"May I Join the Julius Caesar Portrait Club"?

Of course Wikipedia has a good entry. It is an amazing resource and the biggest mistake most make is dismissing it. Yes there are problems - as there are in Encyclopedia Britannica (once a gold standard reference) and in all source material and "authoritative references". But name another source that is updated more frequently and has more eyes on it? None. The citations are all right there on each page...
Perhaps it would be more respected if we had to pay for it.

 

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I respect your viewpoint @Clavdivs, sorry. I certainly do not dismiss it - I am just a little hesitant about quoting it.

James

 

Thanks, Jamesicus --and Claudivs, who replied before this was finished; what Wiki is good for (besides pop culture, for which it's a nearly inexhaustible resource), ...and on a good day, is the occasional reference that you can cite with a straight face. --Even then, it's about the references cited in any given entry.
One reason I continue to live in amazement at the pitch of erudition that you can find on this forum is the sheer, statistical paucity of the same phenomenon on Wiki. There, it's always a joy when you look something up (in my case, mostly out of sloth), and get Real People writing Real Entries about things relating to ancient and medieval history. Wiki is really, Really all over the map in that regard. But, especially in contrast to here, the exceptions run to being thin on the ground.

 

No need to apologize at all my friend.. funny story: when I was a kid the local grocery store had a promotion where each month if you spent enough money at the store you would get a free volume of Encyclopedia Britannica. These were large leather bound books (maybe it was faux leather - I never noticed.. but they were of good quality print and heavy paper) ...So January they gave away the book with everything starting with "A", February the prize was "B", etc.. on and on... so my mother made this her mission to get us a set for the house. She almost made it.. for some reason we were always missing "P" and "XY" (which was one volume)...
So the endless struggle for me, my brother and sister during elementary and high school was to avoid being assigned a project, essay or paper that fell under "P" and "XY".... we still laugh at it today. Horse trading topics with friends and having to sweeten the pot with candy .. just to avoid the missing volumes.
Wikipedia would have helped us out of a few jams!

 

Great story. I grew up with a complete Americana, from the year after my elder brother was born. (Thank you --euphemism alert-- an example of tactical rather than strategic thinking.) Years later, at a local independent bookshop, I found a complete Britannica from the late 1940's. (Well, even then, minus the index --found separately, a little later, from within a year or so of the rest of the set.) Even with that one, it was like, Okay, the content is going to be Utterly Useless for much besides the Humanities; as such, from a relentlessly Eurocentric perspective. --Eurocentric in terms of the scope of the content, rather than something as amorphous as the 'tone.' But if you lowered your expectations accordingly --and had room for it in the apartment-- it was Solid Gold.

 

Sweet addition @Mat !

 

I'm in Canada... Britannica was the standard. Americana was used to level tables.(kidding.. just wasn't an option)

 

Congratulations. Back to only the last handful of administrations here --whether mainly in regard to our Congress, or executive administration-- I used to comfort myself with the thought that, Just North of here, there was a Civilised (sic) country, where Grownups live. Our Americana should have been used for the same or similar purposes.
...Should've started the last reply with the Britannica, initially minus the Index.

 

Beautiful example. Here's mine, off struck and corroded.



About Wikipedia... I read it often and it's a good starting point. But it is definitely not a good source to quote in research. Yes it may be updated frequently and there are many eyes on it... but are they specialist eyes?

For example there's this Wikipedia page on Domitian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domitian. Specifically the paragraph below. What's wrong with it?

 

Very nice coin @RichardT!

 

What leaps out at me is that the Wiki article involves one online source citing another online source. Not recommended, whether in the context of history, or genealogy. (Jeff Foxworthy, paraphrased: 'If your family tree is more horizontal than it is vertical .....you Might be a redneck.' Xept, Yup, had to wiki him to make sure of his first name. Pop culture: Wiki's Your Boy.) And in this case, since the author was citing the WayBack Machine, it not only Should have been, but Was, That (expl. del.) Easy to cite the operant source in print.
How close was that?

 

Congratulations with this great addition @Mat! It's great to be able to get a Caesar portrait coin in your collection.

 

Congratulations on your twelve Caesars @Limes! I don’t often see the Tiberius quadriga denarius included.

 

Close! The problem with the paragraph is that it refers to outdated information, and in one case has speculation stated as fact.

The paragraph's figures for the denarius fineness uses data from Alan Walker's book, The Metrology of the Roman Silver Coinage, published in the mid 1970s. The problem is, Kevin Butcher and Matthew Ponting have published a book, The Metallurgy of Roman Silver Coinage in 2015 where they comprehensively demonstrated how and why Walker's figures are wrong.

Furthermore the statement that Domitian debased the denarius in 85 due to a financial crisis is just speculation: no one knows the true reason, just as no one knows why he revalued it in the first place.

I think this is too much detail but I hope the point is clear. Kevin Butcher's book was printed in 2015. It's been five years but Wikipedia is still using the outdated figures.

Why? No idea. Wikipedia is still a great source for general reading. But I do not recommend using it for serious research.

 

Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades!

 

And that was the first one I'd ever seen. Here you get a viscerally visual sense of the contemporary tradition (oxymoron? doubt it) of Spanish horseriding. Precision.

 

...Well, except that (especially as long as no one's flinging horse shoes), I looked up the Wiki article again, and, lo and behold, there was zero citation of Walker.
Looks as if the zero-citation pathology ran smack into the outdated-reference one. In what precise causal order is anyone's guess. Sloppy is as sloppy does.

 

I used to have a set of hand be down encyclopedias when I was a kid and they were from the 1970s, I grew up in the 80s through the 90s. I used them every so often but they were old and few had water damage at the time.

In 1994 I ended up throwing them all in the trash, many had mold pretty bad.

I do use Wiki pretty often when I want to look up something & I don't want to wad through pages of google results on a subject.

 

Here's a photo of my 11th edition Encyclopedia Britannica -- containing, essentially, all the cumulative knowledge of Victorian and Edwardian Britain -- together with the supplemental volumes published after World War I, containing minute-by-minute descriptions of every notable battle, and constituting (along with the 11th edition) the 13th edition:



I bought the whole set in London in 1986, at a used bookstore near the British Museum, run by a stereotypically bookish elderly Englishman. He shipped the whole set to me in New York City, where it arrived a month or two later in a wooden packing-crate. I still find it useful for looking up obscure battles and equally obscure 19th-century personages.

 

Great story! As children had a set of World Book encyclopedias and I loved them. There was a separate World Book series for children called Childcraft and oh how I loved volume 11, "Make and Do". Wish I still had it! My old encylopedias (the few Worldbook yearbooks I saved) and various school yearbooks were all hurricane victims in 2017 .