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This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because this article has been a GA for some time and I'm wanting to gauge how much work is needed to bring it to FA.
Thanks, Peter cohen (talk) 00:16, 30 July 2011 (UTC)
Finetooth comments: Thanks for your work on this interesting and important article. It appears to be comprehensive, and the prose, often a problem at FAC, is professional. The article is nicely illustrated. On the other hand, I think the level of detail here may overwhelm many readers. It's always tough to decide how much is enough, but I would say that the article in its existing form probably includes unnecessary detail. I would think about ways to summarize more succinctly for a largely non-academic readership. Here are some other suggestions:
- The heads and subheads should be telegraphic and shouldn't start with "the", "an" or "a". For example, "The standard myth: the beautiful youth murdered" would be better if compressed to "Standard myth: beautiful youth murdered".
- While much of the text seems reliably sourced, other parts lack inline citations to sources. Paragraph 2 of "The story in the ancient world" is an example, as is most of "The standard myth: the beautiful youth murdered" and the third paragraph of "The story in the medieval and Renaissance eras". To meet FA standards, you will need to comb the article for claims without sources and either find reliable sources or delete the claims. My rule of thumb is to provide a source for every set of statistics, every direct quotation, every claim that is unusual (not common knowledge), as well as every paragraph.
- Some of the sections have too many extremely short subsections, which makes the layout choppy and makes it difficult to add images without violating the layout guidelines of the Manual of Style. The sub-subsections of "Other written sources" are examples of this. I'd think about merging the shorties to make longer sections into which images fit nicely without displacing heads or edit buttons and without overlapping sections.
- The images and their licenses should all be in tip-top condition. I didn't check them all by any means, but I see that the lead image is a GIF, which is only used on Wikipedia for animated files. Since this one is a photograph, it should be uploaded as a JPG. See WP:IUP#FORMAT. The license for File:Achilles seizing Troilus.jpg is incomplete because it lacks a publication date in its summary section and because there's confusion about who the author is. In this case, I would add the date of the photograph (which can be found in the camera details at the bottom of the license page) to the summary, and in the "Author" line I would say, "Anonymous. Photograph by User:Haiduc." The idea is to make every license as clear, complete, and correct as possible and to make it easy for fact-checkers to verify the licenses.
- No links to external sites should be embedded in the text. The first of these appears in "Ancient art and artifact sources". Use inline citations instead; the links will then appear in the Reference section. The text will need to be changed too from "Occasionally, as on the vase picture at [40]..." to perhaps a textual description of the vase.
- Use bold sparingly, as per WP:MOSBOLD. Instead of bolding individual words like pursuit in the main text, you might use italics.
- I'm repeating myself here. The article appears to be comprehensive, but it might contain unnecessary detail. Most readers are not academics, and I doubt that many will want to consider the quotations in the "Description in medieval texts" section, for example. Could this and other material be summarized succinctly to greater effect, perhaps, with the general reader? It's a question of audience.
Other
- The dab checker at the top of this review page finds four links that go to disambiguation pages instead of their intended targets.
- Page ranges and date ranges take en dashes rather than hyphens. I ran a script that found and fixed a large number of these, but the script did not quite catch them all. They will need to be fixed by hand. There's still one in the caption of the lead image, for example.
- Please make sure that the existing text includes no copyright violations, plagiarism, or close paraphrasing. For more information on this please see Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-04-13/Dispatches. (This is a general warning given in view of previous problems that have risen over copyvios.)
I hope these suggestions prove helpful. If so, please consider commenting on any other article at WP:PR. I don't usually watch the PR archives or make follow-up comments. If my suggestions are unclear, please ping me on my talk page. Finetooth (talk) 22:04, 14 August 2011 (UTC)