Talk:Justus of Tiberias/GA1

GA Review
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Reviewer: David Eppstein (talk · contribs) 07:57, 17 December 2022 (UTC)

This is not an encyclopedia article neutrally summarizing and attributing the consensus scholarly opinion and any alternative minority opinions on what the subject of the article did and wrote. Instead, it appears to be a long, discursive, and argumentative essay largely following the opinion of one source, speculating about what the subject might have known and what his lost writings might have said, in an attempt to explain an attack piece from someone else of that time. It is heavily based on one source, Cohen, which is equally argumentative, but Cohen at least acknowledges the existence of alternative scholarly views (e.g. Laqueur), if only to summarily dismiss them. This article, not so much. It may well be that Cohen's opinion actually is the scholarly consensus, but I don't get a clear view of that from this article, which attempts to persuade readers of the correctness of that opinion rather than to report neutrally on what the consensus is and why scholars believe it.

Organizationally, it would have been much more helpful to clearly outline what Josephus said about Justus, separated from any description of whether current scholarship believes Josephus and why. As it is, I am overwhelmed with arguments about why Josephus must have been wrong, without any clear statement of what he said that was wrong. Moreover the writing is often far from idiomatic English: the third sentence, "Josephus is moreover the alone to mention this writing, but without ever citing the slightest extract", is typical. "The alone"? It could well be (maybe is) a bad machine translation from French (there are some footnotes still in untranslated French), for which the correct English phrase "only one" and the incorrect word "alone" are both represented by the same French word "seul". The lead is not in any way a summary of the body. The use of pronouns that do not refer to the immediately preceding noun is frequent and confusing. There are several sentence fragments without verbs.

I think this is very far from meeting WP:GACR #1a (clear, concise, and understandable prose, with correct grammar), #1b (lead), #3b (most of the article consists of details of interpretations of events that the subject might possibly have written about, rather than about what we know of the subject himself), and #4 (the writing does not convey the appearance of neutral impartiality). One could also argue that the heavy use of rhetorical questions invokes WP:SYN (GACR #2c). And although the references in general appear to be reliable, there are many broken Harvard citation links (#2a). Because it is far from the criteria, I think it is a quick WP:GAFAIL.