Portal talk:Latin language and literature

Portal review
Portal	Latin language and literature
Classification	PAA
Class	P: Language and literature
Subclass	AA: Latin language and literature
Classifier	AdamBMorgan
Reviewer	Clockery Fairfeld
Notes

Further subdivision of the class?

Is there interest in further developing the portal classification system for Greek and Latin language & literature? For Latin, for example, the Library of Congress classification puts Latin language in the PA 2000s, Classical Latin literature in the PA 6000s, and Medieval & Modern Latin literature in the PA 8000s. As we reorganize Portal:Latin language and literature, we might be creating boxes and/or more portals, and it might help to take advantage of the classification system as we do it. --Arbitan (talk) 03:43, 14 August 2022 (UTC)

A lot of the LCCS for Latin literature relies on grouping by Author, and we use Author pages for that rather than Portals. Any additional sub-Portals should (a) have enough content to warrant a separate page, and (b) have a meaningful grouping other than by Author. The Portal:Greek language and literature has several child Portals (e.g. Drama, Philosophy) and for Portal:Latin language and literature I've now set up Portal:Classical Latin literature, which may eventually have sub-portals for some things, but not for Caesar or Cicero, since they are authors. Also, it is not necessary to limit Portals to LCCS topics, although for the broadest Portals we typically try to do so.

The biggest question for later works is "Is there a reason to use a Portal, as opposed to a category, for grouping Early Modern works that were originally written in Latin?"

There are also topics which might some day have a Portal, but for which Wikisource currently lacks the content. --EncycloPetey (talk) 16:05, 14 August 2022 (UTC)

Right, we should not create portals just for their own sake. The portals precede the LCCS and the LCCS is just there to keep them organized. There were a couple things I was thinking about:

(1) For subject portals, as they're created, we could assign a division number. So Classical Latin literature would have a little 6000 under the PAA in the header; Loeb Classical Library (which needs to be made a portal) could be split into Greek and Latin, and the Latin one would have a little 6156 under the PAA. It's very unlikely that we couldn't find an appropriate LCC number for a portal. It wouldn't be any more difficult than assigning a call number to a book.

It'll take a long time for the number of portals in the Classics to become overwhelming, so it's not like it's absolutely needed now. I was just thinking that it'll be easy to start now while the portals are few and easy to do. AdamBMorgan built in a "number" field in the header template for this exact use case, he just didn't implement its display in the portal header.

(2) Also, would there be value in putting LCC numbers in the box headers in subportals? Not in a way that would compete with the box title, but maybe in the header on the left, in small gray font? Sort of like what's done with subclasses on Portal:Language and literature, but more subtle. Like this:

PA 6100 ⁠ Literature collections ⁠ edit ⋅ view

We can put boxes from other topics. Like Greek philosophy is in B, but there could be a Greek philosophy box in the Greek literature portal. It would display B 1234 (whatever the number is), but be shown in a PA portal. I don't know if that makes sense. In other words, I'm not suggesting we force the portals to follow the LCC hierarchy rigidly. The big advantage of hypertext is that we can mix and match topics in portals and have them occur in more than one place and point to each other.

And I agree about Early Modern Latin literature. I personally don't think it needs a portal or even a section in another portal. A category is sufficient. I started sorting the works into sections in this portal partly to see which works could be removed. People who read Hobbes or Bacon, at least here on the English Wikisource, are reading them for the philosophy, not for the fact that they were originally in Latin.

By the way, great job on Portal:Classical Latin literature. It looks nice. --Arbitan (talk) 19:45, 14 August 2022 (UTC)

Adding numbers is problematic, because the portal will often cover one or more ranges of numerical values, and may have overlapping values with other portals. That information can be added in the "Notes". The Greek philosophy does have a box in the Portal:Greek language and literature, and links not only to the the Subportal in B, but the Socrates portal (who has a Portal rather than an Author page because Socrates did not leave any written records).

Agreed that we might switch some section over to pointing to other portals arranged by topic or to categories. Most early modern philosophy and scientific works were written in Latin, and few people are looking for such works based solely on their date and original language of Latin. --EncycloPetey (talk) 22:34, 15 August 2022 (UTC)