Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Battle of Plataea/1

Battle of Plataea

Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • Watch article reassessment page • Most recent review

Result pending

This article has had an orange "relies on primary sources" banner at the top of the article since October 2023. Upon looking at the inline citations, I agree with that assessment. This would require a subject-matter expert to look through the citations to see what should be replaced with a more recent source. Z1720 (talk) 18:22, 25 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The scholarly literature on the Greco-Persian wars is vast -- there's no excuse to be using primary sources here, and the sourcing for the article in general is well below what I'd expect of a GA. The modern sources cited are nearly all either non-scholarly, outdated, generally tangential to the field or from people whose scholarly standing is controversial. Fixing this would need a full rewrite, so I would advise a delist if nobody is willing to do that. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 20:54, 25 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Delist. Overuse of primary sources; secondary sources used are plainly insufficient. It's been well known that the ancient sources' description of the battle are not consistent and do not lend themselves to recognisable (today) topographic features. This is not a problem anymore, however, because we now have aerial ground penetrating radar. Jones (2020) p 196 The [battle] is particularly difficult to reconstruct using only literature from ancient sources... Modern historians [list of 10 names], many of whom visited the battlefield north of Erythres/Kriekouki, were unable to agree on the events and locations of the Battle of Plataea. There are too many complications due to lost topographical markers and reliance on ancient sources [list of 6] to identify locations from accounts of the battle. See also Konechny (2022) for detailed reconstruction. Ifly6 (talk) 14:44, 26 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, I can work on this article and restore it to GA level in ~20 days. I hope that timeline is ok for everyone. Matarisvan (talk) 07:44, 27 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for volunteering to take this up. I want to ask, however, whether any rewrite is (for lack of a better term) happening. Ifly6 (talk) 23:26, 8 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I'm working on 2 other GA rewrites so the timeline will be delayed quite a bit, but the rewrite is on. I've done the biblio formatting, I expect to complete the rewrite in 30-40 days instead of the 20 estimated above. I hope that is ok, @Ifly6? Matarisvan (talk) 19:36, 14 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Doesn't really matter how quickly it happens to me, just wanted to know that you're in earnest on it. Ifly6 (talk) 22:55, 14 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Matarisvan, just checking in with your rewrite. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 21:20, 20 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@AirshipJungleman29, will need 10-20 days more because I am finding some newly published sources, like Konecny 2022, hard to access. Matarisvan (talk) 07:45, 21 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Checking up again Matarisvan? ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 23:52, 14 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@AirshipJungleman29, should be done in 5 days max. My apologies for asking for a second postponement. Matarisvan (talk) 13:55, 15 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@AirshipJungleman29, I've reduced the number of citations of Herodotus to 18 and of Holland to 15, now a total of 30% of the total citations, earlier these were about 80% of the total citations. However, I've not converted these citations to sfn like the other main citations and will be removing them soon. Would you consider keeping now while I continue removing these citations, or would you have to wait till all of these citations are removed? Matarisvan (talk) 07:10, 24 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: I can see progress here, but I'm not sure we're moving entirely in the right direction. We've replaced an overreliance on Tom Holland with an overreliance on a single article by Roel Konijnendijk -- that's unquestionably an improvement, but still leaves major concerns about WP:DUEWEIGHT. Between him and Konecny, we've got nearly the whole article, and two citations is not great for a GA about a very heavily studied part of history. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 10:28, 24 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@UndercoverClassicist, I am working on adding more from sources like Burn, Connolly, Lazenby, etc. I have around 30 other sources I've bookmarked in the bibliography of Konijnendijk and Konecny, and I'm working on getting access to these, since around half are not on TWL. However, I cannot request for all of them on RX at once; I've purchased some of these but their delivery will take 5-10 days, and then incorporating them will take the same amount of time for each one. I asked the GA be kept because this reassessment has been open for 3 months now; even though I began working 2 months ago, I lost one full month because my laptop was not working.

I don't think a GAR can be open for so long, and I acknowledge it's partly because of a fault of my own, but I think it should be closed within a few days, by which time I would've removed all the citations to Herodotus and Holland, and added more material from sources other than the 2 I've used. Also, I counted the citations to Konijnendijk and Konecny, they're 46 in total, so only 40% of the total refs. By the time I've finished adding all the other sources, I guess this %age would be around 10-20%. Matarisvan (talk) 12:59, 24 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

My view would be that there is no deadline as long as progress is being made: I don't see a reason to close a GAR that hasn't stalled or reached consensus, but others may disagree. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 13:11, 24 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I completely agree, there is no deadline. Progress has been made. If there is a reasonable expectation that it will continue to be made then why would we want to prevent that? Gog the Mild (talk) 21:50, 25 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

There have in the past been problems with GARs remaining open near-indefinitely while people say that they will work on the article without actually doing so, which is why the normal time limit is set at three months; however, as Matarisvan has a good track record with working on GARs and has made significant efforts on this one I see no reason to place a hard limit here. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 11:27, 26 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]