Talk:Ballot laws of the Roman Republic

A fact from Ballot laws of the Roman Republic appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 1 November 2017 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that the ballot laws introduced the secret ballot (voting pictured) to all popular assemblies in the Roman Republic?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2017/November. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Ballot laws of the Roman Republic.

Wikipedia

Elections and Referendums

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Elections and Referendums, an ongoing effort to improve the quality of, expand upon and create new articles relating to elections, electoral reform and other aspects of democratic decision-making. For more information, visit our project page.Elections and ReferendumsWikipedia:WikiProject Elections and ReferendumsTemplate:WikiProject Elections and ReferendumsElections and Referendums articles

Rome Low‑importance

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Rome, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of the city of Rome and ancient Roman history on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.RomeWikipedia:WikiProject RomeTemplate:WikiProject RomeRome articles
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

Classical Greece and Rome Low‑importance

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Classical Greece and Rome, a group of contributors interested in Wikipedia's articles on classics. If you would like to join the WikiProject or learn how to contribute, please see our project page. If you need assistance from a classicist, please see our talk page.Classical Greece and RomeWikipedia:WikiProject Classical Greece and RomeTemplate:WikiProject Classical Greece and RomeClassical Greece and Rome articles
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

Law Low‑importance

	Law portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Law, an attempt at providing a comprehensive, standardised, pan-jurisdictional and up-to-date resource for the legal field and the subjects encompassed by it.LawWikipedia:WikiProject LawTemplate:WikiProject Lawlaw articles
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

European history Low‑importance

	Europe portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject European history, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of the history of Europe on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.European historyWikipedia:WikiProject European historyTemplate:WikiProject European historyEuropean history articles
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

Merger proposal

I think that Lex Gabinia tabellaria and Lex Cassia tabellaria should be merged with this page. User:Craic Den disagrees, and since I have no strong opinions, I wanted to see what other Wikipedians thought.

Here are my reasons for the merger:

There is no information in those articles that is not in this article; I already made sure to incorporate all of the information.
This article has a lot more background, details about the laws, and discussion of the aftermath. Even if a reader only wanted to know about the Lex Gabinia, they would get a lot more useful information from this article than from Lex Gabinia tabellaria, and similarly for Lex Cassia.
I don't think there's enough information available to historians to have a separate article on each of the ballot laws. While doing research on this article, I found multiple sources emphasizing how little information we have on the laws (e.g., [1]). If we did have separate articles, I don't think they have the potential of becoming good articles.

The following are User:Craic Den's opinions against the merger:

the implication is the laws are all part of a cohesive programme which with laws spaced out over a generation is not really the case. If someone wants to find out about the individual laws that's very difficult to do in a large article with so much depth on the Roman constitution etc, and they are linked to directly in some articles. They were stand alone events in that they have their own individual motivations and contexts. There's plenty of scholarly discussion about them individually as well as part of a thematic group.

Any input is appreciated! --Bowlhover (talk) 01:42, 17 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

In disclaimer I created both those articles as part of an effort to fill in red links in the List of Roman laws.

In addition - subsequent to my thoughts above I went back and added a bit more to each of these articles, and linked to the bigger article on Roman ballot laws as a whole. So there is a little more context/content for each than before that isn't in the main article currently. Obviously that's easily remedied if necessary. It's still IMO very difficult to quickly distinguish individual information about each law in the big article as it's currently structured.

I'm not sure that the Wikipedia:Good_articles point is relevant. Less than 0.5% of wikipedia is, and most ancient topics will never get there precisely because of the paucity of information. That doesn't mean they should all be lumped in together.Craic Den (talk) 04:34, 17 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Craic Den, your removal of the merger tags means it's unlikely that anyone else will know about this discussion to make a contribution, which was the point of opening it in the first place... do both you and Bowlhover now see this merger discussion as closed? Richard3120 (talk) 16:57, 23 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Hey, @Richard3120: I went ahead and merged as there was no opposition expressed (except from the Sock) and the articles were very redundant, no need for any partial splits. GenQuest ^{"Talk to Me"} 17:02, 2 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]