged recently as too long, I have split out two sections into a new article Works of Erasmus. Rick Jelliffe (talk) 01:06, 18 June 2024 (UTC)

Next Split? An editor has marked the article as too long again, and deleted the quotes section. (I didn't care for the quotes section much, either, though I think talking about Erasmus without samples from him is a bit like painting about music.) I have recovered some of the quotes and put them into the relevant Works of Erasmus sections.

I have also reduced the entries in the Infobox, and rejigged some sections and headings to be more topical (which may help future splits?) in particular the "Interpretation Caveats" subsection that used to be a rather quibbly attachment under "Turks and Jews" is now an earlier subsection "Manner of expression".

But I don't see a clear way to split the article, unless it is to just take the whole Thoughts of Erasmus section into a different article. But that just leaves the article as a biography which (though quite interesting as a traveller and networker) is not enlightening about what makes Erasmus notable. Anyone have any ideas? I don't think there is much scope for the current article to grow more, at least: I think most of the important bases are covered, though it might be that article is relative light on political, legal and pedagogical details.

Another approach would be to split out the section on Catholic and Protestant Reform into its own article: it would not reduce the main article that much, however it might allow more material on Erasmus versus Luther, Erasmus versus Zwingli, etc. It could have the sections on Protestant and Catholic evaluation from the Evaluations and Legacy section too, I guess. Rick Jelliffe (talk) 09:07, 30 June 2024 (UTC)

Second Splitting Proposal

I am proposing to split the article further, by making another page "Life of Erasmus". This is motivated that even after the previous split to Works of Erasmus, the article is large and an editor re-flagged it for splitting. I already added extra sub-headings, in case that was useful.

In concrete terms:

1. Make new page Life of Erasmus with minimal lead.
2. Move Biography section over
3. Add Main tag and 1 para biography to main article
4. Move over Personal/Clothing, Representations, signet ring and personal motto, and exhumation to Life of Erasmus
5. Fix citations

I am thinking that making a Life of Erasmus article would be better than, say, a Thought of Erasmus because of topic cohesion (and ease) and because his notable thought is probably what people are more interested than his interesting life? Rick Jelliffe (talk) 02:56, 7 July 2024 (UTC)

Y I have split the article again. Instead of the Life of Erasmus idea or the Thought of Erasmus idea, which I think would go against the expectations that the main article is about life and ideas, I have split out the Legacy and Evaluations sections (and the Character Attacks section) into a new article Legacy and Evaluations of Erasmus.

This new article is a good chunk of the main article:

HTML document size: 555 kB
Prose size (including all HTML code): 55 kB
References (including all HTML code): 230 kB
Wiki text: 123 kB
Prose size (text only): 33 kB (5125 words) "readable prose size"
References (text only): 28 kB

So I am removing the "this article is too long and needs to be split header." However, it may be that even with this second split (the first made the Works of Erasmus article, some may feel the article is too long. I agree it is still long, but given his complicated life and extraordinarily broad influence in so many areas, there may be some value in keeping things together, despite the length? Concrete ideas would be useful, of course. Rick Jelliffe (talk) 06:15, 10 August 2024 (UTC)

Content Rating

Before Aug 5 2024, the Erasmus article had a B rating but has clearly become too long. The editor Tpbradbury flagged it as too long and moved the content rating to C on account of the size. On Aug 10, about 1/3 of the article was split out into new article Legacy and Evaluations of Erasmus. I have not moved the rating back to B yet (on the grounds that if a B article is moved to C because it is too big, and then substantially split, it should be B again) to give editors a chance to comment (or in case it is not the way things are done), but I propose to do so within a week if that is OK? Or some other editor might like to do it first? Rick Jelliffe (talk) 00:36, 11 August 2024 (UTC)

4 periods

The current text of the Biography starts with "Erasmus's almost 70 years can be divided into quarters" then gives them; which has been tagged "according to whom". I think the tag misses the point: it is not an invocation to unspecified authorities, but a summary of the following information.

I think such a summary is highly needed due to the lengthy and complex bio section. I will change the "can "to "may" and add "overview" as an unnecssary heading. Rick Jelliffe (talk) 12:51, 23 May 2024 (UTC)