Talk:Brothers Poem

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Brothers Poem/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: RL0919 (talk · contribs) 22:13, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

I'll pick this one up -- expect I will post the review by the weekend. --RL0919 (talk) 22:13, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

GA review (see here for what the criteria are, and here for what they are not)

1. It is reasonably well written.

   a (prose, spelling, and grammar): b (MoS for lead, layout, word choice, fiction, and lists):

2. It is factually accurate and verifiable.

   a (reference section): b (citations to reliable sources): c (OR): d (copyvio and plagiarism):

3. It is broad in its coverage.

   a (major aspects): b (focused):

4. It follows the neutral point of view policy.

   Fair representation without bias:

5. It is stable.

   No edit wars, etc.:

6. It is illustrated by images and other media, where possible and appropriate.

   a (images are tagged and non-free content have fair use rationales): b (appropriate use with suitable captions):

7. Overall:

   Pass/Fail:

The article seems good on most of the GA criteria, but there are a few issues that need to be addressed before promotion.

Prose:

• Lead seems to contain some information that is not in the body of the article. Per WP:LEAD, it should summarize content from the body.
• The phrase "Brothers Poem" is sometimes in quotes and sometimes not. If this is considered the title of the poem, it should consistently be in quotes.
• "negatively marked word θρυλεω" - this phrasing is highly cryptic to a non-expert reader. What does "negatively marked" mean, and what is the translation of this Greek word?
• Names of ancient persons should be wikilinked or some description given (or both); otherwise there is no reason to expect a non-expert reader knows who you are talking about. I linked several of these. Athenaeus and Strabo should also be linked, but I was less certain which of the multiple ancients with those names I should be linking.

Images:

• Images are not necessarily required for GA, but but a GA article should not ignore appropriate free images that are available. There are many images of Sappho available on Commons. Is there any reason not to use one here? Possibly we could also use images of some other figures mentioned (Odysseus, etc.), but Sappho is the really obvious one.

All of the above seems fixable within the typical seven hold period. Let me know if you think that won't be possible. --RL0919 (talk) 04:09, 28 November 2016 (UTC)

• Lead: I'll have a look at this when I have more time; probably it'll be tomorrow evening (UTC)
• Bah, I thought I'd got the orthography of Brothers Poem consistent. I'll have a look at this later too. It's not really a title, more of a label (though uniquely in Sappho studies, a label which virtually everyone uses!) so I'm not sure that it should be in quotes, (I didn't put Tithonus poem in quotes either) though if you think it ought to be I don't really have a strong opinion on the matter so I am happy to do so.
• re. θρυλεω: yep, coming back and reading this again it could do with some expansion and clarification. Another thing I'll do properly when I have more time.
• Ancient persons: I have wikilinked Strabo and Athenaeus; it doesn't really matter who they are beyond the fact that they mentioned Sappho in their writings, so I haven't added any more in-text description (and at any rate, I suspect that 9 times out of 10 anyone reading this article will be familiar enough with the classics to know Strabo, at least). I haven't wikilinked anyone else because I couldn't find anyone else who seemed to need it: I may have missed someone, though, so do say if there's anyone else you had in mind.
• I'll have a look on Commons and see what I can find in the way of appropriate images. I would have one of the Obbink papyrus, but I don't think a freely licensed or PD image of that exists. I'll see what we have in the way of pictures of Sappho, though...

Thanks for the review; I'll try to deal with most of the points over the next few days. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 08:14, 28 November 2016 (UTC)

@RL0919: I have now (hopefully) standardised the orthography of "Brothers Poem" on the form without the quotation marks, as per my earlier reasoning and the common practice in scholarship about the poem; expanded the discussion of "θρυλεω" to hopefully make somewhat more sense to the general reader, and added one picture of Sappho to the article. I'm not sure whether or not to add a picture of Penelope awaiting Odysseus to the article; here is a possibility. The caption would be something like "Scholars have compared Sappho's role in the Brothers Poem to that of Penelope awaiting Odysseus' return to Ithaca in the Odyssey, depicted here by Heva Coomans." What do you think?

I can't find anything in the lead which isn't also discussed in the text: could you be more specific as to what you think violates WP:LEAD please?

Thanks, Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 20:22, 29 November 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the update, @Caeciliusinhorto: What caught my eye in the lead was "Dirk Obbink, the head of Oxford University's Oxyrhynchus Papyri Project". His role with the project doesn't seem to be mentioned elsewhere. I think that's actually the only thing that has to be addressed at this point. You could add more images, but that's optional. If you do, I'm good with the example you suggested. Another possibility would be to show a different papyrus of Sappho's writings (since no free image of this one is available but others are) to illustrate what these ancient papyri look like. --RL0919 (talk) 04:57, 2 December 2016 (UTC)

Added a mention of Obbink's role in the section on preservation. I don't particularly want to illustrate a papyrus which isn't one of the ones discussed in the text; that seems to me like it would be more confusing than enlightening to the reader, who at any rate can see Greek papyri illustrated at Oxyrhynchus papyri, papyrus, Sappho etc., all of which are just a click away. As you don't have any particularly strong feelings about it, I won't add the Odyssey image either; I don't think the current article discusses the comparison in sufficient depth to justify adding the image, personally. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 21:47, 2 December 2016 (UTC)

No problem. Congrats on your new GA. --RL0919 (talk) 22:48, 2 December 2016 (UTC)

Text?

Where is the text itself? It's only twenty lines long in the original, and with a translation appended it can't stretch to an unmanageable size.

At least there ought to be a link.

Nuttyskin (talk) 23:51, 7 July 2019 (UTC)

Several of the sources linked include translations; Whitmarsh's and Payne's are both freely available online. The difficulty with including a translation is that there are no freely-licensed ones, and quoting a non-free translation in full is not likely to comply with wikipedia's policies on fair use. If a freely licensed translation existed we could include it, but my Greek is not up to creating one.

We could link a translation in an External links section, I guess, but per WP:ELRC we generally shouldn't include sources which are already linked as references in the EL section. If there is a good translation somewhere online which we could include as an external link I wouldn't be opposed to including it, but I'm not finding a glaringly obvious candidate. There's this translation by Annalisa Quinn, but though she apparently has an MPhil in classical Greek she is not a professional classicist or translator. The translation mostly looks reasonable to me, but I'm very much not in love with "hurricane". Or there's Nagy's translation here, which has the advantages of being by a professional classicist and published by a reputable university, but I think it sacrifices readability for literalness. Finally, this translation is a blog. It's by Joel Christensen, who is an expert in the field, but WP:ELNO#11 is stricter than WP:SPS ("as a minimum standard, recognized authorities who are individuals always meet Wikipedia's notability criteria for people") and I am not convinced that Christensen meets WP:NBIO or WP:NPROF Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 13:35, 8 July 2019 (UTC)

This response suggests to me that you actually are up to the task of creating a new translation, despite your protestations :) You would, of course, take due note of existing translations but not rely too heavily on any one of them. Haukur (talk) 13:45, 8 July 2019 (UTC)

Provenance of P.Sapph.Obbink

Just a note (in case anyone other than me watches this page!) that since the recent allegations against Obbink and especially Eidolon's latest on the topic, the provenance of P.Sapph.Obbink is obviously a much more important subject than the article currently reflects. I am putting together sources to address this at the moment – thus far, mostly those cited in the Eidolon piece. Feel free to add any more here for me to look at if you don't feel up to digging into the weeds of this yourselves. (Or, you know, be bold and write something yourself!) Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 22:11, 5 November 2019 (UTC)

For any page watchers: added a brief precis of the situation with links to the Eidolon article and Charlotte Higgins' in the Guardian yesterday here; I am drafting something more thorough in my userspace here if anyone wants to look it over. Given that most of the discussion is in archaeologists' personal blogs, I think it's probably best to wait and see what happens with Mike Sampson's promised "forthcoming academic article" before going into this level of detail... Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 12:03, 10 January 2020 (UTC)

And, uh, Sampson's article was published in 2020, while I was distracted by some global pandemic thing. Oops. Trying to get hold of it now. Since then, Bierl & Lardinois have retracted Obbink's account of the provenance in their book, so I have made a note of that in the article as a fairly important development! Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 21:53, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

Main page appearance

This is to let people know that this article has been scheduled as today's featured article for December 20, 2019, and specifically paging the FAC nominator(s), Caeciliusinhorto. It would be good if someone checked that the article needs no amendments. The main page blurb text can be viewed and edited at Wikipedia:Today's featured article/December 20, 2019.—Wehwalt (talk) 14:08, 22 November 2019 (UTC)

Hi Caeciliusinhorto and other interested editors. This is to let you know that as a part of preparing this article for TFA I have asked GOCE to run an eye over it for MoS-compliance and grammar, and possible tweaking a of little of the language to ensure that it is at it's very best for its appearance on the main page. If you have any queries about any of the edits don't hesitate to let me know. Thanks. Gog the Mild (talk) 22:49, 25 November 2019 (UTC)