Talk:Macedonia (ancient kingdom)/Archive 13

"Institutions" section lacks sources, rewriting that, possibly the "History" section as well
After creating and expanding the "Culture and society", "technology and engineering," and "currency, finances, and resources" sections, I've decided to continue work on the other sections of this article. I'm just letting others know that I am currently forming a draft to replace the entire "Institutions" section, which has entirely lacked citations since its addition in January 2006. If someone has access to material from WP:Reliable sources to rescue at least parts of that section then speak now or forever hold your peace, because non-sourced statements lacking even the most basic citation have got to go! This article is too critical to leave in such a hobbled state, even if it is a (largely) thankless job that will never amount to "Good" and certainly not "Featured" article status thanks to the ongoing WP:edit warring driven by the perennial nationalist wrestling match between two present-day peoples calling themselves Macedonians. Pericles of Athens Talk 19:16, 21 January 2017 (UTC)

In addition to the "Institutions" section, I am also considering a near full rewrite of the "History" section as well, since there are entire paragraphs floating around there that lack a single citation from any source, let alone a scholarly one. Thankfully my task will be aided by some paragraphs that are already cited, which I plan on retaining almost in full to respect the work of those who came here before me (I do intend to move that big block quote from Herodotus into a footnote, though). We are also fortunate to have such a brilliantly-crafted article for the Rise of Macedon (give kudos to User:MinisterForBadTimes for that beauty), so perhaps instead of reinventing the wheel, so to speak, I can instead scour at least some of the statements (along with their attached citations) from that article for use in this one. What do you guys think? I intend on moving swiftly, within a matter of weeks if not days, so your input, even objections, for my aforementioned plans would be appreciated and welcomed soon if not now. Pericles of Athens Talk 19:16, 21 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Now that you mention it, I just realized that the entire institutions section mostly lacks reliable sources, or there is minimal citation. I will see what sources I can get about it. -- S ILENT R ESIDENT  02:39, 22 January 2017 (UTC)
 * A question. There is scholarly research about the pre-Roman ancient Macedonian institutions, from M. Hatzopoulos, who analyzes facts about the institutions and their aspects. Does this, combined with Errington's sources, suffice? Note: it is in English language. "M. B. Hatzopoulos: Macedonian Institutions Under The Kings" -- S ILENT R ESIDENT  16:44, 23 January 2017 (UTC)
 * I'm using a number of different sources at the moment to write my draft, but primarily citations from Carol J. King's book chapter in the Companion to Ancient Macedonia (2010) edited by Worthington and Roiswell. Any additional material would be hugely appreciated. Thanks for the link! Perhaps we can salvage a few things that are already written in that section, but to be honest much of it can just be rewritten with reliable sources (better than having no sources at all, which is the current state of affairs in that section). Pericles of Athens  Talk 02:57, 24 January 2017 (UTC)
 * I've now completely replaced the institutions section with my draft containing 100% cited material from scholarly sources. I've retained the original pictures of that section and plan on adding more of them. I've introduced the topic of the military entirely, since there was no section on it before! Pretty shocking for an article about the Kingdom of Macedon (renowned for its military if nothing else). I've utilized that book by Hatzopoulos (1996) a bit and I also plan on mining it for further citations. I'm combing through Errington (1990) at the moment, however, since there are a few too many sequential citations by King (2010), Sawada (2010), and Sekunda (2010). Still, better than nothing! Which is exactly how this section of the article existed beforehand. It's looking better already. Your thoughts? Pericles of Athens  Talk 03:01, 26 January 2017 (UTC)


 * To answer your question, yes, using the work done on the Rise of Macedon seems like a very good idea. Thanks also for all the hard work you're putting in. Richard Keatinge (talk) 10:19, 26 January 2017 (UTC)
 * You're very welcome! The only problem I will have is verifying the citations used in Rise of Macedon, since not everything is available on either Google Books, JSTOR, or Archive.org. Since it has not been vetted as either a "Good" or "Featured" article as of yet, any material gleaned from "Rise of Macedon" should be double-checked just in case (most people are not anal retentive...even I make mistakes and typos from time to time when citing and referencing source material). Alexander the Great is a fairly stable "Good" article to scour for additional material. Unfortunately the same can not be said about the articles Argead dynasty, Antipatrid dynasty, Antigonid dynasty, Wars of the Diadochi, and Macedonian Wars. Since none of them have passed GA status I won't be consulting any of them and will instead investigate sources on my own for building on these topics. Pericles of Athens  Talk 21:19, 26 January 2017 (UTC)
 * To have the articles pass GA status will only be beneficial to everyone, and especially the readers. I think it will be great idea to expand this discussion on their respective talk pages so we can see where we are now and what more needs to be done to pass GA status. -- S ILENT R ESIDENT  22:54, 26 January 2017 (UTC)

Agreed. We should certainly branch out and see what can be done in other articles, but as for this one, I'd like for others to take the initiative and try to find some decent images for the "History" section once I have it partially rewritten. I've been able to find a good amount of images, but something tells me there's more than meets the eye than what is available at the Wikimedia Commons page for Ancient Macedonia. I was able to find the recent pictures put into the "Architecture" section (see to the right here) showing the Tomb of the Palettes, not because it was located in the Commons page for Ancient Macedonia, but because I had to hunt and search for it. I just recently added it as a category within "Ancient Macedonia" at Commons, but beforehand it was located at a completely different category page: "Macedon", which completely slipped my notice before. Who knows what else is hidden, lurking, and waiting to be found at Commons? If you guys could find more brilliant finds like this, I think we'd have a great set of images for a decent "WP:Good articles" candidate. Pericles of Athens Talk 03:53, 27 January 2017 (UTC)

I'll start adding potential pictures to a gallery here for later use. Feel free to add pics to the gallery here so that we can use them once the History section is expanded fully! Cheers. Pericles of Athens Talk 04:36, 27 January 2017 (UTC)
 * I have never seen these pictures before, this can be a very neat addition to the article. However I have the impression that only a handful of the armor frescos / paintings should be added to the article, otherwise it will get cluttered and we don't want that. For example, using this instead of,  and , still gives the readers access to the same picture but without cluttering the article. -- S ILENT R ESIDENT  07:08, 28 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Of course! There's no need to be redundant. This is just a pool of potential items that can be used. Once one variant has been used, the others aren't necessary. On another note, I noticed in the "Rise of Macedon" section of this article some charming individual (won't bother hunting him/her down in the article history tab and finding out who it was) decided not only to incorrectly cite Olbrycht's chapter in A Companion to Ancient Macedonia (2010) by saying it was written by the editors (!!!) Roisman and Worthington and published a year later in 2011, but also managed to completely plagiarize Olbrycht. Using Archive.org, I found Olbrycht's chapter and read the cited pages to find that this person not only wrote their words verbatim without producing quotation marks, but then thought it would be a great idea to exacerbate things by copying it over to the article Philip II of Macedon as well (looks like I'll have to fix that article too). I've put Olbrycht's input about the possible Persian influence on Philip II into the appropriate sub-section on "Kingship" within the "Institutions" section, but it has no business being in the "History" section of this article, as it breaks from the narrative flow of chronological events. Quite frankly, there's no room for much else if we are to keep this article at a reasonable size per WP:Article size. In either case, the "Rise of Macedonia" section has absolutely no other cited statements, so once again the entire thing can and should be rewritten. I'm handling that right now in my user page draft for this article. As noted above, I'll be using citations from the article Rise of Macedon, but they will be supplementary compared to the sources I have at hand. Pericles of Athens  Talk 18:22, 28 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Excellent. -- S ILENT R ESIDENT  11:20, 29 January 2017 (UTC)
 * The person(s) who wrote the "Etymology" section did a good job, so I do not plan on rewriting anything there (only going to fiddle with their citations to conform them with the Harvard style of notation found in the rest of the article). However, the only other section of this entire article that I haven't rewritten (in full) thus far is the "Hellenistic era" sub-section under "History," which I plan on tackling sometime tomorrow. It's been a busy week-and-a-half and this article is already starting to look like GA material. Now if only we could settle once and for all that divisive issue about the first sentence of this intro, this article would then be considered stable enough for such a candidacy. Thankfully the keyboard warriors seem to have gone home for the time being, and no doubt some time in the future this issue will arise again, but if this period of little to no edit warring keeps up then I think I will certainly nominate this article for GA status. However, I need help from all of you! I suck at editing my own work and I always need a fresh pair of eyes to scan over things and make sure I haven't made obvious or even terrible mistakes. If anyone's up to the challenge, please step up to the plate now! Unfortunately the Guild of Copyeditors usually operate very slowly (at least for my tastes), so I don't think we'll get much help from them. I might alert them about this article, though. Pericles of Athens  Talk 06:56, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
 * I've edited the lead section a bit today, but overall it's fairly well written. In that regard it is similar to the etymology section. Therefore I do not plan on editing the lead any more than I already have, just in case anyone might be concerned with that. Pericles of Athens  Talk 06:58, 31 January 2017 (UTC)

Focus
This is an article about the ancient kingdom. That is the focus of the article. We mention language as a component of the kingdom. As such, I think we've made a good effort and have an appropriate length and content for the paragraph on language and dialect. It focuses, as it absolutely must, on language as a part of the kingdom and society without getting into peripheral issues like the precise relationship between Ancient Macedonian and Greek. It is succinct and accurate about language use as it relates to the kingdom and its politics. The Pella curse tablets aren't related to that issue. They are just another piece of evidence for the relationship between Ancient Macedonian and Greek. Unless they have a specific relevance to the governance of the kingdom, a special link to them is uncalled for in the language section. Multiplying links to peripheral articles that have little specific relevance to the ancient kingdom confuses the reader and masks the best links. --Taivo (talk) 18:44, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Remember, this is not the article where the relationship between Ancient Macedonian and Greek is relevant or even important. That discussion, and the evidence for the multiple views, is relevant at Ancient Macedonian language.  It is not relevant to the governance or official language use within the ancient kingdom.  --Taivo (talk) 18:48, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Your reasoning is highly pedantic and punctilious but it is at least sound and solid reasoning. Can't really argue too much about this, since I'm more concerned with the overall narrative flow of the article than the policing of "further information" links. In either case, a link to the Pella curse tablet, judging by its content, is more relevant in the religion sub-section anyway. I've since placed it there instead. Pericles of Athens  Talk 22:47, 31 January 2017 (UTC)

The article has been expanded and rewritten! Also: copyediting, article size, and potential GA candidacy
Well, I did what I set out to do roughly two weeks ago: expand and rewrite this article where it lacked citations (including whole sub-sections that featured no sourced statements at all). I think it's looking fairly well but I need some serious feedback about the massive amount of new content that I've added. I need to know if there are any potential disagreements in academia about any topic discussed in this article, in order to demonstrate scholarly consensus and reflect the whole of scholarly debate. I've noticed several types that I've made and fortunately was able to correct them, but I'll probably need a good copy-editor or two who's up to the task of finding any other potential mistakes. Lastly, this article is starting to look like solid GA material and a suitable candidate for Good articles. However, Article size might be a potential obstacle. This article currently has about 16000 words in the main body of prose (minus the introduction, infoboxes, picture captions, titles, and further information links), while the Wiki guidelines state that an article over 10,000 words (50 KB) should perhaps be split into several topical articles as related, satellite articles for the main one. Related articles that already exist include Rise of Macedon, Ancient Macedonians and Ancient Macedonian language. Perhaps others could be created, but the Wiki guidelines also explicitly state that certain articles that are highly technical or focus on grand, sweeping topics are exceptions to the rule and can contain over 10,000 words of prose. I think an article about an ancient kingdom that existed for over 500 years and was one of the most influential of all time probably deserves a good 6,000 words over the preferred limit. Do you agree? Pericles of Athens Talk 22:38, 1 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Mind you, that's over 16,000 words describing the etymology, history, government, military, language, religion, social class, visual and performing arts, literature, education, sports & leisure activities, technology, architecture, finances and currency of this long-lived ancient kingdom in the Greek world. By default most articles simply do not have the same breadth as this one, and yet I've managed to make it shorter than articles such as the Roman Empire (a Good Article) or History of the United States for instance. It is only slightly longer than History of the Han Dynasty (a Good Article). Pericles of Athens  Talk 23:49, 1 February 2017 (UTC)
 * You have done a very fine job, congratulations. I do notice a few very minor infelicities, and don't have time to copyedit them at present, but could I suggest that you wait for a copyeditor to come along? A week or two won't do much harm in the grand scheme of things. Richard Keatinge (talk) 11:25, 2 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Thanks! If the issues of this article are very minor perhaps they will be drawn out in a GA review. In my recent experience the GA review process takes roughly three months now. Wikipedia's not like it used to be! Oh, the glory days; how I miss them. It would be a very different situation, however, if I had jumped the gun and decided to nominate this for FA status. That is a whole other ball game in terms of the expectations about quality of the prose, sources & citations, structure & organization, etc. I currently have Sino-Roman relations as an FA candidate, so I don't think I would nominate this article for FA status anytime soon anyway. Perhaps I never will, seeing how it would probably be voted down on account of the article size (they are usually very picky about that). It's most certainly GA quality, though. Pericles of Athens  Talk 11:50, 2 February 2017 (UTC)
 * You have done excellent job. This article was never in good condition enough for it to be ever nominated for GA in the past (at least not in past 5-7 years if I remember correctly) but you changed that and now it has a good chance of becoming GA. Congrats. -- S ILENT R ESIDENT  23:05, 7 February 2017 (UTC)

Thoughts
Just on the art section really. i don't have refs (yet anyway). My impression is that most scholars rather assume that M court art continued to mostly rely on imported artists and styles. Although M is very important in having a high proportion of survivals at top quality in metalwork and painting, the question of how distinctly "Macedonian" these are remains largely mysterious, from a lack of comparators in the rest of Greece. Perhaps not very. This book seems interesting - concentrating on the frequency of masculinized imagery of hunting, war, and the abduction/rape of females. Can't work out how much she sees this as especially a M thing, from the few early pages I've read. Hope that helps. Johnbod (talk) 03:33, 21 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Excellent! I'll be sure to check out Cohen's work. The art section isn't that detailed, but then again I was trying to flesh out other sections and it lost my attention after a while. Still, her point here should definitely be included. Thanks for bringing it up! Pericles of Athens  Talk 09:16, 21 February 2017 (UTC)

Small error
In the first paragraph of "Involvement in the Classical Greek world", it says "From 176 BC onward, the Athenians coerced some of the coastal towns of Macedonia along the Aegean Sea to join the Athenian-led Delian League", fairly sure this should be 476 BC. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.150.177.131 (talk) 12:02, 23 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Thanks for pointing that out! It was indeed an innocent typo...either that or someone managed to vandalize the page a bit without my knowing. Pericles of Athens  Talk 15:23, 23 February 2017 (UTC)