Talk:Goths

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RfC

The following discussion is an archived record of a request for comment. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

This is an easy close both in terms of the strength of argument by the editors who participated and of strength of arguments as regards Wikipedia policy: there is a clear and strong preference for secondary sources and modern scholarship. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 21:14, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

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Should the prehistory and early history sections of this article be less focused on controversial origin stories like Jordanes' Getica, and more focused on archaeological, linguistic and contemporaneous historical evidence?--Berig (talk) 17:20, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

We should notify normal editors of this article and talk page? (I see you've done a round of notifications to people you often work with, but...) Obvious ones include Mnemosientje, Srnec, Carlstak, GPinkerton--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 19:30, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

• Conditional yes [ADDED: but open to other approaches]. I think I agree, but it depends a bit on how we would define this fairly broad wording in practice. Is there any chance it will lead to disagreements about what the RFC meant? Seems a good discussion to have though. Thanks. I do think we need to mention Jordanes of course. He is the original Scandinavian origins story, even though his version is obviously dubious. My opinions are explained in several recent discussions.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 17:32, 31 March 2021 (UTC) It is discussed more above but maybe it helps to say I am worried about people using this to turn our summaries of archaeologists' findings into "archaeologists have have proven Jordanes right" (about a simple transfer of a whole people, as opposed to a complex range of interaction options). It should of course be possible to avoid that issue, but...--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 19:54, 31 March 2021 (UTC) I also agree with Srnec that reducing discussion of Jordanes is not really hitting the nail on the head yet. If we simply treat Jordanes as correct, and for example start to treat the Gutones as the identical to the Goths, an idea which would arguably not exist without Jordanes (according to the experts), then this proposal could make the article worse. (Influence from Vistula direction is not the same as a mass migration.)--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 07:14, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

Wolfram: "the question is not whether Scandinavia was the "original homeland of the Goths"; at best it is whether certain Gothic clans came from the north across the Baltic Sea to the Continent." (Wolfram, History of the Goths, 1990 p.37) (Note that for the Poland to Ukraine migration proposal, Peter Heather is not in agreement with a large part of the field, with his confidence in real significant movement of people, as described by Jordanes.)--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 07:42, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

• Yes. One line in a lengthy text has generated massive commentary, and to orientate the prehistory section in terms of this origin myth leads to endless complications in doing justice to the controversies it has generated. Scandza warrants mention of course, something along the lines:'Jordanes writes that the ultimate origin of the Goths lay in the island of Scandza from which they are then said to have emigrated in 1490 BCE.'Nishidani (talk) 18:11, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

Right, but did that any one line create so much debate because of something intrinsic to it, some true belief of the editor who just could not get it, or just because drama is being created artificially, using whatever anchor points are available? The history of the discussions recently and further back would indicate it is the latter. But I agree with the idea of attempting to remove anchors. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 19:13, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

Don't think we should worry about that, per the general scholium's advice about hypotheses non fingo. Nishidani (talk) 08:28, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

Maybe my way of framing my concern was wrong. The concern is that trying to reduce discussion of Jordanes might not be hitting the nail on the head. It might clear the mess a bit, but will this article then be filled with more synth derived from archaeology articles (which in turn all actually refer to Jordanes)? That has been equally or more controversial and the article could be worse. (Because worse balanced.) See also the "vote" of Srnec below. Is Jordanes the real problem? I think the problem is more generally that Goths are Goths, but these complex issues concern debatable "pre Goths" and there is a long-running attempt to treat them as simply Goths. (Which some academics do, like Heather, but there is clearly no consensus, and we know that.) I think there are still gaps in our working consensus. I have made a new RFC below.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:38, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

Well, for the moment, I'm going to concentrate on reworking Jordanes's biography. Once we have a fairly basic outline of his life and works there, some of the material that burdens unduly this page can perhaps, consensually, be shifted there to put some flesh on the skeleton. Nishidani (talk) 12:29, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

• Yes – The amount of explanatory footnotes and focus on essentially discrediting a controversial primary source account from antiquity is excessive. General readers benefit less from extensive scholarly disputes about source credibility than they do from matter-of-fact, academically substantiated evidence from secondary sources about what we know from archaeological records, linguistic evidence, and the available history of the people. We should certainly trim down the overly abundant and lengthy explanatory citations. Some of these are way outside the scope of an Encyclopedia and are more befitting of specialized scholarly journals. It's not that there's anything wrong with much of it, but it does not benefit the typical reader. One of the points of disagreement I have had with a certain editor over the years has been this very fact and that individual's insistence on exhaustively including scholarly debates that are of little interest to the VAST majority of Wikipedia's readers. We must distinguish between Wikipedia and the Oxford Journal of Ancient History (sorry if this feels flippant). Otherwise, readers will find the article less useful. --Obenritter (talk) 18:24, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

Probably me? But no problem. I'd say in any case your point is very logical here, and on this article it is easy to see we are slipping off the tight-rope to one side, and we need to move back the other way. Furthermore, I've learned here (with some credit to Krakkos) that we can spin off smaller articles which are MUCH less controversial for all parties. Honestly, my vision for Germanic peoples was similar (more to spin-offs, shorter article) but in the first round of changes that was difficult for all of us to imagine. It is hard to agree on moving OUT some favourite bit. In the long-run that is probably the way there also. The experience on this article has made me believe more in that strategy. We just need to avoid POV forks. I hope the well is not too poisoned by talk of Goffart agendas! :) --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 19:13, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

• Sections are fine as is: In my view, the History sections are fine; the fact that some aspects are disputed is not ideal, but that's life. Peter K Burian (talk) 19:19, 31 March 2021 (UTC)
• Yes, let's stick to mainstream scholarship on this topic. :bloodofox: (talk) 19:35, 31 March 2021 (UTC)
• Yes, I think focusing more on what archaeologists, linguists, and historians have to say about the Goths origins and less on the text of Jordanes is in order.--Ermenrich (talk) 20:22, 31 March 2021 (UTC)
• No. I'm being a bit deliberately contrarian here, but the whole problem is an obsessive focus on origins. And it's genuinely impossible to overstate the centrality of Jordanes to this issue. There's nothing less controversial about the archaeology, because its ethnic interpretation hinges on written evidence. If we want to write an article that is all matter-of-fact, we have to drop the Goths' origins. They spring into being fully formed north of the Black Sea and that's that. Everything before that has a question mark after it. And it just so happens that no other question marks in Late Antiquity are as contentious as the ones concerning Gothic origins. Nobody debates the origins of the Franks like this.
  I have just read (and edited) the "Prehistory" and "Early history" sections. The latter contains little Jordanes and is mostly an analysis of possible early mentions in Strabo, Pliny, Tacitus and Ptolemy. The former is indeed centred on Jordanes and is not a pleasure to read (not least because of the copious footnotes). I just don't see how adding more about the Wielbark culture will improve matters. I would suggest splitting off material to Origin stories of the Goths and renaming that article Origins of the Goths, reducing the load on this article and allowing for fuller development of various theories. Before I edited it out, there was mention of the Gutasaga. That sort of thing strengthens nobody's case without elaboration. Moving stuff to a separate article, would allow for some elaboration of all sides. Srnec (talk) 00:38, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

For the record, I am not opposed to this direction of moving forward. The choice between this philosophy and the one proposed by Berig depends, for me, on the practical details. Berig's proposal sounds simpler, but Srnec has had more recent editing and source-checking experience on this article and I suspect in practice Berig's proposal might need 2 or 3 more RFCs to convert into a clear agreement on real actions.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 07:14, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

I should mention that I don't agree that the article about this debate should be move to Origin stories of the Goths, which has nice clean boundaries and a good size. I am coming to believe that we need an article to cover the enormous literature on the Ethnogeneses (plural) of the Goths. This would be a place to clearly separate out the archeaological discussions, refer to the Jordanes discussions and perhaps most importantly finally give a home for the Traditionskern theories from other approaches, and not let them be presented in misleading ways as simple mass migrations. Post World 2 literature about the Goths tends to see them as a series of peoples, re-founded over and over, sharing some common threads, but not physically the same population. This article is failing to explain that.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 07:51, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

• Yes. Obenritter has verbalized thoughts I've had about the article, but expressed it better than I could. I agree that the amount of explanatory footnotes is excessive. I personally find them of great interest, but I think they are distracting and of little interest to the general reader. A greater focus on the archaeological, linguistic and contemporaneous historical evidence will benefit general readers far more than copious notes on the nuances of abstruse (to them) scholarly disputes. Although Srnec takes the "nay" side, he does make some good points. Carlstak (talk) 02:32, 1 April 2021 (UTC)
• Yes, but also relocate some material. I agree with the gist of Obenritter's comment, but Srnec also makes some good points, especially about renaming Origin stories of the Goths to r Origins of the Goths (especially since the original is ambiguous and implies only origin myths that the Goth had about themselves), then moving much of this material to that page, and leaving behind here only a WP:SUMMARY. This would also obviate the need for a bunch of distracting footnotes, since they would really belong (probably better as regular prose, not footnotes) in the origins article.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:41, 1 April 2021 (UTC)
• Yes. Our most reliable sources for Gothic prehistory and early history are reviews of the archaeological, linguistic and contemporaneous historical evidence by modern scholars. The reliability of Jordanes and Getica is heavily disputed, and details on that dispute are better discussed in other articles. The aim of this article should be to present an overview of the Goths for a general readership based on reliable secondary and tertiary sources. When modern scholars think Jordanes is relevant to archaeological, linguistic or contemporaneous historical evidence on the Goths we can briefly mention it, but that's all. The explanatory footnotes makes the article less readable, but also provides information which is useful, for example for discussions like this RFC. Reaching consensus on this talk page about various disagreements will hopefelly enable us to reduce the explanatory footnotes. Krakkos (talk) 10:13, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

  Two concerns about this. 1. I disagree on a detail which I suspect might be important to you: the words "and early history" in the first sentence. Historians (and philologists) are the most important sources for the historical Goths. As soon as we hit that period, which is the first period everyone agrees that we are talking about "the" Goths, archaeology, linguistics, etc. take a supporting role. 2. I am not against citing archaeologists for their archaeology (in this article and in spin-offs), but in the past WP has reported very little of that. What this article has seen much more of, are citations from comments in archaeological articles about non-archaeological evidence (especially Jordanes) which have effectively been used as a way of getting the stories of Jordanes into the article through a back door, without the proper use of sources which are authorities on Jordanes. If this RFC just leads to more of that then I think I am probably not the only one who would be forced to change my vote to a strong no.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 10:43, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

  Well said; I was thinking something vaguely like this but hadn't worked out how to articulate it. This kind of "back-door WP:UNDUE" problem comes up a lot in all topics that run up against the antiquity wall (King Arthur, early history of Ireland, origin of the Vikings, historicity of the Jesus and the Bible, etc., etc.).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:09, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

  That's a useful clarification! Thanks.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 13:47, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

• Yes. Scholarly evaluation of the entirety of the evidence should be summarized to set Jordanes' account (and the divergent evaluations of it) in context. Yngvadottir (talk) 22:03, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

'entirety of the evidence'? Put so laconically, that seems to me unworkable, because the problem is the fierce abundance of contradictory interpretations of virtually every datum. Take one example from our text that caught my eye over a week ago on first reading this.

Getica claims to be based on an earlier lost work by Cassiodorus, which also made use of an even earlier work by the Gothic historian Ablabius.

I.e. (a) a claim (poorly put: Jordanes cites this Ablabius just three times)

(b) an assertion passed off as a fact that this Ablabius lies behind Cassiodorus's lost work.

(c) a claim that an historian called Ablabius existed

(d) a claim that he was a Gothic historian.

All of these assertions/claims are contentious. Just that one line would, on this page, engender a vagina notionum, to play on the noted phrase by Jordanes. T his is a Dantean recipe for editors: lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate.Nishidani (talk) 05:19, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

You are right. The second and third sentences of the Prehistory section need to be changed. There are basic errors there. I will start a new talk page section.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 07:38, 2 April 2021 (UTC) ADDED: done--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:26, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

• Yes. per ObenritterSea Ane (talk) 20:53, 2 April 2021 (UTC)
• Closure has been requested I have requested the closure of this RfC at Wikipedia:Closure requests#Requests for comment.[1] Krakkos (talk) 08:58, 6 May 2021 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

RFC on article focus

The following discussion is an archived record of a request for comment. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

There is a clear (in fact, nearly unanimous) consensus in the discussion below that the article should focus on Goths as described in modern scholarship. (non-admin closure) Eggishorn (talk) (contrib) 19:23, 8 May 2021 (UTC)

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Yes or no or something else? This article should primarily focus upon the Goths described by Roman historians from the third century. The earlier Vistula Gutones, for example, are relevant, but a distinct topic which should not be simply equated to "Goths".--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:03, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

Possibly interested users (please add any missing): Berig Krakkos Nishidani Srnec Mnemosientje Carlstak Obenritter Peter K Burian Bloodofox Ermenrich SMcCandlish Yngvadottir Alcaios

• Yes, I am the one proposing that this is the focus. I think it is obvious, but in practice we have not all been working this way. The academic disputes about Gutones, Gauts, Wielbark etc are not about Goths as such, and involve several disciplines. They always include mentions of Jordanes, Ptolemy etc. They are too complex to handle in this article as a short aside near the start, without causing major problems, as we have seen. Reducing discussion of Jordanes is an idea which seems to have some consensus. If we reduce this key part of the origins discussion we should also reduce the other parts which are typically discussed together with it. A major complication in the literature is that academics often treat Gutones as predecessors of the Goths, in the sense of having a name and traditions which were passed on, even when they do not literally believe in a large migration. This important point has been very difficult to get worded properly here without taking over the article. Possibly we need a new Ethnogenesis/ Traditionskern/ Origins of the Goths article? I am not a fan of using the Origin Stories article for archaeology, etc.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:26, 1 April 2021 (UTC)
• This article should focus upon the Goths as described by modern scholars. Modern scholarship on the Goths mostly focus on material from the 3rd century onwards, but material from earlier periods is usually included as well. In his The Goths (1998), which is often considered the standard work on the Goths in English, Peter Heather devotes about 15% of the book to these earlier periods. This is about the same amount of attention which this article Wikipedia article gives these periods.

The names Gutones and Goths are identical in the Gothic language. Practically all linguists and archaeologists treat the Gutones as Goths. Heather treats the Gutones as Goths. Herwig Wolfram (author of the standard work on the Goths in German) says that "whenever the Gutones are mentioned... these terms refer to the Goths". The entry for Gutones in the Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde is a redirect to Goths. There are certain historians, such as Arne Søby Christensen, who doubt a connection between Gutones and Goths, but even he concedes that it is "normally assumed that [the Gutones] are identical with the Goths". This article should focus on what is normally assumed by scholars, while taking note of minority viewpoints. It already does that. Our article Gutones is a POV fork based on a minority viewpoint and a more or less a verbatim copy paste of material from Goths and name of the Goths, and should probably again be a redirect to this article.

I don't think we should entirely remove this article's coverage of material prior to the 3rd century. It may however be an idea to reduce the complexity of that coverage, particularly through reducing discussion of Jordanes' Getica. That question is already being discussed in an RFC posted above less than a day ago. I must say that creating mulitple RFC's on practically the same issue within such a short period of time is not helpful for consensus building. Krakkos (talk) 09:38, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

To be clear though, no one is arguing that the Gutones, or even Jordanes, are not important topics which should be mentioned in this article, so we agree that far. But I strongly disagree with your insistence on simply equating Gutones to Goths. Many academics strongly disagree, and most write only of a Traditionskern connection which we are not doing justice to here. Even the academics who believe in a simple migration like Heather, spell the connection between the two peoples out, and why he disagrees with others, rather than just assuming they are identical in all his word usage. (You constantly push for a simple equation here on WP, as in your recent change to the Classification section, but that is clearly OR, and can never be the consensus stable version.) I also strongly disagree that this RFC is the same topic as the above one, which already seems decided. This RFC is clearly looking at how this can be done in practice, and takes into account some concerns of people who posted. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 10:34, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

• Focus on Goths as described in modern scholarship, per Krakkos. The treatment in current reliable sources should guide the treatment on Wikipedia. This is basically exactly the same situation as Celts, which is certainly not limited to the Keltoi as described by the ancient Greeks, who were thought of as a group of tribes, but rather is a modern ethno-linguistic topic of considerable breadth and also some controversies. We're pretty good at coverings those when we see the forest not just the individual trees.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:05, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

We should be careful not to make this more complex than it is. I don't see any significant similarity with the Celts situation, because there is and was one clear set of peoples called Goths, and academics have not expanded that much to other peoples in any simple or uncontroversial way. For example, I don't think anyone calls East-Germanic speakers collectively "the Goths", parallel with what happens with Celts. The Gutones are either argued to be the same people in an earlier phase, or else seen as an earlier related proto-Gothic people whose name and culture probably influenced that of the historical Goths. So it is nothing like the name extension we see with Celts. (As Nishidani pointed out, Procopius talks about a larger category of Gothic peoples which included Vandals and Gepids, but I don't think we need a separate article for that as it has not much influenced modern academic usage?) The principle you state sounds fine in theory, but I'm not sure how you would think this wording is different from the wording at the top of the RFC?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 11:26, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

• Focus on Goths as described in modern scholarship, per Krakkos and SMcCandlish. The treatment from current reliable secondary sources should guide the discussion of the Goths on Wikipedia. Scholarly observations should not be necessarily constrained to Roman opinion from the the Third century. The article should concentrate on what is known about them and not the lengthy classification arguments about ethnic assimilation and/or academic identification disputes. Those are mentionable to be sure, but should not be exhaustively expounded. All the effort on what the Goths "might have been" and intellectual conjecture taken from varied primary source interpretations do not aid the general reader. Reminder – we are building an Encyclopedia and not writing for a scholarly journal. Yes, we want academic integrity and appropriate sourcing, but the granularity of the discourse has to remain within the framework of a general reading audience.--Obenritter (talk) 13:13, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

I am concerned for the RFC that this wording is being used instead of a simpler wording. I fear that it is unclear, and I am also worried because I think I see a likely way that it could be used badly. Consider the similar wording used in this discussion: [2]. Obenritter, SMcCandlish, I agree with what I think both of you intend, but can you help me check for sure? I clearly agree with removing detailed discussion of uncertain conjectures to a new or existing article or articles, shortening such discussion here about the core Goths topics, but I would not agree with converting uncertain academic positions into certainties on this article based on the wording used in thee RFC answers. Do you both agree? The obvious case which is presumably in mind is Gutones = Goths. One editor wants these to be equated in a simple way in Wikipedia "voice", and has been long been using a similar wording to this. It is possible to find individual scholars who argue the case of course, and it is a reasonable case, but it is still argued to be an "intellectual conjecture" by many respectable academics, and even the academics who argue for it distinguish the two peoples they are arguing can be connected. (They lived in different periods, for one thing, and no classical source equated them.) So, I hope no one will be removing mention of uncertainty because of this RFC wording, being reinterpreted as justifying that. Do you understand my concern?

Smaller point, also to get as much clarity as possible: I agree with Obenritter about this: I think no one here argues that we have to only use the opinions of Roman authors. In order to interpret the written sources of that period we cite modern historians and other experts from fields contributing to those discussions. Do you agree? The materials which everyone seems to agree to be making a mess of this article concern the so-called prehistoric Goths, and the scholarly conjectures and debates about those. My aim in this RFC was to make sure we all agree on this. Hope that makes sense.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 13:46, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

Andrew -- you are right that we should not be confirming any monolithic ethnonym or naming convention from antiquity as definitive. We should point out that some scholars equate Gutones with the Goths and others contest this. However, no exhaustive and lengthy explanatory footnotes are needed. We can simply cite a work and page number for a couple scholars in one case where they support this idea and a couple page-number RSs that represent the converse. That means trimming out a lot of the scholarly debate and allowing those so inclined to research the information further for themselves. What we are trying to prevent here are diversions "into the weeds" which have been incorporated throughout this article, the Germanic peoples page, and the like. We know you know your stuff and so do many of the editors in this group. What we don't want is a mish-mash of our scholarly disagreements (by way of our support for one author's opinion or another) searing through the page. Does that make sense?--Obenritter (talk) 14:15, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for the clarification! Makes perfect sense to me! I suppose we can almost say that one of our jobs as WP editors is to limit the amount of scholarly disagreements discussed per article (but never to hide them)? Seems like a good aim. If there are too many on one article, then everything including talk page discussion get more difficult. Concerning Germanic peoples I agree it is a cautionary tale for this article. It still has too many topics. However, it was worse, and it will get better. I just don't think anyone has a good proposal yet on which bits should be farmed out next. More to the point, I don't think we should really have the same dilemmas here because the core topics of the Goths are relatively clearly defined.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 14:26, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

Agreed Andrew. Nishidani made a great point. In places where there is deep academic contestation, we can produce offshoot articles. See: Gutones vs. Goths debate page (hypothetical for now). All of that fine work you've done on that specific topic can then be salvaged and included on a new expository WIki-page dedicated to that problem/issue.--Obenritter (talk) 14:31, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

There is in fact a Gutones article, which Krakkos mentioned above. Needs more work. I think a section about Wielbark eventually needs to be added. So that is one more article where we could place some of this.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 15:27, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

I'm reminded of a remark on the various theories of the etymology of flamen, as a reflex of the Vedic word for 'prayer'(bráman-) or cognate with the Gothic word for 'worship (blotan), a generalization that runs:

That such cases are strictly speaking undecidable, so far from calming debate, has seemed to stimulate bickering in the scholarly literature.'Andrew Sihler New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin, Oxford University Press 1995 p.198

I think here we are basically all on the same page.Nishidani (talk) 14:33, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

I would add, regarding "converting uncertain academic positions into certainties on this article", that doing so isn't what anyone has proposed, and doing it wouldn't be permissible under WP:DUE and WP:NOR policies, anyway.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:56, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

Let's say I could predict which arguments those words were intended to be used for, based on what has happened before, and it has indeed now started. So it is very important that I asked for clarifications. Please look to the newest RFC. What this article needs is outsiders to try to help break a circle.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 18:51, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

• Comment Invited by the bot. It would take me an hour of reading to intelligently weigh in on either side but I've been involved in many similar / parallel situations and might be able to suggest a framework. "Goths" is just a word, not an inherent topic. Then you have to decide what it includes. The best guide is the common relevant meaning or closely related sets of common meanings for the term. ("Relevant" and "closely related" excludes meanings like the modern day kids who wear black.) "Common meaning" in this case (since there is no widespread common meaning with the public) would be the common meaning amongst historians and scholars. Not because they know some inherent truth, but because they are "the public" for the purposes of common meaning in this case. That would mean that anything that some significant group of scholars/historians calls "Goths" should be included in this article. If there is significant debate about use of the term for a certain group, that part can have attribution type wording like "Some historians consider xxxx to be Goths". North8000 (talk) 14:29, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

Thanks North. By my interpretation this is the kind of solution Nishidani and Obenritter and myself (and maybe everyone) is considering. OTOH, I honestly don't think we have an extreme case here of a word where it is difficult to point to uncontroversial core topics.

• No. The article should present what modern scholars say on the topic, not what ancient historians said. North8000 articulates that what we do in cases of substantial disagreement among scholars is attribute statements. Yngvadottir (talk) 22:03, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

@Yngvadottir: thanks for your input. To help editors understand how to convert this to editing directions, can I please ask you to clarify? No one is arguing against using modern scholarship. The question is about the core topic of this article. Obviously one of the issues of specific interest to editors here is whether we can aim to shorten (and move elsewhere) the detailed discussion here of scholarly debates about the proposed ancestry of the Goths before the third century, when the peoples called Goths by scholars first appear. Of course no one is talking about totally removing discussion of the ancestors either, but indeed using wording like North8000 mentions, "Some historians consider xxxx to be Goths", where xxxx might include Gutones or the Wielbark culture. Does that match your thinking?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 07:20, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

• Let's stick to modern scholarship. Per several commentators above, I agree that we need to stick to what modern scholars say about this topic. :bloodofox: (talk) 23:11, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

@Bloodofox: thanks for your input. To help editors understand how to convert this to editing directions, can I please ask you to clarify? No one is arguing against using modern scholarship. See my similar question above to Yngvadottir. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 07:20, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

Andrew. There's a sufficiently large set of comments here for someone like yourself to go ahead and outline the shape of the prehistory section as you think it should run, taking in all of these suggestions, together with your own view. Why not drop in a draft, so that editors can comment, tweak etc., it, while these RfC conversations continue. An alternative work in progress, that would give us all a far clearer and more manageable picture to mull over and hone? Nishidani (talk) 07:26, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

Tasks: my understanding. I think the shortening of the Prehistory section is already preceding in a sense. See the edits by Srnec. Another thing agreed seems to be that we are over-foot-noting (e.g. comment of Obenritter). Krakkos seems to accept that, but I think he is arguing that we should leave that while things are being discussed. So that should start being done carefully, as consensus becomes clear. A bigger job, which no one seems ready to do today, is starting to improve the Wielbark culture article, and expand the Gutones article to include a section on the Wielbark culture. Those would seem to be low-hanging fruit jobs which will help editors get a vision for how to go further. It is not yet clear if we need to create a new article, and that is connected to the question of where we should have is where to discuss the "Traditionskern" (charismatic clan etc) models and how they apply to the two proposed migrations of the "proto" Goths. Perhaps it can be handled well enough in existing articles.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 07:49, 2 April 2021 (UTC) ADDED: Apart from the Prehistory section, clearly the Lead and Early History sections as they currently stand should also be reviewed with these two RFCs in mind. Significant parts are written from the assumption that scholars are trying to prove Jordanes correct (for example, asking where archaeologists think "Gothiscandza" was), and are not about the Goths as such, but about their probable precursors.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 09:43, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

• Focus on Goths as described in modern scholarship Apart from all the historiographical and linguistic concerns, this rubric should be implemented merely on editorial grounds for clarity and concision. Readers who want to pursue the subject further can consult the various spin-off articles (those to be created, and those to be improved). Carlstak (talk) 14:25, 2 April 2021 (UTC)
• Closure has been requested I have requested the closure of this RfC at Wikipedia:Closure requests#Requests for comment.[3] Krakkos (talk) 08:59, 6 May 2021 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

RfC on proposal to simplify the Prehistory, Early history and Movement towards the Black Sea sections and merge them into a single Origins and early history section

The following discussion is an archived record of a request for comment. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

Read in context of the prior two RfC's on this topic, there is a clear consensus to substantially trim these sections. The specific text proposed, however, has drawn significant objections and a consensus to implement it as-is is not apparent in this discussion. There is a rough consensus to use the proposed text as a basis for further refinement. Whether the participants in this discussion believe such refinement should take place in a sandbox, in the article directly, or on this talk page is not clearly established below but can be determined through the normal editing process. (non-admin closure) Eggishorn (talk) (contrib) 19:59, 8 May 2021 (UTC)

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From the earlier Talk:Goths#RfC and and Talk:Goths#RFC on article focus posted above, it is obvious that there is a clear consensus among editors that the Prehistory, Early history and Movement towards the Black Sea sections are too long and complicated, too reliant and focused on Jordanes and his Getica, and that they should be give more emphasis on the analysis of archaeological, historical and linguistic evidence by modern scholars. Much of these sections are my work. I have sought to address the concerns of the community through a proposal. Can this proposal[4], in which the Prehistory, Early history and Movement towards the Black Sea sections are simplified and merged into a single Origins and early history section, be implemented at Goths? Krakkos (talk) 10:31, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

This proposal has been modified twice in order to adapt to comments from other users below. For the original 2 April propoposal see this diff.[5] For the first modification on 2 April see this diff.[6] Krakkos (talk) 10:31, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

Pinging Berig, Andrew Lancaster, Nishidani, Obenritter, Peter K Burian, Bloodofox, Ermenrich, Srnec, Carlstak, Mnemosientje, SMcCandlish, Yngvadottir, Alcaios, Pfold and North8000, who have participated in similar previous related discussions. Krakkos (talk) 12:18, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

• Suggestion. Thanks. Can you please post a diff (or diffs) above showing so we can see the differences with the current version and/or the March 18 version? (Ideally both.)--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 12:20, 2 April 2021 (UTC) Disturbed. For the record I note this was not done. I still believe reverting to the March 18 version is the simplest option which all new changes should be compared to. Other editors may not realize, but this whole discussion was triggered by major changes after March 18 which should not have happened, and the first question has to be whether to revert those. It is silly to compare only versions which are in effect completely the proposal of the same editor. Are we playing chess? --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 18:58, 2 April 2021 (UTC)
• Overall support, though I'm not closed to revision suggestions, etc., and I still agree with earlier commentary to move some of this material to what is presently Origin stories of the Goths and renaming that Origins of the Goths (or Prehistory of the Goths or whatever), leaving behind more of a WP:SUMMARY at this article. This just is not the place to pore in depth over all the disputation about the Goth's origins; we have an article for that already.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  12:37, 2 April 2021 (UTC)
• Needs more work for me. Thanks for making this quick effort but this section is basically now an alternative version of the Gutones article, with too much detail about them, whereas what has been removed and de-emphasized should as per the RFC become more important, not less important. (Wolfram p.13: The Goths of the third century were considered a new people to whom the old Scythian name applied. No ancient ethnographer made a connection between the Goths and the Gutones. The Gutonic immigrants became Goths the very moment the Mediterranean world considered them Scythians.) One principle I think was agreed in the RFCs is that Jordanes discussion should be reduced, but his influence should not be hidden. We should not place the stories of Jordanes in modern clothing. Why mention Jordanes at all if we do not mention that he is the original source of the idea that the ancestors of the Goths took part in 2 migrations? I think we must handle him first then, letting our readers know about his influence on historians. That would be the quickest way to handle him. We can quickly summarize that Jordanes is not considered reliable, but various recent scholars argue for one or both migrations being some kind of reflection of real events (but probably not a real migration). Then we can quickly mention (1) the Gutones (but less detail), (2) the archaeological evidence of Scandinavian contacts with the Vistula, and OTOH Wielbark culture (Vistula) influence on the Chernyakhov culture, which is widely considered Gothic (3) the newer thinking that instead of a migration there were smaller scale influences. (I don't think anyone wanted less of 2 and 3, but perhaps even more. These 2 points have been de-emphasized and over-simplified in some past versions. 3 currently has no home article either.) So this comment is based on what I understand the RFC responses are saying.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 12:50, 2 April 2021 (UTC) List of concerns with first and second proposals (Work still needed):

• Simple equation of Gutones with Goths is not acceptable. It is not found in scholarly sources. And we have a Gutones article. This is a case of making certainties out of uncertainties.
• Title "Early Goths" is not acceptable. For same reason. Discussion on this talk page suggest there is near unanimity among recent editors that Origins of the Goths would be suitable for this topic. (It has been discussed as possibly needing a new article.) I would, predictably, prefer something more uncertain like "Origin hypotheses" or "Origins debates".
• Over-simple attitude of 2 migrations of Jordanes is not acceptable, and just mentioning Jordanes less hides the source of these migration stories, which makes the situation worse, not better. We agreed not to do this in previous RFCs.
• No mention of the modern scholarly pro-Jordanes argument. We are now including no mention at all of the very fundamental issue that scholarly proponents of Jordanes now rarely believe in real migrations, but rather culutral influences. (Heather's understanding of the second migration is obviously an exception, but does not constitute a consensus.) This seriously misleads our readers.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 12:08, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

• General support but more trimming – Something more of a synopsis. Hypothetical: Origin myths and ethnic classification for the Goths remain disputed. These range from classical sources that claim the Goths migrated from Scandinavia (Jordanes' Getica)(source citation accompanied by short explanatory note), their emergence as misidentified groupings of Butones, Gutones, etc. (source citation), whether they were originally Scythians (source citation), or XXXXX. Archaeological findings and linguistic analysis also complicate the discussion as XXXXX claims that XXXX while so and so claims XXXX (source citations). What part of the point here is that we don't need excessive discussion when so much about the Goths' origins are disputed and unknown. Loads of academic conjecture do not help the general reader. It's wonderful stuff to this forum's audience (but we are the well-versed minority here). Nishidani made it pretty clear in his post that what this article needs is some trimmed down yet informative information with side-shoot articles where necessary. It seems that SMcCandlish is suggesting similar with the comment that "This just is not the place to pore in depth over all the disputation about the Goth's origin." Maybe I'm wrong, but this was my take on what the RFC concluded.--Obenritter (talk) 13:19, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

  I've invited you and the other participants in this discussion to comment on my draft [7]. It will also probably need to be pared down etc, because as a starting point I am trying to be relatively complete, concerning things which are priorities to various editors, so we can really see the decisions we are making when we do reduce it. FWIW its worth I've placed your skeleton draft in the left column and started working in the right column.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 20:16, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

• Update @Andrew Lancaster, SMcCandlish, and Obenritter: Thanks for the support and advice. I have updated the proposal through trimming coverage on contemporaneous historical records, and combined the five paragraphs on it into a single paragraph. Krakkos (talk) 14:27, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

  Again thanks Krakkos, but for me at least this still seems to be mainly about the Gutones, who have a seprate article, and is pushing the idea that Gutones = "Early Goths". (I have to say I really don't like that section title.) See my Wolfram quote above, which is an example of how everyone, including people who see Gutones as the "precursors" of Goths, see Gutones and Goths as two separable topics. I thought everyone wanted us to do something like this: Part 1. Jordanes frames the migration discussion but Jordanes is unreliable. Part 2. Other evidence relevant to the topic continues to be debated by scholars (Gutones, Archaeology, Traditionskern proposals, etc).--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 15:18, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

  The Thervingi, Greuthungi, Visigoths, Ostrogoths and Crimean Goths are separable topics with their own articles, but that does not mean that they shouldn't be covered in this article. The same principle applies to the "Gutones". The idea that "everyone" considers the "Gutones" and Goths to be "two separable topics" is simply untrue. If everyone believed that, the why is the entry for the "Gutones" in the Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde a redirect to its entry on Goths, while their entry on the Lemovii (a much less notable people mentioned together with the "Gutones") is a distinct article? That the "Gutones" are the same as the Goths or at least ancestral to them is supported by such an overwhelming amount of scholars that many don't even bother to discuss whether there is a distinction between them. Here are some citations from authorative works on this question:

  • "[The] Goths are met in historical sources... [in] northern Poland in the first and second centuries... Goths are first mentoned occupying territory in what is now Poland in the first century AD... The history of people labelled "Goths" thus spans 700 years, and huge tracts of Europe from northern Poland to the Atlantic ocean... [T]he Wielbark culture.... took shape in the middle of the first century AD... in Pomerania and lands either side of the lower Vistula... [T]his is the broad area where our few literary sources place a group called Goths at this time... Tacitus Germania 43-4 places them not quite on the Baltic coast; Ptolemy Geography 3.5.8 locates them east of the Vistula; Strabo Geography 7.1.3 (if Butones should be emended to Gutones) broadly agrees with Tacitus... The mutually confirmatory information of ancient sources and the archaeological record both suggest that Goths can first be identified beside the Vistula. It is here that this attempt to write their history will begin." – Heather, Peter (1998). The Goths. Blackwell Publishing. pp. XIV, 2, 21, 30. ISBN 0-631-209-32-8.

  • "Goths lived close to the Baltic in northern Poland in the first two centuries CE" – Heather, Peter (2012). "Goths". In Gagarin, Michael (ed.). The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome. Oxford University Press. pp. 323–324. doi:10.1093/acref/9780195170726.001.0001. ISBN 9780195170726. Retrieved April 1, 2021.

  • "Goths... a Germanic tribe whose name means 'the people', first attested immediately south of the Baltic Sea in the first two centuries." – Heather, Peter (2018). "Goths". In Nicholson, Oliver (ed.). The Oxford Dictionary of Late Antiquity. Oxford University Press. p. 673. ISBN 9780191744457. Retrieved January 25, 2020.

  • "Goths—or Gutones, as the Roman sources called them... Hereafter, whenever the Gutones and Guti are mentioned, these terms refer to the Goths." – * Wolfram, Herwig (1988) [Originally published in German, 1980]. History of the Goths. Translated by Dunlap, Thomas J. University of California Press. pp. 12–13, 23. ISBN 978-0-520-05259-8.

  • "During the first century and a half AD, four authors mention a people also normally identified with 'the Goths'... It is normally assumed that [the Gutones] are identical with the Goths." – * Christensen, Arne Søby (2002). Cassiodorus, Jordanes and the History of the Goths. Museum Tusculanum Press. pp. 32–33. ISBN 9788772897103.

  The overwhelming majority of authorative works on the Goths consider contemporaneous historical evidence from the 1st and 2nd centuries in northern Poland to be within the scope of the history of the Goths. This should mean that such evidence is also within the scope of the Wikipedia's coverage of the history of the Goths. Krakkos (talk) 16:25, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

  I think your reply shows a problem. Apparently this draft is trying to slip the Jordanes version of the migration stories (except with the time re-setting that you keep mentioning) in through the back door. You are using an OR argument that the Lemovii are also Goths, in exactly the same way as the Visigoths are Goths, which is clearly not true. You are using snippets of words from writers who disagree with you, like Christensen. If we are going to use quotes like the ones you give for Wolfram, then we'd have to explain that in his text being a Goth is not about ancestry, which is the opposite of what you want our readers to think he means. That is exactly the kind of technical issue everyone wants us to keep short. (The idea of Wenskus and Wolfram is extremely popular among academics by my reading?) We have also discussed many times how you switch to Heather as the main authority for the second migration, but don't want to use him for the first migration (because he is a sceptic). In other words, your ultimate real source is Jordanes, and you pick anyone who agrees with Jordanes on an issue. This is not what the RFCs called for.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 16:47, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

  ADDED out of sequence: I should have mentioned the first Heather is (finally) not from one of his tiny tertiary entries, but a work peope really cite. It put it to everyone that the words "this attempt" are not just in the quote as a joke. This quote gives a completely different impression, if taken on its own at least, from the snippets out of dictionaries.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 20:36, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

  For the benefit of other editors, here are some comments by Krakkos concerning the Gutones article, during the first of the current RFCs: [8]. So Krakkos does not want that article to exist at all, which is relevant here, and certainly does not want detailed discussion of pre-Goths moved out of this article at all - which is in contrast with most editors who have commented on the RFCs. One problem for Krakkos is that the Gutones article handles the topic differently than this one. I would say it is correct and balanced, and I think others agree. Krakkos sees it the other way around and calls this article and that one "POV forks". The arguments for the position Krakkos can only control on this article are the same "cherry picking" ones being used in this discussion, and that was the reason for the "what scholars say" wording which Krakkos used in the second RFC. "What is normally assumed by [selected] scholars" should, according to Krakkos, simply be treated as a fact.

  This is just one of several circular discussions which has been going on for more than a year. We are not making small progress, because as the March 18 comparison shows, this article can slip backwards quickly after a round of difficult improvements followed by a "decent pause". This article needs to break free from its past. This will never happen if one party is always taking extreme positions such as demanding that Gutones are simply the same thing as Goths. Most of us have learned to handle splitting off complex subjects so that there are not too many in one article.

  No one is arguing that the Gutones are not likely to be predecessors of the Goths in some uncertain way, and no one wants to hide that, but we can split them out, so we should. (See the RFCs.) They are NOT normally referred to as Goths in any simple way. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 19:24, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

  Yeah, "likely to be predecessors of the Goths in some uncertain way" seems to be about the size of it. We're certainly not going to arrive at a situation where WP has no article at Gutones, so any shaping of this material that is angling for that can just forget it.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:35, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

  PS: I agree with the overall direction, of compressing this down to a paragraph. And, yes, various groups do need to be mentioned in the course of this; the fact that they have their own articles is part of why we can afford to make this section more concise.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:45, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

  Needs Traditionskern rejoinder. @SMcCandlish: compressing is a reasonable aim for the material we have in this proposal, but I want to remind of various discussions above which indicate to me that some OTHER material may also need to be (re-)ADDED. One of the most important things we need to add is a reference to the very popular post-WW2 scholarly argument that to the extent Jordanes was partly right about the two migrations (which is what this section is effectively going to be about), instead of two simple migrations his story reflected cultural contact and the movements of small numbers of people who carried their culture with them, in two steps. Historians are divided about both steps, but most who argue for either step being real now argue in these terms. One or two sentences would probably be enough and should be possible. I think without such a rejoinder we keep the problem of a fuzzy uncertainty being converted to a simple certainty (i.e. two straight-out mass migrations). This is all about converting from Jordanes literalism to modern scholarly understandings.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 09:49, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

  Title is wrong. This is another long-running circular discussion which can be found repeated over and over on this article, with the same minority position constantly being pushed into new drafts and constantly rejected. We should not call the "pre Goths" Goths, so we should not refer to the Gothic "origins" discussions as the "Early Goths" topic.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 09:49, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

• Thanks for the ping. Maybe me being a dummy on this topic can be useful. So here's my dummy view. So it seems that nobody is calling Gutones "Goths" by that name, that Gutones are to some extent precursors of Goths, and Gutones have a separate article. If so, why not put only enough here on Gutones to set the stage for the surely-Goths material, and otherwise leave the Gutones coverage to the Gutones article. North8000 (talk) 15:41, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

  Thanks for your input, North8000. This article should be largely written for "dummies" like you so your input is crucial :D On the "Gutones"-Goths question i added som citations in a comment above which may be of interest. I would really like to hear your overall impression of the proposal i have outlined. Cheers. Krakkos (talk) 16:32, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

  (edit conflict) @North8000: That makes sense to me and is how we normally work on Wikipedia.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 16:46, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

• This RFC is not workable. SMcCandlish you seem to be implying that this RFC is still active but I believe it is already clear that this RFC is no longer functioning as an RFC: The proposal works with a link to a proposal, and the link has been adjusted several times. This means it is no longer possible to count "votes" because they all relate to different versions. OTOH none of the votes show an clear yes or no. Furthermore it is clear from the discussion that the drafts were not even intended to come closer to a consensus.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:01, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

  RfC's are not a vote. They are consensus discussions, and consensus can certainly emerge after examining various revision proposals. That's generally how it's done. And it takes times. RfCs typically run for an entire month, and can be extended beyond that.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:37, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

Yes it is not literally a vote. I just used that as shorthand. It reflects the fact that RFCs are not meant to be as fluid as a normal talk page discussion. There is meant to be a simple proposal, which is not normally meant to change, so that there can be a gathering of feedback which all refer to the SAME proposal. Otherwise, why have an RFC? They are intended to gather clear feedback? What I see above is very consistent feedback, and then a rewording of the proposal and doubling down on the POV-position which was written into the first draft. So where to next on this RFC? More rewriting of the proposal at the top?

Concerning RFCs generally I tend to agree with your idea that they should be few, and when they occur they should be allowed to go long. But I have never found a rule which literally demands this, and I have in contrast learned the hard way that many Wikipedians think lots of short RFCs are not problem and should be encouraged. I am trying to work with whatever everyone else demands and accepts. I am open to whatever works. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 09:30, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

Agree with SMcCandlish. And by the way, the proposal has only been changed once, and that change was a further trimming down of content in compliance with the suggestions of Obenritter, SMcCandlish and yourself. You said in your initial response that the proposal "needs more work".[9] For you to then dismiss the RfC as "not workable" once more work has been done is quite unfortunate. Krakkos (talk) 08:39, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

Yes ok you only made one proposal (sorry, honest mistake) and I was indeed willing to accept one adjustment, but AFTER that second proposal failed, AND after reading your defence of that and seeing that in fact your intentions had nothing to do with matching the various opinions posted in the three RFCs, where do we go now? Even if you say you're willing to change direction, it will still involve MORE changes to the proposal.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 09:30, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

• Support, per Krakkos, SMcCandlish and Obenritter above.--Berig (talk) 10:12, 3 April 2021 (UTC)
• Support, I think, per Obenritter. God, this page is making my head hurt; no wonder the estimable editor Alcaios dropped out of the entire discussion long ago. Carlstak (talk) 13:32, 3 April 2021 (UTC)
• Support Per Obenritter Sea Ane (talk) 12:31, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

Adding omitted participants to consider third draft below: Nishidani, Peter K Burian, Bloodofox, Ermenrich, Srnec, Mnemosientje,Yngvadottir, Alcaios, Pfold and North8000. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 18:10, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

• Update @SMcCandlish, Obenritter, Carlstak, Berig, and Sea Ane: I have now modified[10] the proposal further by trimming more content as suggested by several editors above. The content is fundemantally the same as in previous proposals, while the Prehistory, Early history, Movement towards the Black Sea hav all been shortened and merged into a single Origins and early history section consisting of two paragraphs. Feel free to let me now if this addional trimming has been a further improvement. Krakkos (talk) 10:31, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

• Concerned. First (practical), I indent this responses, but we need to find some way to distinguish responses to this new draft from responses to the earlier drafts. Second, I am seriously opposed to the misleading information which the 2nd and 3rd sentences represent when read together. [See detailed analysis.]

Collapsed. Use link instead

The 2nd is a repetition of past sentences we have discussed, which will mislead everyone that most scholars believe that the Gutones are the biological ancestors of the Goths, with no "mixing". That is bad enough, but extremely consistent with the racial purity concern which seems a constant in most controversies connected to you on this article, and previously on Germanic peoples. The new 3rd sentence now makes this worse, doubling down and removing all doubt, asserting that the scholars who think the Gutones were not necessarily the majority of the biological ancestors of the Goths are a separate minority group. Nothing could be further from the truth. The scholars in this third sentence are very common and likely to be the majority. They include many of the writers you like to cite because they use language seeming to equate Gutones and Goths. You know this. Third, the 4th sentence is also clearly extremely misleading: "Archaeologists associate the Goths with the Wielbark culture". Actually, archaeologists associate the Goths with being one of the peoples represented in the the Sântana de Mureş-Černjachov culture. They associate the Gutones with being one of the peoples present in the Wielbark culture. Sure, it is clearly true that scholars also associate the Goths with the Gutones and sometimes even mix the names up in their narratives. But you can't jump past all that and equate things. This will mislead our readers terribly. This ignores the context which is clear in our sources, distorts them badly. I stop at the 4th sentence. Overall this section is still too clearly aiming to simply equate Gutones and Goths. There is no field consensus for this, and even those who argue most strongly for a connection do not deliberately confuse their readers, or obsess on racial purity.

Others may be interested to look at the sources and notes I am collecting concerning this drafting here, as the sources there (sometimes different sentences from the same works Krakkos cites) may give a different perspective.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 11:20, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

Andrew, you are repeating yourself. This long response is pretty much the same as what you have posted in multiple posts above, and just makes this discussion harder to follow. Your description of the consensus among scholars is certainly incorrect. For example, here are some sources on the link between Goths and the Wielbark culture:

• "Archaeologists equate the earliest history of the Goths with the artifacts of a culture named after the East Prussian town Willenberg-Wielbark." – Wolfram, Herwig (1990). History of the Goths. Translated by Dunlap, Thomas J. University of California Press. p. 12. ISBN 0520069838.

• "[I]s now generally accepted that the Wielbark culture incorporated areas that, in the first two centuries AD, were dominated by Goths..." – Heather, Peter (2010). Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe. Oxford University Press. p. 104. ISBN 9780199892266.

• "They are normally identified with the Goths (the Wielbark culture)." – Christensen, Arne Søby (2002). Cassiodorus, Jordanes and the History of the Goths. Museum Tusculanum Press. p. 40. ISBN 9788772897103.

• "For a long time the Wielbark culture has been identified with the presence of the Goths in Poland." – Kaliff, Anders (2008). "The Goths and Scandinavia". In Biehl, P. F.; Rassamakin, Y. Ya. (eds.). Import and Imitation in Archaeology (PDF). Beier & Beran. p. 228. ISBN 978-3-937517-95-7. Archived from the original (PDF) on March 4, 2020.

• "Goths occupied a vast territory encompassing the lands from the Lower Vistula in the north, large parts of eastern Poland and west-ern Belorussia, territories of Ukraine reaching in certain parts beyond the Dnieper River, Bessarabia and large parts of what is now Romania... In this territory four Gothic cultures were distinguished: the Wielbark culture, the Chernyakhov culture, Sîntana de Mureş culture and the Masłomęcz group." – Kokowski, Andrzej (2011). "The Goths in ca. 311 AD". In Kaliff, Anders [in Swedish]; Munkhammar, Lars (eds.). Wulfila 311-2011 (PDF). Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. p. 71. ISBN 9789155486648. Archived from the original (PDF) on March 5, 2020.

I strongly encourage users to check the footnotes directly instead of having the views of scholars filtered through Andrew Lancaster. Krakkos (talk) 12:02, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

We should read the works themselves, as fully as possible. You should not be playing a cherry-picking contest at all. None of these is a source for biologically equating the two peoples. (And this field is FULL of rejoinders NOT to assume ethnicity = real descent. Note also words like "dominated by".) Our sources, when you read them, go through the proper steps of mentioning the Gutones separately before taking whatever position or terminology they prefer. Just because you can find sentences which match what you want does not mean this reflects the intention of the author. None of these sources is giving a literature review. Your draft fails verification. The real source is Krakkos.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 12:56, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

The sources above are cited for associating people with a material culture. The only person talking about "biologically equating" anything is you. I agree that editors should seek to read works as fully as possible, but for the average reader who perhaps would like to spend their time on other things, consulting the relevant footnotes directly is a good alternative. Certainly a better alternative than having scholarly views filtered through any of us. Krakkos (talk) 13:15, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

I partly agree. But we have to do read the contexts and chose the words for our readers. Call it filtering if you want, but we can't avoid some of that. A very important example for this exact matter, is that our readers do not know that Wolfram is constantly referring to the concept of "ethnogenesis". In the book you cite he says the "Goths" had several of these, one when the "Scythian" Goths came into being on the Black Sea (p.44). (Note also the Gutones discussed under that name back around p.39. The quote you like is from the Intro, which is better than quoting from an abstract but still a bit dangerous.) I propose that people's common sense is that equating two peoples means a straightforward biological equation, ancestry. Can we agree on that? Please consider your text in that light. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 13:46, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

Presenting the views of scholars in their own words in context is very helpful. Filtering their views in the wrong way is not. There is a consensus that the section on Gothic origins and early history should be trimmed, and that detailed discussion on scholarly squabbles such as the ethnogenesis debate should be placed elsewhere. Discussion on "biological" questions is also better suited somewhere else. Krakkos (talk) 14:22, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

I tend to agree but if we choose NOT to mention ethnogenesis and ancestry, then we must pick neutral words which do not require us to explain them. This is why we have to know the context and understand more than we put in the article. Simplifying is complicated. Using "exact words" sounds nice, but you make people say the opposite of their intention this way! "Cherry picking" is not some theoretical problem I invented to annoy you.

I have started an analysis of your draft on my userspace to save space and allow me to show how the approach you describe is having problems in real examples: [11]--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 14:40, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

Update. Krakkos I have now spent a lot of time looking at the details of your draft including the citations used, as you can review at the link already given above [12]. It seemed time to stop work. I hope my effort will be appreciated and used in a positive way. I also hope this major effort focussed on a small bit of text will also be an opportunity for other editors to better understand some concerns I have about the way sourcing is done on this article. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 18:39, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

@Andrew Lancaster: I have undone your resectioning[13] of the RfC. It makes the RfC more convoluted. Krakkos (talk) 17:35, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

I find it very difficult to understand how anyone could argue that creating a simple sub-sectioning is a "convoluted" resectioning. This is surely very normal and simple, and the alternative will certainly be convoluted. If we have no separation how do we know what people are responding to now? It almost looks like you want to ruin the talk page sometimes I'm afraid.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 18:04, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

• Oppose. Not an improvement, in my opinion. It removes all the strong statements and leaves the weak. "...subject to much discussion" "They are normally assumed..." "Some historians argue..." "Archaeologists associate..." "The Wielbark culture has been associated with..." "...subject of much interest, its reliability is disputed" "...some scholars have suggested..." "...are said to have been..." "The Vandals have been associated..." The first strong sentence we get to is "From the 2nd century AD the Wielbark culture expands southeastwards at the expense of the Przeworsk culture", which does not directly say anything about Goths. Thereafter we return to "...has been connected..." "...which has led some to suggest..." "...it is believed to have contributed..." "This process has been compared to..." "...has been a source of much discussion..." "Some scholars argue..." "While the Chernyakhov culture is believed to have included..." That accounts for every sentence in the proposed section. Some of this is aesthetic and could be corrected by re-wording, but much of it is the unavoidable byproduct of trying to present a short summary of what is in fact a highly disputed subject even among experts. I believe this would be better presented at length—and not in snippets—in an article dedicated to the subject, as I proposed above. The summary section here could then be more straightforward (and even shorter). Srnec (talk) 01:44, 8 April 2021 (UTC)

@Srnec: you've maybe put your finger on something concerning the length. I have no finished proposal to make, but drafting work here [14]. What I have been seeing is that we probably need to make it a reasonably long summary (say 500 words) or else very short indeed. I will probably develop several trial versions to test my thoughts on this. I would welcome your comments on that drafting if you have a moment Srnec. (You could use the talk page of that draft.)--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 06:56, 8 April 2021 (UTC)

Material from the 1st, 2nd and early 3rd centuries are well within the scope of this article though. In his The Goths (1998), which is probably the most relevant source for this article, Peter Heather devotes c. 40 out of 300 pages (about 13 %) to those centuries. The proposal devotes c. 400 out of 8400 words (less than 5%) to it. If we were to give as much weight to these centuries as Heather does, the proposed section should be three times longer. Pretty much all the material from this period is under dispute. If we are to provide a short and balanced account of this material, weak statements are pretty much unavoidable. The most crucial thing is that the statements in the proposal reflect reliable and relevant sources. I think they do that quite well. Krakkos (talk) 10:13, 8 April 2021 (UTC)

@Krakkos: I guess weak statements are always avoidable. In fact, if we are finding them difficult to avoid, that's a good indicator you need to tweak drafting strategy. If we find that we have to write weak statements to fit a target size for example, then the solutions available include making it even shorter (and relying even more on other articles to handle things) or making the text a little longer than originally targeted. I believe one reason that it has become difficult to keep it short is that previous versions were also in some ways incomplete explanations. For example if we should not mention simple migrations, without qualification, if we know that scholars do not really mean normal migrations. So we either have to explain it carefully (longer), or not mention migrations at all, but rely on other articles (shorter). From playing around on my drafting page I am tending to the idea that this Origins section needs to be a bit longer than expected. But I hope it can be justifiable by being a bit more informative to readers, and perhaps even resolve some long-lasting editor concerns.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 10:49, 8 April 2021 (UTC)

@Krakkos: The proposed change under discussion in this RFC would reduce the amount of material from the 1st, 2nd and early 3rd centuries in this article. Since this RFC is about reducing three sections to one, I find it odd that you think the proposed section should be three times longer. That's what it is now! Perhaps I should ask if you are in favour of your own proposed changes, or are you merely seeking "to address the concerns of the community"?
The problem I have with the proposal isn't the weak statements per se since, as you say, they are unavoidable in summing up the controversies. The problem is their density in the proposed section. In the article currently, hedged statements like are usually thought to have been Germanic peoples and Some scholars have equated these Guiones with the Gutones are balanced by stronger statements like This area had been intimately connected with Scandinavia since the time of the Nordic Bronze Age and Pliny writes that the 4th century BC traveler Pytheas encountered a people called the Guiones.
I do not wish to hold up improvements to the article, but I must say that I do not quite understand the concerns animating either of the open RFCs. To my mind, both proposed solutions make the identified problems worse. Clearly there is something I'm missing. Srnec (talk) 02:43, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

@Srnec: one of the concerns animating discussions about both the Lead, and the three sections (I think they all need to be discussed) is the question of whether the Gutones can simply be equated with the Goths, or do the Goths, at least the "core concept" Goths, start in the 3rd century. And because the answer so far is to look at modern scholars, drafts are showing a lot of quotes, and there has been a lot of discussion about what the sources really say. You mention two proposals, and I am not sure what you are counting. I have not yet made a proposal, and my draft page is currently more sourced than I would normally want for a real proposal, for the reason just explained.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 05:27, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

ADDED: lead drafting (incl. new version by Krakkos) [15]; closest thing I have to a draft [16].--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 09:58, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

@Srnec: I think the proposal is an improvement. My impression is that the community wanted to shorten coverage on 1st, 2nd and early 3rd century material and place less emphasis on Jordanes and scholarly debates. On the other hand, as stated above, 1st, 2nd and early 3rd century material is clearly within the scope of this article, and there is a limit to how much we can reduce such coverage. I think the proposal has reached that limit. With the regards to Gutones, most archaeologists and many historians, such Peter Heather, do make a simple equation between them and the Goths. Other scholars (mostly historians) do not. I think the proposal balances those views quite well. Krakkos (talk) 09:31, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

TLDR update: A promising direction of recent discussion. Some agreement between myself and Krakkos! We agree that Gutones do not "biologically" equal Goths. So then one concern of mine can be defined like this: If we pick the wrong words, our readers will understand that we are reporting a simple "biological" equation. Even Heather does not really believe that. I strongly believe the request for shortening should not lead to us misleading our readers on this.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 10:51, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

• Tentative shorter draft proposal for Origins. (4th proposal in this RFC, 1st by me.) Maybe the short version here is worth considering as a way forward? [17] --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 11:53, 10 April 2021 (UTC) Letting people know about this shorter draft for the united and simplified Origins section which aims to avoid complexities: Berig, Nishidani, Obenritter, Peter K Burian, Bloodofox, Ermenrich, Srnec, Carlstak, Mnemosientje, SMcCandlish, Yngvadottir, Alcaios, Pfold, North8000, Krakkos. To remind of previous RFC discussions: more discussions about Gothic origins are of course covered in other articles such as Gutones, Origin stories of the Goths, Wielbark culture, Chernyakhov culture, Getica, Gothic language, East Germanic languages, Berig, Fillimer, Oium etc, all of which are currently far less "over-worked" than this article. Comments anyone?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 10:21, 12 April 2021 (UTC)
• Closure has been requested I have requested the closure of this RfC at Wikipedia:Closure requests#Requests for comment.[18] Krakkos (talk) 09:01, 6 May 2021 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

RFC to move ahead on previous Intro and Origins proposals

NOTE ADDED 5 June 2021: Please do not close this RFC. It is on-going.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:00, 5 June 2021 (UTC)

Based on previous RFCs and discussions, may we now move ahead with the new Intro proposal of Krakkos (4th column here, discussion here), and the new Origins section drafted by me (2nd column here) which would replace the current 3.1, 3.2, and 3.3? --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 06:43, 6 May 2021 (UTC)

Pinging. Berig, Nishidani, Obenritter, Peter K Burian, Bloodofox, Ermenrich, Srnec, Carlstak, Mnemosientje, SMcCandlish, Yngvadottir, Alcaios, Pfold, North8000, Sea Ane feedback please.

• Yes (as proposer). I think these two drafts correspond to the various opinions and ideas mentioned in previous RFCs and discussions. I have already agreed with Krakkos on his lead proposal. There was a clear consensus in previous RFCs that the 3 sections about possible "pre Goths" which will be compressed now can better be expanded upon in other articles, because they have a tendency to expand and become controversial and overwhelming on this large article. Tweaks are possible of course, but I recommend moving ahead. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 06:43, 6 May 2021 (UTC)
• Comment Changes to the initial parts of the Goths#History (Origins) section are currently being discussed at an earlier RfC found at Talk:Goths#RfC on proposal to simplify the Prehistory, Early history and Movement towards the Black Sea sections and merge them into a single Origins and early history section. I doubt whether it is helpful to have two ongoing RfCs on essentially the same question. We should probably resolve the earlier RfC before we "move ahead" with its conclusions.

Concerning the proposed change to the Intro, i think we should get some feedback before we move ahead. Krakkos (talk) 08:39, 6 May 2021 (UTC)

I have now requested the closure of three ongoing RfCs above which cover similar questions as this one.[19][20][21] Krakkos (talk) 09:06, 6 May 2021 (UTC)

OK, I guess that makes sense, formally at least. No rush, so no harm getting the details right. Thanks Krakkos. OTOH, do you have any concern about this RFC as such? I didn't see any problem at least starting to ask people to look at the two proposals?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 14:48, 6 May 2021 (UTC)

Asking people to look at proposals is alright. On the other hand, posting the same proposal in mulitple RfCs and sections leads to confusion and makes it harder to work out sensible solutions. Interconnected RfCs should be handled in a reasonable order one step at the time. Making a new RfC with a request to "move ahead" with a counter proposal to a proposal being discussed in a ongoing RfC is problematic. Regarding your counter proposal for the Origins section, i am concerned about its removal of many quality sources, its undue emphasis on the views of historians at the expense of philologists/linguists and archaeologists, and its lack of a coherent structure. Krakkos (talk) 17:56, 6 May 2021 (UTC)

I posted one proposal in one RFC. This links the decisions about moving forward in two early parts of the article, and I think this is correct because these have clearly been linked discussions, also for other editors. (The shortening of the lead is also connected to the reduction of emphasis on "pre Goths".) There were no other open RFCs or running discussions. If you try to (re)open a second RFC that could then be problematic in the way you describe. The old RFC which led to my new Origins section proposal was clearly already useless as an RFC a month before it was terminated because it was no longer about one clear proposal. Many had been discussed and rejected. Mine is best considered a new one.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 18:43, 6 May 2021 (UTC)

@Andrew Lancaster: Talk:Goths#RfC on proposal to simplify the Prehistory, Early history and Movement towards the Black Sea sections and merge them into a single Origins and early history section has now been closed with the conclusion that there is a consensus to trim the early history sections and use this proposal as a basis for trimming and further refinement. Are you alright with moving ahead with this previous proposal? Krakkos (talk) 09:10, 9 May 2021 (UTC)

Apart from the new intro, drafted by you, the other part of this RFC is my draft of a shortened and united "Origins" section, to move ahead on a basis as described in that closure. During that previous RFC you proposed other ideas which all failed to create a concensus, so my draft is now the next one needing feedback. (We did not really need the closure because it was obvious what was agreed.) To quote the rest of the closure "There is a rough consensus to use the proposed text as a basis for further refinement. Whether the participants in this discussion believe such refinement should take place in a sandbox, in the article directly, or on this talk page is not clearly established below but can be determined through the normal editing process." --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 18:18, 9 May 2021 (UTC)

There was a rough consensus in the previous RfC to use my proposal as a basis for further refinement. Would you object to moving ahead with that? Krakkos (talk) 08:24, 10 May 2021 (UTC)

I think my proposal is clear, and is the basis of this RFC. This draft evolves from that same previous RFC as all your drafts, and that's how I suggest we go ahead. Other editors can say if they prefer your draft, or a mix of the two, or neither. But I suggest we leave these two drafts unchanged for a while now, and try to allow other editors to absorb them and comment. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 12:42, 10 May 2021 (UTC)

• Not an improvement. This "Origins proposal" ignores key conclusions from previous RfCs and is less informative and balanced than the current version. The proposal may be appreciated due to its shortness, but content quality is of greater value than content shortness. Previous RfCs have reached consensus that this article should put less emphasis on dubious origin stories and more emphasis on archaeological, linguistic and contemporaneous historical evidence. Despite of this, the proposal maintains discussion on such origin stories while removing all references from linguists (Brink, Rübekeil, Andersson, Strid etc.), virtually all references to archaeologists (Kazanski, Kokowski etc.), and a large amount of essential references on contemporaneous historical evidence. Various sub-par sources are in turn introduced to support the minority viewpoint that "there is no Gothic history before the third century", while top-notch sources supporting the majority viewpoint are removed, ignored and/or misrepresented. It may also be noted that the proposal lacks a coherent structure, in contrast to the current version, which is at least chronologically structured. The History section of this article can certainly be improved and trimmed. Removing essential content and rewriting it in an incoherent manner in support of a minority viewpoint will put it on a weaker basis for such improvement. Krakkos (talk) 16:01, 10 May 2021 (UTC)

Krakkos we've looked at the sources in previous discussions and you are misrepresenting them. That Gothic history starts in the third century is mainstream for historians, and history is the speciality of historians. Secondly, you are ignoring the fact that your draft proposal contains no discussion about some critical topics such as the mainstream idea that a small elite probably carried gothic/gothonic traditions between various places. So my draft actually ADDS critical information, which you've been hiding from our readers. Your draft is instead based on treating Jordanes as a fact, and there was a strong concensus that this article needs to get away from that. Thirdly, archaeologists are cited so much by you ONLY to defend your complete dependence upon Jordanes, but they are NOT Jordanes experts. I am all for Wikipedia having a better coverage of the archaeological discussions - but the main discussions should not be in this article.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 09:43, 11 May 2021 (UTC)

This article is about Goths rather than Jordanes. We should therefore be citing Goths experts rather than Jordanes experts. Your proposal increases the weight given to Jordanes and Jordanes experts, and that is opposite of the clear consensus established in previous RfCs. The chief mainstream historians on Goths are Heather and Wolfram, but your proposal minimizes and misrepresents their views in order to push minority viewpoints as a matter of fact. That archaeological and linguistic evidence is of relevance to Gothic origins and early history is agreed upon both by mainstream scholars and by prior talk page consensus. Such evidence should be cited to archaeologists and linguists who are Goths experts, rather than Jordanes experts. That certain archaeological and linguistic evidence corroborates parts of Jordanes is not a valid argument for removing such evidence. Likewise, the addition of material about "gothic/gothonic traditions" does not necessate the misrepresentation of Heather and Wolfram and the complete removal of citations from archaeologists and linguists. Such misreprentation and removal of essential sources from experts on Goths reduces the quality of the article and puts it on a weaker basis for future improvement. Krakkos (talk) 11:31, 11 May 2021 (UTC)

Other editors should compare my draft to yours and the current version in order to confirm the facts. My drafting page (and indeed the archives of this talk page also contain extensive evidence concerning what the sources say.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 11:53, 11 May 2021 (UTC)

Just for completeness, I forgot to link to my older comments on the draft which I understand to still be your latest draft for a shorter pre-history section: [22]. A major concern is cherry-picking of sources in order to promote the Jordanes story, while hiding what experts in the various fields really believe and write.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 07:51, 30 May 2021 (UTC)

• No, I see no reason to remove studies on archaeology, lingistics, and genetics surrounding the origin of the Goths, and especially since the origin of the Goths is a very notable and still controversial topic.--Berig (talk) 16:58, 10 May 2021 (UTC)

Berig perhaps there is a misunderstanding. The previous RFCs made it clear that there was a consensus not to remove such information from Wikipedia, but to focus upon it more in other articles. There are already many articles related to this article, concerning linguistic, archaeological etc topics. None of these topics can be done justice here. This article focuses on the topic "Goths" as that term is used in sources. The various disputed proposals about "pre Goths" should be mentioned and linked to, but there has been a strong consensus expressed about concerns that these disputes continually take over this article and talk page. There was also a strong theme of the need to stop making Wikipedia treat Jordanes as the main source for all of this. I would add that we really must make it more clear that mainstream scholars these days make use of the Vienna school's concept of a small elite who carry traditions with them, not requiring a large movement of people. In my draft this is added, whereas previously it has been hidden from our readers. How can we justify this?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 09:43, 11 May 2021 (UTC)

• Pinging as reminder. The previous RFCs decided that the 3 controversial sections about possible Gothic origins before the 3rd century should be shortened, because the main discussion is for other articles. This is the current proposal, which actually covers reliably sourced topics currently excluded from our current article, despite being significantly shorter and simpler: [23] (4th column). Nishidani, Obenritter, Peter K Burian, Bloodofox, Ermenrich, Srnec, Carlstak, Mnemosientje, SMcCandlish, Yngvadottir, Alcaios, Pfold, North8000, Sea Ane. So far: (1) Krakkos has also linked above to his older proposal, and I linked to my analysis of that draft showing the problems. If I understand correctly Krakkos would however prefer that the previous RFCs never get acted upon. (2) Berig also prefers that the previous RFCs never get acted upon. (3) No one else who participated in the previous RFCs has commented on the present proposal.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:43, 2 June 2021 (UTC)

The key conclusions of the previous RfCs were to increase emphasis on archaeological, linguistic evidence, contemporaneous historical accounts and secondary sources, and to shorten existing material. Attempts to act on these RfCs have been proposed and supported by the wider community, but you have opposed these efforts. Your proposal constitutes a complete rewrite of key sections of this article, in which top sources are replaced with sub-par ones, and essential information on archaeological, historical and linguistic evidence is entirely removed. This is the opposite of the conclusions of the RfCs, and constitutes a significant reduction of article quality. For more than a year you have made essentially the same proposal here multiple times (Talk:Goths/Archive 6#Should the Origins 3.1 and Migration 3.2 sections be move out of History?, Talk:Goths/Archive 8#RFC about the Name section etc.). Making the same proposals over and over again and pinging users endlessly until one gets the desired result is not a good approach. Krakkos (talk) 10:05, 2 June 2021 (UTC)

LOL. This RFC is my first proposal and it was made slowly, based on the RFCs and aiming to match the diverse comments of other editors, after very thoroughly reassessing the sources. It includes additional information and sources compared to your current controversial Jordanes-based version. There is at this stage no evidence at all that there is any opposition to my proposal apart from you and Berig. But that is not surprising because you are both clearly opposed to the decisions and opinions in the previous RFCs and want the opening of this article to continue to be tacitly Jordanes-based, in order to spread the word that Goths are Swedes (and DNA will prove Jordanes right one day, etc, etc). None of your proposals show any interest in archaeology, let alone linguistics or DNA. Editors should read my actual draft. Your previously rejected draft is still clearly linked to as well, and people can still say if they prefer it, or see bits they like better. BTW on my drafting page I have also shown extra sources that can be added to my version, but many editors may find my draft over-footnoted. I do not believe your approach to sourcing always matches our community norms, but I've tried to follow you part of the way due to the inevitability of the outrage which will be expressed if the footnotes are fewer or less long. There is also a table showing the problems which your draft has, including source distortion. Anyway, I have no problem with my draft being rejected after a proper discussed, but what is more important it to make sure the drafting discussion and feedback leads to clarification of what changes are needed. Please do not disrupt this discussion with misleading red herring remarks.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 14:36, 2 June 2021 (UTC)

You made false remarks about me (and Berig) and then pinged a whole bunch of editors. Of course i have to respond to such red herrings which disrupt the discussion. This article should be based on the research on Goths by the foremost experts, including archaeolgists, historians and philologists. Your proposal involves the removal of the sources from these experts and their replacement with weaker ones which support the fringe viewpoint. Such removal is essentially what you have been proposing repeatedly for more than a year, using a supposed need for "simplicity" as justification. Krakkos (talk) 16:00, 2 June 2021 (UTC)

That is not a valid excuse. However, I'll agree with one thing:- The "Goths are Swedes" theory, which only comes from Jordanes, and features Berig, and which you have made the central theme of this article while pretending it is from modern archaeologists, is indeed a long term controversy among most editors of this article, and has indeed been raised before by me and others in different contexts before. You are right about that. But I repeat that this draft is a first attempt to make a quite carefully sourced compromise based on a wide range of editing opinions and a careful reassessment of the sources. Please let discussion go ahead?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 16:37, 2 June 2021 (UTC)

• Support With the caveat that my knowledge and depth on this is insufficient for a thorough confident answer. North8000 (talk) 13:38, 2 June 2021 (UTC)

Your feedback is precious. Are there any bits you throught particularly strong or weak?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 14:39, 2 June 2021 (UTC)

• I was on the losing side of both RFCs. I do not share the community's view of how to make this article better or even of what is wrong with it. Therefore, I have no opinion on the implementation of the RFCs. Srnec (talk) 00:33, 3 June 2021 (UTC)

@Srnec: I do not think the RFCs above are clear enough about details to say your position "lost", and I also can't believe that you would say the differences between the two proposals currently being made have no connection to the points you made. My draft was made after your rejection of the one made by Krakkos. I also looked at the way other editors all referenced your opinions (e.g. CarlstakSMcCandlish). Could you double check what I am proposing? I suppose BTW you are referring to your two comments here: [24][25]. Honestly I counted your opinions as having received a lot of support and I have tried to work to reduce "obsessive focus on origins", and the use of selected snippets about topics which can only be properly handled in dedicated article or articles.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 06:44, 3 June 2021 (UTC)

Adding a note and also responding to Andrew's question, the caveat in my post is because I have not taken the deep dive needed to thoroughly learn the article, proposed changes and situation well enough to give full-fledged opinions. If y'all think that extra input is needed, I'd be happy to do that. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 16:06, 3 June 2021 (UTC)

Personally I think the more detailed feedback that can be given the better. Having a draft rejected is no problem but a more important aim is gathering feedback and new perspectives.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 19:51, 3 June 2021 (UTC)

OK, I took a deeper dive. My first more detailed comment is on the half of the RFC dealing with the lead. I think that the specific question is substitution of the linked "column 4" for the current lead. IMO this would be a good move, with the understanding that this doesn't "lock in" the whole thing but leaves it open to tweaks. The lead should be a summary of the article. In comparison. the current lead is more of a blizzard of factoids that is hard to absorb and the column 4 looks like a easier-to-read summary. Since the lead should be a summary of the article, there should not be anything in the lead that is not in the article so removal of the old lead should not result in any loss of material. But you might want to double check that or possibly you did already. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 21:15, 3 June 2021 (UTC)

I would agree with that step forward. Krakkos made it, and so presumably would not be opposed to that step either.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 11:43, 4 June 2021 (UTC)

First, Srnec is a well-respected editor whose edits I've seen on many articles concerning historical topics on my watchlist. I can't remember that I've ever disagreed with an edit that he made, but if I did, I know that he would have a well-reasoned explanation of his thinking. I don't have time now to delve into this, but I know that Srnec's thoughts always deserve consideration—he is knowledgeable and expresses himself quite well.

One day years in the future some Wikipedian will do a forensic analysis of the voluminous discussion on this talk page and its continuing stasis. That person will be amazed and perhaps lose his or her sanity from contemplating all the ever-increasing gigabytes of argument. May he or she rest in peace—that's what I'm going to do.;-) Carlstak (talk) 02:04, 4 June 2021 (UTC)

@Carlstak: I propose that in order to avoid problems with the undead, ignore the whole history of the talk page and just read the short and simple draft? Any kind of feedback might help. The proposal does not require a re-reading of every debate because this simple single change is easy and uncontroversial to summarize: a big reduction of everything concerning speculations about the origins of the Goths before the third century (as Srnec requested). The people who don't like it agree that this is what is doing.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 11:43, 4 June 2021 (UTC)

I'm glad you have a sense of humor, Andrew. Please understand that I'm a bit zombified myself these days—I'm not quite running on all cylinders and just don't have much spare time. I read your shorter draft, compared it to the other, and find the short version to be much better—it's concise and less confusing, although I thought we had consensus that excessive footnoting with quotes from the referenced authors was not desirable. Carlstak (talk) 03:40, 5 June 2021 (UTC)

@Carlstak: It's a good point about having a sense of humour. Helps a lot with this article, and I don't think it is just you but maybe even our whole community which is getting a bit tired of some types of work (and yes we are all getting older, and apparently we are not doing well recruiting young people). Just on the footnotes, as far as I am concerning all the direct quotes can be removed (or reduced), but realistically I kept them in for discussion of the draft because we have a long history on this article (like Germanic peoples) of a specific argument that reduction of this is un-sourced, or even "removing quality sources". How do we stop the bots from removing the RFC template while discussion is on-going?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 07:57, 5 June 2021 (UTC)

 Done As you can see, I've added the "RFCBot Ignore Expired" tag to the page. Carlstak (talk) 15:37, 5 June 2021 (UTC)

• Resolve the earlier-opened RfC first, then, yes, let's get on with it ("it" being some combination of what's been proposed so far and whatever comes out of that other RfC). I think this is a good summary of the current consensus, based on past RfCs not counting that still-open one: "The previous RFCs decided that the 3 controversial sections about possible Gothic origins before the 3rd century should be shortened, because [they're covered in] other articles."  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:32, 4 June 2021 (UTC)

  @SMcCandlish: which RFC do you say is open? Which question is unanswered? Please clarify. I am glad you agree with my summary, but don't quite follow.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 11:43, 4 June 2021 (UTC)

  I was responding to "Changes to the initial parts of the Goths#History (Origins) section are currently being discussed at an earlier RfC found at Talk:Goths#RfC on proposal to simplify the Prehistory, Early history and Movement towards the Black Sea sections and merge them into a single Origins and early history section. I doubt whether it is helpful to have two ongoing RfCs on essentially the same question. We should probably resolve the earlier RfC before we "move ahead" with its conclusions." If that's now also closed, then let's integrate the results of it with previous results. I tend to agree with: "The previous RFCs made it clear that there was a consensus not to remove such information from Wikipedia, but to focus upon it more in other articles." But the devil is in the details of how to shift focus and narrow scope. I tend to agree at least in spirit with this, too: "Interconnected RfCs should be handled in a reasonable order one step at the time. Making a new RfC with a request to "move ahead" with a counter proposal to a proposal being discussed in a ongoing RfC is problematic." But I'm not sure that's a 100% accurate description. Regardless, I see enough blowback already to think that this new RfC is a bust. It would probably be most productive to prepare a draft revision based on the previous RfCs and then see if it meets with approval. Give us all something concrete to look at instead of more of the same arguments. They're getting hard to follow except for people really focused on this particular page. When I say we should get on with it, I mean get on with improving the article, which is a content endeavor not more talk-page argument. PS: Talk:ByteDance is stuck at exactly the same stage of the same process: lots of discussion and "voting" about how to revise, but a need to just write the revision, with everyone's concerns in mind and balanced to the extent possible, then put that draft up and see if it sticks as the new base from which we'll work moving forward.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:58, 4 June 2021 (UTC)

@SMcCandlish: I can't follow, and I think one of us is misunderstanding the situation. According to me you are referring to a closed RFC as open. Also you are proposing that the next logical step is that someone should propose a new draft. That is exactly what this RFC is? In terms of the older draft of Krakkos, Krakkos called in an admin to close all the older RFCs, not me, but I've continued to remind editors that this draft also still exists. (The result of this RFC could also be a hybrid or something based on new ideas.) I also don't understand your reference to blowback EXCEPT in the inevitable sense that Krakkos and Berig do not agree with the opinions of other editors in the previous RFCs (as per the summary you agree with) and would prefer the article to keep the Goths-are-Swedes theme of the controversial opening sections. That is of course a disagreement which goes back long before I ever worked on this article, and one where both editors believe ideology-driven academia is partly to blame, and are waiting for new DNA evidence to prove them right. We can't expect any consensus that will resolve that disagreement at this time? I believe however we can come to a happier compromise if the academic versions of the Swedish proposal can be properly discussed in a more specialized article. I think most of believe trying to fit the MAIN discussion of that here is just never going to really work?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 13:52, 4 June 2021 (UTC)

Well, maybe one step towards simplification would be to do the change to the lead if there is a consensus or no objections. North8000 (talk) 12:09, 4 June 2021 (UTC)

A potential clue in regards to Gothic origins?

A genetic study on early Slavs in Poland is about to be published. The study will possibly include Gothic samples, and some raw data has already been released. Heat maps of the data have been made by an artist. The heat maps can be found at the Reddit post "A potential clue in regards to Gothic origins?". We can't cite it of course, but it's an informative read. The post contains quite a lot of content copied from Wikipedia, revealing how content added here is frequently mirrored elsewhere. Interesting times. Krakkos (talk) 18:19, 6 May 2021 (UTC)

Thanks. By my understanding it is based on Y DNA like articles 20 years and it is using the now rejected methodology of assuming places where a Y haplogroup is most common today, must be the places where the haplogroup originated? (E.g., in the old days, R1b was thought to have moved from west to east.) Let's hope not. Best would be autosomal testing and as much ancient DNA comparisons as possible. Y DNA can however be interesting in specific ways. Patrilineages seem to move around more quickly and rapidly replace each other. So they are a poor representation of the population as a whole, but they are hypothetically connectable to movements of elites and their languages and technologies. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 18:55, 6 May 2021 (UTC)

re-appearance of DNA section

I have removed the following which was added by what I understand to be a single topic IP editor with an interest in Swedish topics:

DNA evidence seems to be consistent with the traditional perspective described by Jordanes of a Scandinavian migration. The DNA comparison shows the Gothic populations DNA structure is similar to southern Scandinavia. It is unclear if the Oksywie culture was replaced by the Goths or created by the Goths. Before the Gothic immigration, the DNA of Central Europe was different and more diverse. Exactly how this migration happened could not be reached. The study published in 2019 seem to confirm the notion that Goths originated in southern Sweden and Denmark. But the study also cites more research in archaeology and genetics is needed to gain a greater understanding of exactly how the Gothic migrations influenced the history of the region. The study studied populations from different periods and DNA structure in Northern Poland changed due to an influx of immigrants. In Kowalewko in Poland, the Gothic newcomers 200 AD had significantly different DNA from previous locals that inhabited the region. The spread of the Scandinavian I1 Dna group is also closely linked to the Migration period during the collapse of the Roman empire. Current research shows that before the Goths migrated Haplogroup I-M253 was confined exclusively to Scandinavia. The migration of the Goths resulted in the spread of the genes outside of Scandinavia for the first time. Goths buried in Italy shared genetic affinity with modern-day Scandinavians also having a dominant I1 gene.

References

After many previous discussions, similar material was previously removed by Srnec. Concerned raised included WP:UNDUE, WP:PRIMARY, WP:SCIRS, WP:OR, WP:SYNTH. Archived discussions: [26], [27], [28]. The section being expanded this way is also recently agreed to be one needing trimming, because focus on such speculative topics about pre Goths has been a significant distraction from the main topic [29].--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 07:31, 30 May 2021 (UTC)

discussion with IP editor

But the large concentration around Rome is persistent with the Gothic sack of Rome. Over 15 per cent of I1 DNA in modern times. I1 only became dominant around 500 BC in Scandinavia. The fact that modern-day Romans have 15 per cent I1 is probably due to the Goths settling down in Rome. Before the migration period, modern-day Romans lacked I1 DNA. Know they have 15 per cent which is huge and do not indicate a small case migration of elite. The Goths buried in Rome also show Genetic affinity with modern-day Scandinavians with a dominant I1 gene not common in Germany Poland, or elsewhere. The DNA evidence suggests the Goths did migrate en mass from Scandinavia. Modern-day British populations also have 15 per cent I1 DNA thanks to the Vikings and Anglo Saxon migration from Scandinavia. Fifteen per cent around Rome is a very high number if you take into consideration 1500 years have passed and that modern-day Romans have so much Scandinavian heritage. Where did it come from if not the Goths? The German populations have 15 per cent so if they had sacked Rome the I1 spread would have been lower. For example, France or modern-day Frenchmen— conquered by the more German Franks have far less I1 DNA. Only a pure Scandinavian group could have made Rome so incredibly Scandinavian. The Genetic evidence shows the Goths are almost identical to modern Swedes. Also the fact that the DNA They also found almost all Goths remains buried in Italy being genetically related to Scandinavians. https://www.eupedia.com/europe/Haplogroup_I1_Y-DNA.shtml Eupedia and various discussion forums are the better places to discuss such speculative ideas. Here on Wikipedia we have a more boring aim, of just summarizing what holds fields agree upon, and/or what they are debating. Even that is complex enough. :) Individual research papers are can not be used to summarize a whole field, but for better or worse Wikipedia's community grudgingly accepts them to be reported in specialist articles on human population research, archaeology and so on. (Concerns about this have been posted regularly over the years.) This article is not one of those, because it has enough to do just covering the very rich topic of the Goths as known from history, but there are some related articles where we are reporting some of these things. However, a secondary problem we have had is that Wikipedians have been adding their own conclusions and not just giving a neutral report of these research papers. That is definitely against our core content policies, and something to do on other websites, not this one.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 11:15, 30 May 2021 (UTC) That proves the at least partial Scandinavian origins of the Goths. Is not better than to for example research something else about World war 2 or some other topic needing attention... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.227.81.54 (talk) 17:48, 30 May 2021 (UTC) When new publications appear which show something new, we look at those. That is how Wikipedia works. In the meantime, predicting what the new publications will show is for other types of websites. At this stage there is no body of published material with strong conclusions about Gothic origins, based on DNA. Eupedia is not a reliable source. And there is no publication at all which suggests sthat Rome is "incredibly Scandinavian"!! FWIW I1 is very widespread in Europe, and has a difficult distribution to make conclusions about because it is pre-agriculture.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 19:11, 30 May 2021 (UTC) Sorry but I1 is very Scandinavian it is true that the gene has been found before. But it was not until the late Nordic bronze age it started to get broadly spread. Also, it is only dominant in Scandinavia and Northern Germany. Also, Scandinavians have 35-40 per cent I1 DNA. So it is very Scandinavian even if it have old origins it was not dominant in any region in Europe until the late Scandinavian Bronze age. Also, the Lombards could be a source of I1 in Rome. So maybe the Goths were R1A or another haplogroup... But calling it a none Scandinavian gene is pretty ignorant. Lombards could be the source of I1 in Italy. It only became dominant around 500 BC for unknown reasons. It also spread to Germany when the Celts got weakened by the Ceasars invasion. All Germanic people groups originate in Scandinavia or Northern Germany. Ceasar's invasion of the Gaul weakened, them so the Germanic peoples could invade. It is not dominant in any region except Scandinavia and Finland. The groups' origins are disputed but did not start to gain dominance until 500 before christ so all of its spread over the rest of Europe is contemporary history and all migrations that spread it is recorded in Southern European history. R1A also seem to be widespread in Italy so the Goths also had German ancestry. However, the Italian studies showed a great affinity with Scandinavians. In Gothic graves. For example, before the Anglo-Saxon invasion, no I1 was present in Britain. Ireland has no I1 except in Dublin due to it being founded by Norse settlers. Before that I1 was small or marginal. The clustered in Turkey comes from Varangian guards during medieval periods large swaths of Norse males migrated to the Byzantine empire to serve as guards. Northwestern Spain was the final refugee from the Islamic invasion. Sicily got I1 from Norman invasions. The cluster around Sankt Petersburg is due to Norse settlers using it as a trading hub. Laying the foundation for the Rus states. The Germanic migrations dispersed I1 lineages to Britain (Anglo-Saxons), Belgium (Franks, Saxons), France (Franks, Visigoths and Burgundians), South Germany (Franks, Alamanni, Suebi, Marcomanni, Thuringii and others), Switzerland (Alamanni, Suebi, Burgundians), Iberia (Visigoths, Suebi and Vandals), Italy (Goths, Vandals, Lombards), Austria and Slovenia (Ostrogoths, Lombards, Bavarians), Ukraine and Moldova (Goths), as well as around Hungary and northern Serbia (Gepids). The I1 found among the Poles (6%), Czechs (11%), Slovaks (6%) and Hungarians (8%) is also the result of centuries of influence from their German and Austrian neighbours. The relatively high frequency of I1 around Serbia and western Bulgaria (5% to 10%) could be owed to the Goths who settled in the Eastern Roman Empire in the 3rd and 4th centuries. In Turkey and Russia unlike Rome, England or Germany it was not a full-scale migration therefore I1 did not become widespread only some Varangian guardsmen acting as police in Greece and Russia and settled and married Greek or Russian women. The I1 spread is closely linked with recorded historical events. Sicily have a concentration probably due to Norrman settlers moving in taking the houses of Muslim Arabs after the Norman conquest. Also Vladimir the Great seem to have also been descended from the I1 subgroup. But all this information in the article does not have to be written in the article of course. Just the fact that the origins lie in Scandinavia from I1 and that Goths probably were not intermixing that much with close by populations. Or it could be Lombards in the graveyard. The other things I mentioned about modern Rome citizens having a lot of I1 admixtures was just to prove my point. Amorim, Carlos (2018-09-11). "Understanding 6th-century barbarian social organization and migration through paleogenomics". Nature Communications. 9 (1): 3547. Bibcode:2018NatCo...9.3547A. doi:10.1038/s41467-018-06024-4. PMC 6134036. PMID 30206220. The frequency of old Y haplogroups in regions is not a good predictor at all of where the haplogroup originally dispersed from, but in any case this is not the place to try to publish your personal speculations. This is not a forum. We just make articles which summarize what has been published in expert fields as a whole. This is not the place to present novel hypotheses based on primary research. It just isn't what Wikipedia is for. Please familiarize yourself with how Wikipedia works.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 22:50, 30 May 2021 (UTC) I took articles published by genetic experts in Poland thought. I just wanted to add the genetic research a team of 6 different DNA researchers from Poland concluded in their DNA analysis. I did never want to include this and also I1 is not an ancient genetic group. It developed during the Neolithic in Scandinavia and is not related to the I2 group. It is the only major DNA group in Europe with none Asiatic origins. The researchers concluded that the Goths females were married to or taken by neighbouring tribes. The gothic female genes are present among modern poles. But not male gothic DNA is not as common. Showing that the Goths kept for themselves for some reason. But that poles are also descended from them due to locals finding gothic women attractive. This was not my own conclusion this was based upon a polish team with 6 researchers. They concluded the Goths were partially Scandinavian or German in origin and that their women mixed with modern-day poles. Inducing the I1 haplogroup into Poland. . Eastern European populations do not have patrilinear ancestry from the Goths. It is not old 4000 years old. It only started to become common 500 before Christ. The Eupedia article also states that I1 large spread across Europe is a result of the Germanic migration period. It was a dead genepool until it for, some reason, had evolutionary benefits and spread across Scandinavia and Germany. Italic researchers concluded the Gothic graveyard were genetically similar to modern-day Scandinavians. The spread of I1 across Europe can only be traced to Germanic migrations. But if the editors do not want to include DNA research in the article let's ignore my edits. But they are consistent with what I read in a research paper published by six genetic experts. No DNA edits I get it. I Will not try it again.

The notion that genetic evidence should be excluded from this article, when it appears in so many others, strikes me as very peculiar, if not outright special pleading. The genetic evidence is solid evidence, not "speculative ideas" as you call it. -- Elphion (talk) 15:04, 30 May 2021 (UTC)

I see what you mean, but it is not quite that extreme. As a general rule on Wikipedia there is concern about the use of such research, but more about our ability to use it well. DNA information is concrete in a sense, but interpreting it is tricky because there are very few good secondary works which help us draw historical conclusions from isolated tests on skeletons here and there, and so we risk WP:SYNTH. Historically, on this article on others, editors including such material have based their historical conclusions almost entirely on the ideas of various online bloggers etc, despite superficially citing peer reviewed research reports which generally make very meagre comments about history or language. Typically what we therefore when apprioriate is list basic summaries of results from various articles, and keep it as neutral as possible, restraining ourselves from bringing in ideas from the blogosphere, no matter how interesting. If you follow the links I posted above I once proposed a way we could do that here but other editors preferred the current option, and I also agree with them. The OTHER issue here is not an opposition to DNA as such but the longer running discussion (see various RFCs) about trying to move coverage of Gothic origins to other articles (Gutones, Wielbark culture, Origin stories of the Goths etc). This does not only affect DNA, but also archaeology and discussions about Jordanes. I think I speak for a majority of editors (based on several RFCs) when I say that the space we dedicate to these topics on these articles is too little to be able to do justice to those topics, which are complex in their own right.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 13:25, 31 May 2021 (UTC)

I agree with Elphion that the exclusion of genetic evidence from this article is unhelpful. Stolarek et al. (2019) did a genetic study which is directly relevant to the Goths:

"The collected results seem to be consistent with the historical narrative that assumed that the Goths originated in southern Scandinavia; then, at least part of the Goth population moved south through the territory of contemporary Poland towards the Black Sea region, where they mixed with local populations and formed the Chernyakhov culture... [T]he genetic relationships reported here... support the opinion that southern Scandinavia was the homeland of the Goths." – Stolarek, I.; Handschuh, L.; Juras, A.; et al. (May 1, 2019). "Goth migration induced changes in the matrilineal genetic structure of the central-east European population". Scientific Reports. 9 (1). 6737. Bibcode:2019NatSR...9.6737S. doi:10.1038/s41598-019-43183-w. PMC 6494872. PMID 31043639.

That study found evidence of Gothic connections with Scandinavia. Andrew Lancaster is constantly seeking to remove such evidence, and is using all types of pretexts to justify such removal. One such pretext is to create POV forks like Gutones and Origin stories of the Goths, and then to advocate the transfer of evidence he doesn't like from this article to the POV forks. Another pretext are supposed concerns about citing genetic studies. Interestingly, Andrew Lancaster has been citing himself at Wikipedia articles on genetics.[30] His concerns about genetic studies seem quite selective. I think this article has space for a sentence or two about the genetic studies on Goths that have been published so far. Krakkos (talk) 14:20, 31 May 2021 (UTC)

Why are you pretending a 2009 edit on another article is recent or relevant? I defer to my summary above for links to several past discussions about DNA relevant to THIS article, especially this one. The Stolarek 2019 article did mitochondrial DNA tests, which are useless for this purpose, and said the result was CONSISTENT with Goths coming from Sweden. The edit to remove it was made by Srnec and was also strongly agreed by others including Alcaios and Carlstak. I also refer to recent RFCs for discussion about moving origins details out of this article, where the closing admin noted a "clear consensus".--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 16:18, 31 May 2021 (UTC)

I thought haplogroups were pretty consistent with ancestry. Especially when Genetic specialists in Poland agree they are true. Also, Goths had a central European or polish variant of R1A that also seem to be spread out along Spain and Italy in a similar cluster with I1. I also used an Italian source examining actual remains of Gothic warriors in Italian graveyards from 500 BP exactly after the sack of Rome by the Goths and Lombards. Taken from a Gothic burial in Rome. I1 at least seem to be the dominant group in the populations only in modern Swedes, Danes and in Norway I1 is dominant in Goths too... At least those found in the graveyards of Rome. Also one similar examination done by genetic experts in Italy 2020 seems to confirm the Scandinavian origins of the Goths done in 2020

References

Since we had some semblance of consensus not to delve too deeply into the origin stories, I think we should refrain from including the genetic discussion in the main body of the test. Krakkos was right that a sentence or two is merited about the recent genomic evidence, but let's make them informational notes, as the science of genetics is still very young and in transition. We don't need this page becoming politicized by focusing on a controversial area. To this end, Andrew's position seems the most in keeping with editorial consensus. --Obenritter (talk) 19:03, 31 May 2021 (UTC)

(edit conflict)FWIW, Haplogroups, types of DNA, obviously do have something to do with biological ancestry. But this article is not about biology, and mitochondrial DNA is a special small chunk of rarely mutating DNA that we only get from our mother, and these change very slowly and apparently (scientists have found) don't normally spread in a way which can be used to connection to language or ethnicity in smaller regions like Europe. If you've you've ever tracked your own mitochondrial DNA or, like me, worked with genealogists in large groups, you'll know how the closest mitochondrial matches of people with European ancestry tend to come from thousands of kilometres from their own known ancestors. This is why most well-known labs working on population history don't use mitochondrial DNA, at least not exclusively.

ALSO, Roberta Estes is an American blogger. The article she discusses about Roman DNA is comparing to Hungary, looking for evidence of Lombard movement, not Scandinavia, not looking at Goths.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 19:18, 31 May 2021 (UTC)

This article is not about Latin literature either. Does that mean we should purge the article of all references to Latin literature? Of course not. This article is about ancient people, and our understanding of ancient people is based on a combination of literary, linguistic, archaeological, genetic and other material. Genetic information can be used to get insight into many things, for example human migration and social organization. The mtDNA that we inherit from our mothers is one type of such useful genetic information. Stolarek et al. (2019) examined what they perceived to be Gothic mtDNA, and drew some conclusions from it. I think the addition of a neutral reference to Stolarek et al. (2019) would be helpful. This could be done through formulating a sentence or an informational note. Krakkos (talk) 19:45, 31 May 2021 (UTC)

Actually you will only find things neatly labelled as Goths in Latin and Greek literature. This article is about a historical people, i.e. known from the written record. All other types of investigation about them, such as archaeological or linguistic, start from the written record. But you won't find any neatly labelled Gothic DNA in the populations genetic literature. What you have published here in the past was not a neutral summary, but wishful thinking. You were the source. We can however say quite a lot about archaeological ideas concerning the origins of the Goths, but no version of this article or any other on WP has ever done a good job of that. (You've used archaeology sources only to sneak the Jordanes "Berig story" into "Wikipedia voice". Ironic! You use archaeologists as a proxy for a bit of Latin literature which is your indirect source for the "Goths are Swedes" myth you are continually trying to reinsert. You argue against citing experts on Jordanes, only because you know they all agree he can't be used this way. Using archaeologists as alternative non-expert sources for Jordanes appears to be the limit of your interest in archaeology.) The archaeology of Gothic origins deserves it's own article (Wielbark culture etc) and I think no one would have a problem with truly neutral summaries of articles like Stolarek's there.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 20:20, 31 May 2021 (UTC)

This article is about Goths. Detailed coverage on Jordanes and Getica belongs at the articles Jordanes and Getica. This article should rely primarily on experts on Goths, as it currently does. The literature and archaeology of the Goths is indeed covered in detail at other articles. The Visigoths and Ostrogoths have also received detailed coverage elsewhere. This does not mean that we should purge this article of information about Gothic archaeology, Jordanes or the Visigoths and Ostrogoths. The scope of this article should be determined by the scope of the most relevant and reliable sources on the Goths, such as the works of Peter Heather, Herwig Wolfram and Michel Kazanski. These works provide substantial coverage of archaeological and linguistic evidence, which means that such evidence should also be covered here. Krakkos (talk) 20:54, 31 May 2021 (UTC)

Apart from the clear decisions from the RFCs, the entire field or fields relevant to Goths all write in such a way that the appearance of Goths in Roman sources in the 3rd century, for the first time under that name, and for the first time north of the Danube, represents the start of (to say the least) a distinct era of Gothic history. It is clearly a very nicely separable topic!? I have already shown how Heather and Wolfram make this point very clearly, and how you have misunderstood and distorted their words. You are flogging a dead horse and over-dramatizing, in order to create talk page confusion again. No one except you is purging anything from any published expert source. What needs to be purged are fringe stories from internet trolls who like to see themselves as living Goths, and desperately want to continue the old Swedish claim over them. There was an RFC and discussion continues. It should be a normal discussion about where to put what (including genetics, archaeology etc). The fact is that you are continually working against what our fellow editors have said they want, and waiting to reinsert the Goths-are-Swedes story, as you did a few months ago. All your proposals have nothing at all to do with people like Heather, Wolfram or Kazanski, as I have shown many times now. For another example you continue to "purge" and de-emphasize all mention of the Vienna school's ideas about an elite migration which are accepted by all three of them. You only use cherry-picked words from those writers in ways to change their meanings, in order to give the old story of how Goths are Swedes, which is adapted from Jordanes, and would not exist without Jordanes. It is you that wants the troll-adapted Jordanes to quietly dominate this article: You want your modern troll-adapted version of the Jordanes Berig etc story to be the story which Wikipedia tells, using the names of modern scholars to hide the real sources. That is also the only way in which you have used archaeological and DNA sources, which you seem to have no interest in, or understanding of, outside of this use - just as you have no interest in the actual scholarly literature about Jordanes. Please stop it and be a bit more practical? --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 09:19, 1 June 2021 (UTC)

• "Goths are first mentioned occupying territory in what is now Poland in the first century AD... The history of people labelled "Goths" thus spans 700 years... [T]he Wielbark culture.... took shape in the middle of the first century AD... in Pomerania and lands either side of the lower Vistula... [T]his is the broad area where our few literary sources place a group called Goths at this time... Tacitus Germania 43-4 places them not quite on the Baltic coast; Ptolemy Geography 3.5.8 locates them east of the Vistula; Strabo Geography 7.1.3 (if Butones should be emended to Gutones) broadly agrees with Tacitus... The mutually confirmatory information of ancient sources and the archaeological record both suggest that Goths can first be identified beside the Vistula." – Heather, Peter (1998). The Goths. Blackwell Publishing. ISBN 0-631-209-32-8.

• "The Gothic name appears for the first time between A.D. 16 and 18. We do not, however, find the strong form Guti but only the derivative form Gutones... [W]henever the Gutones and Guti are mentioned, these terms refer to the Goths on the Continent before their migration to the Black Sea." – Wolfram, Herwig (1990). History of the Goths. Translated by Dunlap, Thomas J. University of California Press. pp. 20, 23. ISBN 0520069838.

Krakkos (talk) 10:20, 1 June 2021 (UTC)

Classic WP:IDHT. When you are exposed, this is what you do: post large irrelevant quotes, and always the same ones, and always pretending you forget previous discussions about removed bits where you have "(...)". (You are sometimes joining bits that are pages apart or even in different chapters, and you always moving key qualifications. You also pick old books over new ones, questionable wordings from abstracts that disagree with the main bodies, compressed wordings from short dictionary articles instead of highly cited works by the same authors, and so on.) This is disruptive editing Krakkos. There is no other reason for you to be quoting the same large blocks of text over and over and over and over without any reference to previous discussion. Most importantly, these quotes are entirely irrelevant to the points made above. FWIW:

Wolfram, same work, p.44 says: p.44: the acculturation of the Goths to the Pontic area and their ethnogenesis "at the shores of the Black Sea" are simultaneous and mutually depent processes: In other words, we should speak of the Goths only after the Gutonic immigrants had become "Scythians" at the Black Sea.

While none of this is relevant to the comment you were replying to, the cherry picking is stunning.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 11:04, 1 June 2021 (UTC)

Apart from a series of personal attacks, your point above was that Wolfram and Heather believe Goths appear "for the first time" in Roman sources in the 3rd century AD. This is a false claim which you have made over and over again. Quoting their most authoritative sources directly helps set the record straight. As long as you continue to misrepresent the views of Wolfram, Heather and others on this talk page, i will continue to quote their works directly, so that the community can make up its own mind on the basis of the actual evidence. Krakkos (talk) 11:48, 1 June 2021 (UTC)

No Krakkos, that was not my point, and it was not your point (and it is not even the point these scholars make, let alone the rest of the field; these two write about the name of the Goths but you twist their meaning all the time to write your fringe stuff about a single simple physical group of people). The point is that there was nothing wrong with the RFC decisions, and quotes like these can't be used to show they were wrong decisions, so please stop beating a dead horse. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 13:25, 1 June 2021 (UTC)

More notes about DNA from IP editor

https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/view/PRJEB39997?fbclid=IwAR1334H3S4xx3NN8V3mFLdBnYJVGSwZs1jgnU4MzIEduN2YyoA08yh7Xb6I This new research paper published 2021 proves without any reasonable doubt that some Goths at least had a DNA structure similar to modern Swedes. Done by the University of Fribourg. But those Scandinavian guys living in Poland might be something else... But according to the poles doing this archaeology project they were considered to be archaeologically Gothic and a majority of Individuals have I1 or R1B haplogroup. The Pla de l'Horta villa near Girona in Spain is located in close proximity to a necropolis with a series of tombs associated with the Visigoths. The grave goods and the typology of the tombs point to a Visigothic origin of the individuals. A small number of individuals buried at the site were sampled for DNA analysis in a 2019 study. One of the samples belonged to haplogroup I1.[50] This finding is in accordance with the common ancestral origin of the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths. I read your article but your assumption is wrong your studying an ancient haplogroup but I1 is very new only 3500 years. The Visigothic royalty also had dominant I1 ancestry. According to studies done Spain by archaeologists in Spain. They DNA tested Visigothic nobles graves and they also had a dominant I1 groupings in 2019. https://www.geni.com/projects/I-CTS6364-Y-DNA/36181 quote: "Current DNA research indicates that I1 was close to non-existent in most of Europe outside of Scandinavia and northern Germany before the Migration Period." "The Pla de l'Horta villa near Girona in Spain is located in close proximity to a necropolis with a series of tombs associated with the Visigoths. The grave goods and the typology of the tombs point to a Visigothic origin of the individuals. A small number of individuals buried at the site were sampled for DNA analysis in a 2019 study. One of the samples belonged to haplogroup I1.[50] This finding is in accordance with the common ancestral origin of the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths." References

I still watch this from a previous bot-invited RFC visit. So I don't have the depth & expertise here that y'all do and so my comments are from just a quick overview. I agree that it should be kept out. It looks like "somebody's research and interpretation of it" rather than something broad and solid enough (with secondary analysis) to be in an encyclopedia article. Various policies point out that type of a problem with this.North8000 (talk) 13:38, 1 June 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for the input. The dubious genetic material shared by the IP should certainly be kept out. I'm open to including reliable material that is directly relevant to the Goths, but in such cases it should handled it carefully. In any case, the field of genetics is progressing rapidly, and more solid information will hopefully be available in the future. Krakkos (talk) 14:18, 1 June 2021 (UTC)

Yes, but you are also "forgetting" that the articles you want to reintroduce into this article were put into multiple Wikipedia articles, not just this one. (Also, in articles like this one it was reproduced in multiple versions throughout the article, and you did not cooperate with discussions to improve that!) So the only questions which have really been relevant are about the neutrality of the summaries, and (as per the RFCs) the decision to place the main discussions in archaeology articles about the material cultures whose DNA is being discussed. There has been no purge, and no purge is proposed.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 14:28, 1 June 2021 (UTC)