I've been working heavily on expanding and updating pages about the historical monuments of Fez and of Morocco and Al-Andalus generally, including the main pages at Moroccan architecture, Fez, and Moorish architecture, and I've been wondering how to improve this page since I saw it. Previous editors have made a good start at it, but the more I've worked on other pages the more I see this one has a long way to go to be up to encyclopedic standards. There's a mix of correct information, but there's also a mix of unsourced or poorly-sourced information, including what looks like original research (e.g. blunt claims of "Persian" influence). In terms of the topic, I think an important problem is that the architecture of Fez is not really distinguishable from the topic of Moroccan architecture more generally, and some of the sections here mirror the sections at Moroccan architecture or Fez, so this creates an unnecessary and unhelpful content fork. In other words, anything worth explaining here is now better-explained and better-sourced at Moroccan architecture, at the "Fez, Morocco" page, or even at Moorish architecture.
Rather than suggest that the page be deleted or merged for those reasons, I think the most useful thing would be to convert it to something equivalent to the Landmarks of Marrakesh page. That means mainly making this page a summary or overview of the historic monuments in Fez, whereas discussion of the architectural styles and the history would be left to Moroccan architecture and limited here to short summaries of background info (if any) with links. I think that is already one of the main points of the page, but I'm just starting a talk section here to explain what I think needs to be done and invite others to comment as needed.
Since there aren't many editors watching this page and I think this will be a clear improvement, I will be WP:BOLD and simply start making these changes now, but I'll start with the more superficial stuff and move slowly to the more radical changes. Here are some of the things I think should be done so far:
- General revision of wording and style; removing unsourced information or tagging it for citations if it seems likely to be supported.
- Remove or shorten the "History of Fez" section, as this topic is more appropriately covered at Fez, Morocco, and/or copy-edit some of the "History" section of Moroccan architecture instead, which is directly applicable here.
- Leave the "Structure of the Medina" section for now but tag it for more sources, as currently it's only a thin paraphrase of one article that is focused on a small topic. Luckily there are definitely some books that could be useful to expanding this section in the future (e.g. Le Tourneau (1949), "Fès avant le protectorat: étude économique et sociale d'une ville de l'occident musulman" and Métalsi (2003), "Fès: La ville essentielle").
- Essentially remove the "Other culture's influences on the architecture"; this section is the least relevant and most problematic. A lot of the content is vague, unsupported, or not very informative, in addition to general academic problems about claiming "influences" in historic architecture (see for example a discussion of this in the introduction to Jonathan Bloom's 2020 book "Architecture of the Islamic West: North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula, 700-1800"). I've recently revised the same section at Moroccan architecture and that section is now much better-sourced and is limited to listing specific examples that scholars have actually argued (many of them applicable to Fez, but not only to Fez).
- Significantly revise and expand the "Different structural types" section by copy-editing the "Landmarks" section in Fez, Morocco, which has been developed by many editors over the years and is directly applicable, and adapt any of the useful material from the "Types of structures" section at Moroccan architecture. This should be the bulk of the page, and it could include lists of links to the various pages about Fez's monuments.
- Somewhere down the line, maybe once the page has been improved, the page name could be moved to something like "Landmarks of Fez" or "Historical monuments of Fez", similar to the equivalent Marrakesh page.
Anyways, this was long but I hope it'll help. R Prazeres (talk) 22:56, 8 January 2021 (UTC)Reply
- Update: I've now revised most sections through a mix of inline revisions and
copy-editing adapting material from related pages with more developed material and sources. As mentioned above, I initially thought reducing the history section was ultimately the better approach, but after looking around again I found that it was easy to find and adapt relevant material from other pages (e.g. Fortifications of Fez and Moroccan architecture) into something directly useful here. Whether this is the best final result in the end or not I leave up to future question. The last remaining section to deal with is now the "other culture's influence" section, which I still think should be removed, or at most have some general details moved or recreated in more relevant terms in the "Architectural style" section. R Prazeres (talk) 06:46, 10 January 2021 (UTC)Reply
