This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
The empire on which the sun never sets article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
Archives: 1, 2 |
This article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Daily pageviews of this article
A graph should have been displayed here but
graphs are temporarily disabled. Until they are enabled again, visit the interactive graph at
pageviews.wmcloud.org |
On this talk page, I see recurring references to the fact that this article is about the phrase "the empire on which the sun never sets", not about the geography of various empires and whether, astronomically, they literally had daylight at some point in their jurisdiction 24/7/365.
That's fine, but it seems that there really is interest in which countries did control territories so extensive worldwide that the sun never set there. This "What if" piece (cited elsewhere on this page) illustrates such interest. If we can't have the geographic/astronomical explanation in this article as to which empires the sun didn't set on (and when they lost territory such that the sun eventually did set on them), then we ought to cover that in some other article. -- Metropolitan90 (talk) 02:41, 26 May 2020 (UTC)
User:Kenwick has just moved this page without any discussion. The comment attached to the move implies that "Sun" should be capitalized because it is a personal name. Obviously, it is NOT a personal name. Has there been some consenusus somewhere that I have missed? Unless other users wish to support Kenwick and or s/he wishes to explain it to us, I will be reverting this promptly. -- Doric Loon ( talk) 09:05, 16 August 2020 (UTC)
Common Noun | Proper Noun |
---|---|
sun | Sirius, Proxima Centauri, the Sun (our sun) |
moon | Titan, Callisto, the Moon (our moon) |
galaxy | Milky Way Galaxy, Andromeda Galaxy |
nebula | Orion Nebula, Crab Nebula |
The transfer of the sun motif from one empire to another shows a close parallel to the transfer of the pax motif: Pax Romana → Pax Hispanica → Pax Britannica → Pax Americana. While I don't think this should be writ large in the article, I do think either a sentence at the end of the head or an x-ref under "see also" would be appropriate. However this has been reverted several times. So I'd like to explain it here. First of all, some quotes, which I'll put in a foldaway box to stop this becoming too long.
Extended content
|
---|
|
Two things to note here. First of all, the pax metaphor was borrowed through a sequence of dominant powers in much the same way as our article shows the sun-setting metaphor being borrowed. The first passage cited above is the clearest statement of that. That in itself would warrant a "see also". But secondly, the two metaphors are constantly being discussed in the same context. Quote 2 above is the clearest statement of this, but quotes 3-9 have it too. This shouldn't surprise us, since essentially the two phrases mean the same thing. The idea of the sun never setting implies that an empire has become geographically expansive. The pax idea suggests that an empire has dominated such a vast portion of the world that previously warring nations are now unified. (N.B. the terminology Pax Romana and Pax Hispanica is also used by historians for periodization, but obviously that is not their original sense: when a first-century Roman bragged about the Pax Romana he was talking about the size of the empire, not the historical period he was living in.) I think the above provides adequate referencing. I would be happiest if we can arrive at a consensus here, but if nobody has a good counter-argument, I propose to put this back into the article in a very minor way. Doric Loon ( talk) 19:54, 19 July 2022 (UTC)
The transfer of the epithet from one dominant empire to the next is paralleled by the succession from Pax Romana through Pax Hispanica and Pax Britannica to Pax Americana., which is something we categorically do not have sufficient sourcing for. We don't have the necessary sources for the connection between the transfer of the "pax" motif and the transfer of the "sun never sets" motif. Source 5, for instance, mentions the "sun never sets" motif for Britain, and the "pax" motif for Rome, Britain, and the US, but doesn't say anything about the transfer of either motif and doesn't draw parallels between the transfers of motifs (obviously). I also disagree with your reading of source 2—mentioning both motifs for Britain and the US is not the same thing as comparing the transfer of one motif to the transfer of the other motif. Your proposed wording is a bit softer than I thought you wanted, but still runs into WP:SYNTH problems with parallels between motif transfers. TompaDompa ( talk) 16:11, 27 July 2022 (UTC)
Editors should provide a brief annotation when a link's relevance is not immediately apparent, and then we're kind of back where we started. I briefly considered using the {{ See also}} template in the relevant sections, but our article on Pax Hispanica especially really has nothing to do with the topic of this article. TompaDompa ( talk) 20:27, 28 July 2022 (UTC)
This page was getting a bit long, so I have archived most of it. However I ran into a problem at Talk:The empire on which the sun never sets/Archive 1#The British empire and the American Empire - the page refused to save changes because a blocked site was cited. So I deleted the cite and put in a note to that effect. Does anyone know if this is the best way to deal with that? (You can find the deleted link by going to an older version of this main page and searching for "Nationmaster".) Doric Loon ( talk) 10:15, 28 July 2022 (UTC)
I'm challenging this particular deletion by User:TompaDompa on 18 September 2022, which I just reverted. The assertion, which I inserted, is adequately cited to The New York Times, a reliable source.
The grounds given was: "Dubious inclusion. We would need sources discussing this use, not engaging in it." This makes no sense for singling out the example of the NYT's discussion of Disney parks over any other. Every single citation in the article appears to be "engaging in it." If you believe that's a problem (i.e., if the entire article amounts to a WP:NOT or WP:NOR issue), then submit this article to Wikipedia:Articles for deletion. -- Coolcaesar ( talk) 19:34, 18 September 2022 (UTC)
An article should not give undue weight to minor aspects of its subject but should strive to treat each aspect with a weight proportional to its treatment in the body of reliable, published material on the subject.Do WP:Reliable sources on the subject of the phrase "the empire on which the sun never sets" cover the aspect of it being
applied to private American corporations?This is properly sourced as an example of this type of use, but the underlying assertion that
The phrase has also been applied to private American corporations.is your personal WP:ANALYSIS. Why "private American corporations"? Why not " The Walt Disney Company"? Why not "theme parks"? Why not "private corporations? This kind of analysis needs to come from the sources, because otherwise you are engaging in WP:Original research. TompaDompa ( talk) 19:48, 18 September 2022 (UTC)
There needs to be an unambiguous, contemporaneous reference to the use of the phrase regarding Charles V's empire. There are references in standard biographies of him being "His Majesty to whom the whole world is subject" (Hugh Thomas, The Golden Empire: Spain, Charles V, and the Creation of America. Random House 2010, 35) but not the exact or even close to the wording that is the subject of this article. If such a contemporary quotation exists, please give the citation. Amuseclio ( talk) 19:39, 16 December 2022 (UTC)Amuseclio
As a result his empire was to be the first in human history on which, in Ariosto's words, "the sun never set."Other sources (though not the ones cited in the article) also attribute this to Ariosto. TompaDompa ( talk) 06:19, 17 December 2022 (UTC)
It's unclear who invented the concept, if Charles himself and/or some of his collaborators and Ariosto took it from him/them, or the other way around (Ariosto made it up and he was copied). It's also been claimed that this phrase is in fact simply a variation of the Roman concept of ruling "from the rising to the setting of the sun". However, whatever the origin, it was was in use in Charles's time. As far as I know Ariosto wrote it in some passages of the Orlando Furioso (maybe somewhere else as well?), but it's not in the original version of 1515, rather in a revised version of the 1520s and 1530s. I don't know if that's the quote used by Padgen, but in book 15, Ariosto exhalts Charles by saying that he has the crowns of the roman empire and of far lands, so that the sun never sets and seasons never pass on his realms. It's written in the form of a prediction. It could be another passage however. Barjimoa ( talk) 11:47, 12 May 2023 (UTC)
This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
The empire on which the sun never sets article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
Archives: 1, 2 |
This article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Daily pageviews of this article
A graph should have been displayed here but
graphs are temporarily disabled. Until they are enabled again, visit the interactive graph at
pageviews.wmcloud.org |
On this talk page, I see recurring references to the fact that this article is about the phrase "the empire on which the sun never sets", not about the geography of various empires and whether, astronomically, they literally had daylight at some point in their jurisdiction 24/7/365.
That's fine, but it seems that there really is interest in which countries did control territories so extensive worldwide that the sun never set there. This "What if" piece (cited elsewhere on this page) illustrates such interest. If we can't have the geographic/astronomical explanation in this article as to which empires the sun didn't set on (and when they lost territory such that the sun eventually did set on them), then we ought to cover that in some other article. -- Metropolitan90 (talk) 02:41, 26 May 2020 (UTC)
User:Kenwick has just moved this page without any discussion. The comment attached to the move implies that "Sun" should be capitalized because it is a personal name. Obviously, it is NOT a personal name. Has there been some consenusus somewhere that I have missed? Unless other users wish to support Kenwick and or s/he wishes to explain it to us, I will be reverting this promptly. -- Doric Loon ( talk) 09:05, 16 August 2020 (UTC)
Common Noun | Proper Noun |
---|---|
sun | Sirius, Proxima Centauri, the Sun (our sun) |
moon | Titan, Callisto, the Moon (our moon) |
galaxy | Milky Way Galaxy, Andromeda Galaxy |
nebula | Orion Nebula, Crab Nebula |
The transfer of the sun motif from one empire to another shows a close parallel to the transfer of the pax motif: Pax Romana → Pax Hispanica → Pax Britannica → Pax Americana. While I don't think this should be writ large in the article, I do think either a sentence at the end of the head or an x-ref under "see also" would be appropriate. However this has been reverted several times. So I'd like to explain it here. First of all, some quotes, which I'll put in a foldaway box to stop this becoming too long.
Extended content
|
---|
|
Two things to note here. First of all, the pax metaphor was borrowed through a sequence of dominant powers in much the same way as our article shows the sun-setting metaphor being borrowed. The first passage cited above is the clearest statement of that. That in itself would warrant a "see also". But secondly, the two metaphors are constantly being discussed in the same context. Quote 2 above is the clearest statement of this, but quotes 3-9 have it too. This shouldn't surprise us, since essentially the two phrases mean the same thing. The idea of the sun never setting implies that an empire has become geographically expansive. The pax idea suggests that an empire has dominated such a vast portion of the world that previously warring nations are now unified. (N.B. the terminology Pax Romana and Pax Hispanica is also used by historians for periodization, but obviously that is not their original sense: when a first-century Roman bragged about the Pax Romana he was talking about the size of the empire, not the historical period he was living in.) I think the above provides adequate referencing. I would be happiest if we can arrive at a consensus here, but if nobody has a good counter-argument, I propose to put this back into the article in a very minor way. Doric Loon ( talk) 19:54, 19 July 2022 (UTC)
The transfer of the epithet from one dominant empire to the next is paralleled by the succession from Pax Romana through Pax Hispanica and Pax Britannica to Pax Americana., which is something we categorically do not have sufficient sourcing for. We don't have the necessary sources for the connection between the transfer of the "pax" motif and the transfer of the "sun never sets" motif. Source 5, for instance, mentions the "sun never sets" motif for Britain, and the "pax" motif for Rome, Britain, and the US, but doesn't say anything about the transfer of either motif and doesn't draw parallels between the transfers of motifs (obviously). I also disagree with your reading of source 2—mentioning both motifs for Britain and the US is not the same thing as comparing the transfer of one motif to the transfer of the other motif. Your proposed wording is a bit softer than I thought you wanted, but still runs into WP:SYNTH problems with parallels between motif transfers. TompaDompa ( talk) 16:11, 27 July 2022 (UTC)
Editors should provide a brief annotation when a link's relevance is not immediately apparent, and then we're kind of back where we started. I briefly considered using the {{ See also}} template in the relevant sections, but our article on Pax Hispanica especially really has nothing to do with the topic of this article. TompaDompa ( talk) 20:27, 28 July 2022 (UTC)
This page was getting a bit long, so I have archived most of it. However I ran into a problem at Talk:The empire on which the sun never sets/Archive 1#The British empire and the American Empire - the page refused to save changes because a blocked site was cited. So I deleted the cite and put in a note to that effect. Does anyone know if this is the best way to deal with that? (You can find the deleted link by going to an older version of this main page and searching for "Nationmaster".) Doric Loon ( talk) 10:15, 28 July 2022 (UTC)
I'm challenging this particular deletion by User:TompaDompa on 18 September 2022, which I just reverted. The assertion, which I inserted, is adequately cited to The New York Times, a reliable source.
The grounds given was: "Dubious inclusion. We would need sources discussing this use, not engaging in it." This makes no sense for singling out the example of the NYT's discussion of Disney parks over any other. Every single citation in the article appears to be "engaging in it." If you believe that's a problem (i.e., if the entire article amounts to a WP:NOT or WP:NOR issue), then submit this article to Wikipedia:Articles for deletion. -- Coolcaesar ( talk) 19:34, 18 September 2022 (UTC)
An article should not give undue weight to minor aspects of its subject but should strive to treat each aspect with a weight proportional to its treatment in the body of reliable, published material on the subject.Do WP:Reliable sources on the subject of the phrase "the empire on which the sun never sets" cover the aspect of it being
applied to private American corporations?This is properly sourced as an example of this type of use, but the underlying assertion that
The phrase has also been applied to private American corporations.is your personal WP:ANALYSIS. Why "private American corporations"? Why not " The Walt Disney Company"? Why not "theme parks"? Why not "private corporations? This kind of analysis needs to come from the sources, because otherwise you are engaging in WP:Original research. TompaDompa ( talk) 19:48, 18 September 2022 (UTC)
There needs to be an unambiguous, contemporaneous reference to the use of the phrase regarding Charles V's empire. There are references in standard biographies of him being "His Majesty to whom the whole world is subject" (Hugh Thomas, The Golden Empire: Spain, Charles V, and the Creation of America. Random House 2010, 35) but not the exact or even close to the wording that is the subject of this article. If such a contemporary quotation exists, please give the citation. Amuseclio ( talk) 19:39, 16 December 2022 (UTC)Amuseclio
As a result his empire was to be the first in human history on which, in Ariosto's words, "the sun never set."Other sources (though not the ones cited in the article) also attribute this to Ariosto. TompaDompa ( talk) 06:19, 17 December 2022 (UTC)
It's unclear who invented the concept, if Charles himself and/or some of his collaborators and Ariosto took it from him/them, or the other way around (Ariosto made it up and he was copied). It's also been claimed that this phrase is in fact simply a variation of the Roman concept of ruling "from the rising to the setting of the sun". However, whatever the origin, it was was in use in Charles's time. As far as I know Ariosto wrote it in some passages of the Orlando Furioso (maybe somewhere else as well?), but it's not in the original version of 1515, rather in a revised version of the 1520s and 1530s. I don't know if that's the quote used by Padgen, but in book 15, Ariosto exhalts Charles by saying that he has the crowns of the roman empire and of far lands, so that the sun never sets and seasons never pass on his realms. It's written in the form of a prediction. It could be another passage however. Barjimoa ( talk) 11:47, 12 May 2023 (UTC)