Talk:Ancient Israel

Why?

@SelfieCity: What's the point of this summary of the Old Testament? Just putting a link to Jerusalem on the bottom of an article doesn't make it appropriate for a travel guide. Any information missing from the history of Israel should go there. Can we make this a redirect to Israel#History before it gets out of hand? ARR8 (talk | contribs) 20:50, 6 April 2019 (UTC)

It's not done yet. --Comment by Selfie City (talk | contributions) 20:59, 6 April 2019 (UTC)

@SelfieCity: I realize that. I'm saying the work shouldn't continue, because this article is wholly unnecessary. I can sort of the see the justification for Rome and Mesopotamia if I squint - those places no longer exist and having information about them on one page can have a point. But Ancient Israel was almost entirely on the same territory as the modern-day state of Israel, and there's no reason to go in such detail. Destinations of interest can go in the prose on the Israel#History page. ARR8 (talk | contribs) 21:02, 6 April 2019 (UTC)

For years, since Wikivoyage was set up, we have created travel topics for historical and cultural topics. In all that time, as far as I know, only one person has opposed the creation of those kinds of travel topics. --Comment by Selfie City (talk | contributions) 21:13, 6 April 2019 (UTC)

Anyway, this section would be too long to be part of Israel#Understand. As I see it, it's a valid travel topic, and if work is done on it, it will not harm the world. --Comment by Selfie City (talk | contributions) 21:16, 6 April 2019 (UTC)

If it's too long to fit there, we don't need it here. This isn't a history wiki.

If people want to read about the history of ancient Israel, they can go to Wikipedia.

If people want destinations relevant to Ancient Israel, they won't find this article anyway. They'll search up Israel. The destinations should go there.

Re: "one person" "harm the world" etc., it's a waste of time and splitting relevant things across multiple pages makes things harder for the traveler. ARR8 (talk | contribs) 21:25, 6 April 2019 (UTC)

Well, I'd hope that eventually I would create links from articles, likely including Israel. Therefore, if readers go to the Israel article as you say they will, they will find this article through a link. Modern Israel and ancient Israel are separated by a period of nearly 2,000 years when the region's inhabitants were different. Therefore, it's not the same. --Comment by Selfie City (talk | contributions) 21:38, 6 April 2019 (UTC)

It's important for me to mention that, while I think there probably was a United Kingdom, I respect the views of those who disagree and think their views should be included. We have many articles that are description-heavy, like Atlantic slave trade, and I think those are simply articles in development. The growth and success of Wikivoyage, in my opinion, is important than whether an article is quite relevant, etc. But I think this article is a relevant travel topic, it just needs expansion. --Comment by Selfie City (talk | contributions) 21:50, 6 April 2019 (UTC)

(ec) Again, why? The only justification for splitting acutally-useful travel information off of that page is to fit a unnecessarily-long historical and encyclopedic essay on this page. People don't come to Wikivoyage to read that.

Look, SC, if you want to write history, may I suggest Wikibooks? They fit the mold of Wikipedia-without-references much better than we do. ARR8 (talk | contribs) 21:52, 6 April 2019 (UTC)

I don't see this as an extension of Israel#Understand. I see it as an entirely separate article, about a completely separate part of history, and a separate country which ceased to exist in in the 500s BC. Same idea as how Ancient Egypt is different from modern Egypt.

My goal is not a history article. I write on Wikiversity quite a lot (about 300 contributions in the past few months) and enjoy contributing to that wiki. This is intended to be a travel article, which is why I created it here. --Comment by Selfie City (talk | contributions) 22:01, 6 April 2019 (UTC)

I don't see how one period of history of a country is relevant to spin off into an entire article. Should we have an article on Ancient Finland? Medieval Andorra? Stone Age Ireland? The only distinction I see is that you want to write about it. And if it is a travel article you're setting out to write, I don't see that either - so far, the only travel-relevant information in the thousands of bytes you've posted are four destination listings that could just-as-easily go in Israel, if they aren't there already.

Ancient Egypt is also not a very good article, and I would make the exact same argument there, but at least the prose is concise.

Again, I am suggesting that travel relevant content (the only content that belongs on any page on this website) be merged with Israel and this be made a redirect. Otherwise, I suggest that the page be stripped of non-travel-relevant content, at which point it will be short enough that a merge is the obvious step to take. ARR8 (talk | contribs) 22:09, 6 April 2019 (UTC)

This is my last comment for a while; I need to work on some other things.

If someone wanted to start an article about Stone Age Ireland, I wouldn't mind as long as the writer included sufficient content and relevant destinations. (By the way, Jericho is only mentioned twice in the Israel article — both times for information about entering the country. So as you can see, it's not covered there, but it's covered here.) --Comment by Selfie City (talk | contributions) 22:32, 6 April 2019 (UTC)

I would. I would say to that hypothetical editor that any travel-relevant information can go in Ireland#History and non-travel-relevant summaries of history, no matter how interesting they are to that editor, do not belong on this site, which is an unfortunate truth, but, we are, after all, not Wikipedia.

Re: Jericho, that sounds like a failing with the Israel article, and not a reason to start a new one. I would enthusiastically support the addition of missing relevant information to a widely-visited country article that is lacking it. ARR8 (talk | contribs) 22:36, 6 April 2019 (UTC)

SelfieCity: Why do you think Israel was probably a unified kingdom? The Bible is many things, but one thing it certainly is not is an objective work of history. Be careful about basing anything solely on Biblical accounts that are otherwise either unattested or, worse, contradicted by the consensus of archeologists and/or historians. Ikan Kekek (talk) 22:37, 6 April 2019 (UTC)

ARR8: Jericho is not part of the State of Israel and isn't likely to be any time soon, unless Kahanists really take over Israel and go about trying to expel all the Arabs and take over all of former post-1922 Mandatory Palestine. Ikan Kekek (talk) 22:39, 6 April 2019 (UTC)

Sure, fine. Read "Israel" as "Palestine" or "The West Bank" or whatever you prefer. Either way, Israel can have a wikilink to the bottom-level destination which does contain the information.

But I think these issues illustrate that, not only would the existence of this article be an unfortunate splitting of information, making things more difficult for readers, and an unnecessary infodump, it would also attract the kinds of controversial, pedantic, and undesirable[motivated -ARR8 (talk | contribs) 22:56, 6 April 2019 (UTC)] edits we recently had a discussion about trying to reduce or eliminate on other articles. ARR8 (talk | contribs) 22:54, 6 April 2019 (UTC)

My feeling is, unless the content really would overwhelm the articles on Israel, the West Bank and so forth, put the content there. If it really does start to overwhelm those articles, we can revisit this. Ikan Kekek (talk) 23:07, 6 April 2019 (UTC)

I've considered other sources (besides the Bible, I mean) on the whole United Kingdom idea, especially in recent times, and I'm well aware of what historians or modern scholars say. But I don't think the United Kingdom idea is impractical, and therefore I see reason to believe it; see w:Kingdom_of_Israel_(united_monarchy)#Archaeological_record. But I don't think at the time being we, or historians, can be completely sure either way, either that the kingdom was always divided or that it was united some of the time and divided the rest of the time. --Comment by Selfie City (talk | contributions) 23:17, 6 April 2019 (UTC)

• @ARR8: If you guys really want to delete this article, would you mind moving it to my userspace so I can use it elsewhere (like on another wiki)? Thanks! --Comment by Selfie City (talk | contributions) 02:48, 8 April 2019 (UTC)