Talk:Mahmud Gawan/GA2

GA Review

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Nominator: Flemmish Nietzsche (talk · contribs) 12:14, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

Reviewer: UndercoverClassicist (talk · contribs) 15:59, 22 August 2024 (UTC)

Content suggestions

• the chief minister, or Peshwa: of which state?
• Titles like "prime minister" are either double-capitalised ("Prime Minister") or all-lower-case. In most cases, we want the latter: see MOS:PEOPLETITLES.
  • Noting that this has not been completely done. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 09:43, 23 August 2024 (UTC)
    • Done. Flemmish Nietzsche (talk) 10:45, 23 August 2024 (UTC)
• the village of Gawan in Persia: non-English terms should be italicised in lang templates, but this doesn't apply when it's simply the name of a person or place.
  • Noting that this has not generally been done. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 09:43, 23 August 2024 (UTC)
    • Done. Flemmish Nietzsche (talk) 10:45, 23 August 2024 (UTC)
• Generally speaking, we want to use the subject's full name on first mention in a paragraph, then "he" unless there's some cause for ambiguity, or after we have introduced a new person.
• "the Deccan" should generally be referred to as "the Deccan plateau": "Deccan" is an adjective.
• with a rank of 1,000: add horses?
• the easternmost portion of Andhra, Goa,: these are two different places, aren't they?
• Try to avoid paragraphs that are overly short: in general, three sentences is considered the minimum.
• leader of the Afaqis faction: the Afaqi faction, surely?
• with the Sultanate stretching from the Arabian Sea to the Bay of Bengal through the annexation of the Konkan, the easternmost portion of Andhra, the city of Goa, and the forming of a protectoral relationship with the Khandesh Sultanate: this isn't quite grammatical: I would suggest breaking it into two after Goa.
  • Split after "Bay of Bengal", couldn't find a good way to not have all acquisitions in one sentence, but "forming" was replaced with "establishment" which sounds more correct. Flemmish Nietzsche (talk) 10:45, 23 August 2024 (UTC)
• Quotes, like "the moderating element in the Triumvirate", need to be attributed in text.
  • Done. Flemmish Nietzsche (talk) 10:45, 23 August 2024 (UTC)
• among the Deccanis and Foreigners: no capital on foreigners.
• This was done due to the increased adminstrative burden and the expansion of the Sultanate's territory, both partly due to his own policies: set up as a contradiction, but it isn't one -- his policies could (should?) have worked to reduce the administrative burden on the state. Also, typo in administrative.
  • Changed to "both partly a result of his own prior actions". Typo fixed. Flemmish Nietzsche (talk) 10:45, 23 August 2024 (UTC)
• included correspondence between many heads of state of the era, who greatly respected him, including Mehmed II, in which the Sultan addressed him as “Spreader of the Board of kindness and goodness, the Right Hand of the Bahmani State, Trustee of the Religion of Muhammad", Abu Sa'id Mirza and Husayn Bayqara of the Timurid Empire, and Qaitbay of the Mamluk Sultanate.: another long sentence that needs to be cut to make grammatical sense.
  • Split at "respected him". Flemmish Nietzsche (talk) 10:45, 23 August 2024 (UTC)
• On the "rank of 1000" -- we've said that it reflects a) revenue and b) horsemen, but haven't resolved which the number 1,000 actually refers to. 1000 what?
  • 1,000 horses and 1,000 units of currency; changed back to original "rank of 1000", this seems like a non-issue. Flemmish Nietzsche (talk) 10:45, 23 August 2024 (UTC)

  The issue is the GA criteria, specifically 1a: the prose is clear, concise, and understandable to an appropriately broad audience. At the moment, I can't see that anyone not already an expert in medieval Indian nobility would understand what a "rank of 1000" is, or be able to get a sense of what that means in practice (was that a high rank?). UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 11:21, 23 August 2024 (UTC)

  Added "high-ranking" before "noble". A thousand horsemen seems like a lot to me. Flemmish Nietzsche (talk) 11:26, 23 August 2024 (UTC)

  It does, but we need a better source than our own gut feeling, and Eaton doesn't specify that this was a high rank. We therefore need another source to put it into context. In a related matter, one of the footnotes in this area is cited to "p. 65n", which is a mistake -- we need to give the note number as "p. 65, n. 14". UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 13:37, 25 August 2024 (UTC)

  Sfn note issue fixed. How about rather than mentioning the rank at all outside the explanatory footnote, just say "Mahmud Gawan was made a noble and given charge of 1,000 calvalrymen", which is true as well. I don't think any source is going to explicitly say "he was made a high-ranking noble" as it is somewhat implied; the second sentence of my previous response was also not saying I made the previous change based off my own opinion, rather that I felt it would be somewhat obvious that 1,000 horsemen would make someone a high-ranking noble whether or not it is directly said in this own article; my previous edit was made as Eaton implicitly says "high-ranking"; "Clearly impressed by Gawan's credentials, the court made him a noble with a rank of 1,000"; if they were impressed, they surely would have given him a high rank. Nevertheless, the recent edit should make it so such worries are no longer necessary as the rank is no longer mentioned. Flemmish Nietzsche (talk) 18:31, 25 August 2024 (UTC)

  That's supported by Eaton, so checks out. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 18:32, 25 August 2024 (UTC)

Image review

• Images should have alt text for accessibility, per MOS:ALT.
• File:Complete view of Mahumad Gawan.JPG: India has freedom of panorama, so licensing is good.
• File:Raichur Doab.jpg: can we find a better map for this one? It's a not-great scan that's cut off oddly.
• The article is otherwise sparsely illustrated. Can any images of Mahmud, or of the other major players in his story, be found?

Sourcing

• Earwig shows no concerns for plagiarism, though I haven't yet gone through the sources in detail to check that.
• The article is overwhelmingly based on some very old sources -- most of the citations are to Sherwani's work from eighty or so years ago. On the other hand, Flatt 2015, which appears to be a modern scholarly work, is relegated to "Further reading" with no citations. I would advise adjusting the balance of material here: if there is something that can only be sourced from an old work (and we have good reason to believe that it has not been superseded by more recent scholarship), so be it, but otherwise we should focus the balance of citations upon work that reflects the current scholarly consensus.

Spot checks to follow once the above is addressed. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 15:59, 22 August 2024 (UTC)

1. Fixed.

2. Done, although I had the "Prime" capitalized for a reason, as Sherwani used the same style of capitalizing one word but not the other. [1]

Maybe so, but Sherwani doesn't have to follow the MoS, and we do. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 18:01, 22 August 2024 (UTC)

3. Fixed.

4. Some instances changed to full name, although there's no MOS guideline saying that the full name should be used at all after the first sentence of the lead; I also chose to use "Mahmud" rather than "Gawan" when referring to him when not using his full name as the former sounds more natural, akin to saying "Mahmood" for "Mahmood Shah" rather than "Shah" or "John" for "John of London" rather than "London".

It's good style rather than a MoS requirement -- we had a lot of consecutive sentences beginning with Mahmud did X, which was clunky and made it difficult to maintain the reader's flow. Absolutely correct on Mahmud rather than Gawan, I think, though you may wish to explain that choice with a footnote. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 18:01, 22 August 2024 (UTC)

5. No, the Deccan Plateau is almost always referred to as simply "the Deccan", especially in sources, rather than "the Deccan Plateau"; both are perfectly grammatical, as seen in the first sentence of the article on the plateau.

Yes, though if you see that article, you'll notice that "the Deccan" is almost totally avoided throughout it. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 18:01, 22 August 2024 (UTC)

6. The rank corresponded to two things, not just horses, and what "1,000" meant I feel is sufficiently explained in the footnote.

It is, but ideally we want readers to be able to understand what we've written without flicking away to a footnote. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 18:01, 22 August 2024 (UTC)

7-10 Fixed.

12. Despite being not a great scan, it's the best relevant map I could find; most maps of the period, particularly in c:Category:Maps of 15th-century India, are either not of the right region or are less detailed.

13. No images/paintings of Mahmud, and I've looked quite a bit; the same goes for any relevant monarchs, and putting an image of coinage of a different monarch seems a bit of a stretch.

Sourcing: Yes, some of the sources are a bit on the older side, but as you suggested, provide info only found in those sources, mostly in Sherwani's 1942 and 1946 books on the Bahmani Sultanate and on Mahmud Gawan himself; the same level of detail is not given in any other sources I've encountered. I couldn't access that Flatt 2015 source, at least when I was writing this article. "Old" sources also aren't necessarily bad if they still prove to be reliable, which is the case for the Cambridge History of India and Sherwani, the latter increasingly so as the modern scholar Eaton (cited in this article with his chapter on Mahmud Gawan but in his other books as well) has extensively cited and sourced his work to Sherwani's many in-depth books on the Deccan. Flemmish Nietzsche (talk) 17:19, 22 August 2024 (UTC)

If Eaton has cited Sherwani and included facts that we have cited to him here, we should switch the citation to Eaton -- that demonstrates that these ideas are still considered current, which a citation to a work from the 1940s doesn't. It's less that the work is likely to be unreliable and more that scholarship moves on, and a good article will reflect the academic understanding of the subject as it is written about in the present day. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 18:01, 22 August 2024 (UTC)

All of these concerns should be mostly addressed. Everything I could find that both Sherwani and Eaton cover I replaced mostly with content coming from the latter, and some new info not included in Sherwani's works was added as well from Eaton. Flemmish Nietzsche (talk) 19:35, 22 August 2024 (UTC)

Spot checks

• A minor one, but some source titles need to be adjusted for capitalisation -- short words which are not nouns, verbs, pronouns or adjectives, such as of, are not capitalised.
• Note 6: left Gilan on the insistence of their mother: this is not supported by the cited source, which only says that their mother advised it, and they agreed. Sherwani does, however, use the word insisted.
• Mahmud had three sons, Abdullah, Ali, and Alaf Khan, and a brother who went to Mecca, all of whom were largely uninvolved in his later life in the Deccan Plateau.: this is not supported by the cited section. Some of the later pages do discuss the three sons, but I cannot see a judgement as stark as all of whom were largely uninvolved in his later life: the material we cite needs to be explicitly stated by the source, rather than inferred or extrapolated from it.
• He was offered ministerial positions in the courts of Khurasan and Iraq during these years, but declined them: I don't see this supported at all in the cited source.

Three misses from three checks is concerning, given that the article needs to demonstrate integrity between what is in the article and what is in the cited material. Could you please fix the above, or provide the direct quotation from the source if I've missed it, then give the article a thorough check-through to make sure that any similar issues are resolved -- specifically, that every citation points to pages which explicitly and unambiguously state the facts that are claimed in the article -- and then ping me again for a second round? UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 18:43, 25 August 2024 (UTC)

Yes, I will, although admittedly most of the first section (origins) was not my work, and was that of Mike Christie, who did a copyedit of this article after the first GA review and a rewrite of the first section, and thus the faults of those footnotes are not entirely mine. Flemmish Nietzsche (talk) 18:45, 25 August 2024 (UTC)

A GA nomination is a review of the article, not of the editor -- please don't take any issues with the article as comments on your own efforts or competence. All that's happening here is assessing whether the article yet meets the GA criteria, and, if not, if and how it can reasonably be made to do so in the span of this process. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 18:47, 25 August 2024 (UTC)

@UndercoverClassicist Should be all fixed. The "Khurasan and Iraq" statement was actually supported by the provided footnote on p.60 "during his travels he had declined offers to serve as chief minister in the courts of Khurasan and Iraq", but a footnote to Sherwani was added as well. Flemmish Nietzsche (talk) 19:43, 25 August 2024 (UTC)

Second batch:

• Sultan Muhammad Shah III was wary of Mahmud's growing power and influence, and did not believe Mahmud's assertion that the letter was forged. The sultan drunkenly ordered him executed on 5 April 1481: drunkenly is not supported by the source, nor is the suggestion that Mahmud argued that the letters (which the source does not definitively say existed) were forged.
• Note 66 is cited to Sherwani 1942, p. 337f, but the source only has 267 pages.
• The material cited to note 65 (and buried him, though still in a small tomb disproportionate to the authority his rank had held) isn't at all mentioned in that part of the source. It is multi-cited to Yazdani, who does say that the tomb was inadequate to his rank, but doesn't credit Muhammad Shah with burying him.
• One year after the death of Mahmud, the Sultan also died at the age of 29. It was said that Mahmud haunted the Sultan during the last days of his life as he used to scream on his death bed that he was slaying him: I can't get a preview of note 69, but note 70, which is multi-cited, gives the Sultan's age as 28, and tells the story differently, as a single shout near the moment of death. We also have close paraphrase of he was slaying him from the source.

I have now checked two sets of sources and am consistently finding concerns about WP:TSI. I asked you on the last set to make sure that this was sorted throughout, and you affirmed that it was -- as such, I don't think I can pass the article without manually checking each citation myself, which is not a reasonable thing to do in the span of a GA nomination. As such, I am failing the nomination: I would advise checking through the sourcing carefully, to make sure that there are no remaining issues of TSI or direct copying, before re-nominating. Best of luck with your work on the article. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 20:50, 25 August 2024 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.