Talk:Sacred Band of Thebes

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	Classical warfare task force (c. 700 BC – c. 500 AD)

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CONTROVERSY section should be REMOVED (or trimmed to a tiny fraction of its current size)

This "controversy" section should be removed and a simple paragraph inserted into the above noting that a recent publication, unsupported by the greater academic community, questioned their existence. That's it. We don't need to read his entire argument; it's irrelevant.

Wikipedia topics growing in size used to be a good thing. Now it seems like every single historical page has become a giant tug-of-war between nationalists, political extremists, religious zealots, and POV pushing douchebags of all flavors. None of the self-serving junk they insert can be deleted because draconian edit policies and "good faith" protect all but the most ludicrous additions from removal.

This is supposed to be an informative, encyclopedic article - it should not have ten times as much space devoted to "controversy" as it does to famous quotes from ancient historical sources.

From a quick glance at the talk page, it looks like this all goes back to one loser who had nothing better to do that day than twist everything here into his preferred author's perspective. Subsequent attempts to re-balance the page turned into an edit war, which was settled by giving this asswipe his own section (and essentially letting him have the last word in the article).

Hooray for wikipedia....

/endrant — Preceding unsigned comment added by 97.92.45.226 (talk) 16:33, 18 September 2012

Well, I've been in the same sort of dialogue more than once with the editor you characterize so pungently, so I understand all too well how this happens. But I agree with your assessment, and said something along the same lines less colorfully just this morning. Cynwolfe (talk) 20:58, 18 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I entered the previous discussion assuming good faith and thus believed that I really could find more scholars supporting or saying the same thing as Leitao as Sir Gawain McGarson had claimed. I have still not been able to find more. Leitao, it seems is the only source that questions the historicity of the Sacred Band (and by extension the historicity of Pelopidas, Epaminondas, and the Theban Hegemony). I have no problems with culling it or removing it altogether per due weight. Also note that Sir Gawain inserted Leitao in several other articles. -- OBSIDIAN†SOUL 03:29, 19 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I've revised it to drastically reduce the focus on Leitao (whose views appear to be WP:FRINGE here), reducing the text devoted to him to the few sentences given to other individual scholars, placing the vast number of more mainstream authors first, and revising the section's lead-in to make it clear that the Sacred Band's historicity is widely-accepted among academics. --Aquillion (talk) 07:16, 5 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Remaining dab link

I've removed all but one of the dab links in the article and also removed the dablinks template. The remaining dab link is redirectd from medized to the "dab" page medism. It's not actually a proper dab page though -- it contains a short article about the relevant medism, and a two sentence definition of an irrelevant medism. I will tag the medism page for cleanup. In the meantime, since there isn't an article page for the relevant medism and the dab page does contain relevant information, I am leaving in the link to the dab page. Susfele (talk) 04:24, 10 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Lead too short

The lead is 70 words compared to article c. 6000. Should be around 1/25 of the whole article. Soerfm (talk) 13:34, 2 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your suggestion. When you believe an article needs improvement, please feel free to change it. We encourage you to be bold in updating pages, since wikis like ours develop faster when everybody edits. Don't worry too much about making honest mistakes—they're likely to be found and corrected quickly. You can always preview your edits before you publish them or test them out in the sandbox. If you need additional help, check out our getting started page or ask the friendly folks at the Teahouse. Andrew🐉(talk) 12:42, 15 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Misleading short description

The short description summarising the article which appears just before the article is opened, gives this résumé: 4th Century BC Theban gay military unit.

Though brief and succinct, it's obviously misinformative. Though gay is widely used to denote any level of same-sex attraction and activity; it actually signifies someone who only has sexual relations with other adult males. Leaving the definition of adult to one side for a moment; clearly the military unit was composed of both beardless youths and married men, i.e., men with wives. In terms of a definition which specifies gay men, this is a constructed sexuality which does not give an accurate picture. Nuttyskin (talk) 01:23, 31 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]