Talk:Pontia gens

Gens v surname

The people listed under "other" aren't others in this gens; they're others with the surname Pontius. I think bits of this article need splitting into a Pontius (disambiguation) page. Pseudomonas_(talk) 10:38, 22 August 2018 (UTC)

Citation bundling

@P Aculeius:, I bundled the citations as advised at WP:CITEKILL and WP:CITEBUNDLE. You seem to have missed the 'non-other sources' placed just before the 'other source' reference. On a second glance, I'm not entirely sure why any of the four gospels are needed as citations, when the only thing any of them can be said to reference is that Pilate was the prefect of Judaea. Or, for that matter, why Pontius Aquila needs six? I do not see anything that can reasonably be defined as a 'range of beneficial information', as quoted from WP:CITEMERGE. Perhaps you can advise? ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 03:15, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

Neither of those applies here: the sources aren't being cited for pointless reinforcement of minor details, as in the first (rather, they're the chief sources for the biographies of the persons mentioned), and the second is mainly concerned with preserving readability within sentences and paragraphs, which isn't an issue here due to the formatting (each entry's sources are grouped at the end). Articles in this series have followed a consistent citation format for years: each source is cited separately, rather than bundled with other sources, for a variety of reasons—one of which is to maximize readability of the citations. Often these can get quite long, particularly when there's no bibliography, and all of the publication data is included in the citation; even the short citations can get long when multiple passages from Cicero or Tacitus or Josephus—often from multiple works—are cited.

One reason for the current citation format is that it's easy to implement; nobody has to know which templates to use or what the details of the various parameters should be; and in the edit window the citations don't take up a ton of space, making it difficult to read the text that's being cited, or figure out how the text will appear on the page when the edit is saved. The format you implemented has the opposite effect, inserting a list of bullet points into a list of bullet points, and taking items that are normally one or two lines and turning them into five or six, making it much harder to see the article text in the edit window—much like when someone inserts a link to Google Books that consists of four lines of random gibberish, and you have to search for the beginning and end of it in order to find what actually goes in the article. That's the kind of edit window clutter that the current citation formatting was intended to prevent.

I suppose that there's no reason why the passages from the Gospels couldn't be combined into a single citation—but I don't see any advantage to bundling them with Tacitus or Josephus. As a general rule, keeping the various sources separate is simpler than deciding how many sources to bundle for each separate item, and because they're always at the end, doing so doesn't create any inconvenience for readers. I'm sure there are other articles in which repeated sources serve no beneficial purpose, but that's not the case when the sources in question are the chief sources for a person's biography. And I'm sure there are articles where multiple citations break up sentences and make paragraphs less readable—but that's certainly not a problem here. P Aculeius (talk) 05:51, 7 March 2022 (UTC)

Pontia, wife of Petronius

The reference to poisoning her children seems to be a myth. Cf Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum," Chapter 6, Murder by Magic, at the end of the section on Locusta, pp. 341-346 in the electronic edition. Miss Fluffytail (talk) 15:42, 27 August 2024 (UTC)