Talk:Martin Rundkvist

May I make a few suggestions?
Thank you guys for putting the article about me back onto English Wikipedia! May I make a few suggestions for improvements?


 * Several of my books are missing from the bibliography. Find them here:
 * My published research deals with a longer period than indicated in the current article: mainly the Bronze Age, Iron Age and Middle Ages of Scandinavia.
 * My blog's URL is now:
 * My birth date is given twice in the current article.
 * And so is the theme of my PhD dissertation.

Thanks! Martin Rundkvist (talk) 20:56, 1 March 2020 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the corrections, . I've made some changes, but left the repetition of your birth date and dissertation in – it's the usual practice to mention key pieces of information like this in the lead section and the body of the article. –&#8239;Joe (talk) 10:14, 2 March 2020 (UTC)


 * Thanks again! I spotted one more blooper. I edited Fornvännen from April 1999, for a total of a bit less than 20 years. Martin Rundkvist (talk) 14:16, 2 March 2020 (UTC)


 * And about the h-index: since fields of research in the humanities tend to be limited to their respective language areas, and since Swedish is spoken by less than 11 million people, I believe you'll find that an h-index of about 8 or 9 is rather respectable for a Swedish archaeologist. This number can't be used to compare e.g. Brazilian and Finnish scholars in the humanities. Martin Rundkvist (talk) 14:24, 2 March 2020 (UTC)


 * The Chair of Archaeology at the University of Stockholm has an h-index of 25. Fornvännen's Editor-in-Chief has 9. Martin Rundkvist (talk) 17:21, 2 March 2020 (UTC)


 * No problem, . I noticed this article had been deleted when adding one of your publications to the article on Morten Axboe, and thought I'd try to resurrect it. Wasn't expecting someone to renominate it (let along so quickly), but on the plus side—now that I've put in some effort compiling reviews and other secondary sources—the article is in substantially better shape for it. Hopefully it's in sufficient shape that it will withstand deletion as is, but one thing that could help is if you could post here any other secondary sources you might be aware of that discuss you and/or your work, or reviews of your publications (including Martin Hansson's Fornvännen review, which I haven't found a copy of online—if you have a link or could send it to me, that would be great). --Usernameunique (talk) 04:52, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

Proofreading

 * humanitarians --> humanities scholars
 * Beowulian --> BeowulFian
 * conduct[] --> conduct [...]

Martin Rundkvist (talk) 10:19, 8 March 2020 (UTC)


 * Fixed, thanks. The last is technically correct (the brackets removed the "s" from "conducts"), but ugly, so I've just reworded that sentence and reverted to "conducts." --Usernameunique (talk) 17:06, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

Progress
Hi, (though I presume you're watching this page...), I'd have thought this article was almost ready to be put back into mainspace once again; it certainly seems to have been improved since the AfDs, but I can well imagine you were too busy or indeed fed up with the hassle.

I'd quite like to do a bit of work on it if that's all right, and then if we're both ready we give it another shot? To be honest, Rundkvist's h-index ought to be more than enough for NScholar but there is quite a bit of irrationality about as always. One of several things I could do would be to separate primary (MR) sources from the rest, to make clear we have plenty of both. All the best, Chiswick Chap (talk) 13:29, 17 January 2021 (UTC)


 * By all means,, please feel free to edit away as you see fit. The article is actually close to how it appeared at the end of the second AfD—though significantly built out from how it appeared at the beginning—but by then I think the "delete" votes were unlikely to come around no matter what the state of the article; had I foreseen the amount of truculence this article would inspire, I would have built it out before taking it to mainspace.


 * With that said, there are several more reviews that I'll add to the article, and I'll take a look for any new sources that have come about in the last year. —Usernameunique (talk) 19:40, 17 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Super. I'll do a bit of tidying then. Chiswick Chap (talk) 19:43, 17 January 2021 (UTC)


 * OK, I've done the immediate formatting, which I think leaves the article looking decent. We could simplify the referencing by moving the list-defined ones inline, which would certainly be tidier. Chiswick Chap (talk) 20:48, 17 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Hey, thanks for jumping in—I agree it leaves the article looking nice. As you just saw, I'm taking a look and fixing/adding some material. It looks like the main thing to add is some fieldwork from last year in Östergötland, which resulted in the discovery of some two dozen gold figures. There are a number of articles (example) which I'll work on adding over the next couple days. For the referencing, I generally like keeping the citations and sources separate when specific pages are being cited (e.g., "Frost 2016, pp. 350–351."), but for one-page works (like Brown 2015, which is a one-page review), there's no real harm in removing them from "Bibliography" and having them only appear in "References." --Usernameunique (talk) 10:36, 21 January 2021 (UTC)


 * OK; I just note that looking nice and solid is certainly a soothing thing for critical eyes. Chiswick Chap (talk) 12:35, 21 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Point well taken, . I've made the partial change—still thinking about how to handle the remaining seven sources. By the way, what's your thinking for the interview being a primary source? Although it obviously includes Rundkvist's words, it's through the prism of another person. It also indicates notability in a way that most of the other primary sources do not. On a separate subject, what do you mean by "This list identifies each item's place in Rundkvist's publications"? I'm a bit unclear on that. --Usernameunique (talk) 15:28, 21 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Yes, interviews are a boundary case, and they obviously indicate notability. Feel free to handle it as you see fit. The italic comment is just to say what the list is for, i.e. to provide structure and navigation without claiming these are reliable secondary sources, i.e. defusing any "these aren't RS" approaches. Chiswick Chap (talk) 15:32, 21 January 2021 (UTC)

Now that the article is round about 'Good Article' quality, are we nearly ready to take it to mainspace? Once bitten, I guess... Chiswick Chap (talk) 21:40, 27 January 2021 (UTC)


 * , I think we're almost there. I'm just thinking about adding brief mentions of the 2008 paper with Howard Williams about the Viking boat grave, and the 2006 paper "Domed oblong brooches of Vendel period Scandinavia". They're his two most cited papers, and the former in particular sounds pretty interesting. As you said, once that's done, moving to mainspace and a concurrent GA nomination seem to be the next steps. --Usernameunique (talk) 22:14, 27 January 2021 (UTC)


 * , anything else you see that we need to work on? I'd like to give the article another read with fresh eyes, and there are a few more title translations I can add, but that's about it on my to-do list. --Usernameunique (talk) 08:46, 29 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Great, and no, it's looking rather thorough. Would you like me to proofread? I think it's barely necessary as you seem just as happy as I am with both English and Swedish, but I can give it a quick going-over if you like. Chiswick Chap (talk) 09:09, 29 January 2021 (UTC)


 * A quick proofread would actually be great, —I've undoubtedly left a typo or two in there, and at this point my head's so deep in the weeds of the article that you might be better able to spot something that doesn't make sense. --Usernameunique (talk) 09:30, 29 January 2021 (UTC)


 * I've had a quick whiz through, nothing major to report. All the best, Chiswick Chap (talk) 10:36, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

Comments from KJP1
By way of a placeholder. Will go though over the next days/week.
 * Lead
 * “associate professor” - of what? The answer is Archaeology, so perhaps too repetitive?
 * Yeah, Swedish archaeologist and associate archaeology professor is probably a bit too repetitive.
 * “Beowulfian mead-halls” - is this an accepted term, and thus in quotes? And does mead hall have a hyphen or not? Not in the next clause, or in Wiki’s article. But if it is a quote, then perhaps.
 * That quotes Rundkvist, so I've added a citation. I don't love the hyphen either, but it's in the source.
 * On second thought (see discussion below), I removed the hyphen, with a note stating as much in the citation. --Usernameunique (talk) 05:52, 3 February 2021 (UTC)
 * “20 decorative ornate gold figures that may have represented gods or royals” - “decorative” and “ornate”, the difference between the two being? And is “royals” more commonly “royalty”? “deities or royalty”? “gods or kings”?
 * Got rid of "decorative," which probably also implies some knowledge of their function, which we don't have.
 * “artefact deposition patterns” - quite technical, and nothing I can see you could link to. Any simpler way of explaining what this is?
 * Reworded per discussion below. --Usernameunique (talk) 05:32, 3 February 2021 (UTC)
 * “lifestyles of the Scandinavian elite” - a “the” before lifestyles?
 * Done.
 * “edited its quarterly Folkvett” - “quarterly journal/magazine Folkvett”?
 * Done.

Back soon. KJP1 (talk) 23:09, 31 January 2021 (UTC)


 * "Artefact deposition patterns" is mentioned only in the lead, where it is uncited. Rundkvist seems to look at entire sites and the meaning of everything from post-holes to gold figures, and their relative positions, which I guess is what the phrase was alluding to. It doesn't seem to be common in the literature, or indeed in his work.


 * Martin says it's landscape archaeology so I'll link it now! Chiswick Chap (talk) 13:58, 1 February 2021 (UTC)


 * Yeah, not the best wording—that was my attempt to get the idea across in as few words as possible, but clearly it didn't do the job. How does "Rundkvist has analyzed the placement of deposited artefacts vis-à-vis the landscape" sound instead? --Usernameunique (talk) 05:32, 3 February 2021 (UTC)


 * It's already better; I think I'd say more simply "deposited artefacts in the landscape" which I think captures the 'landscape' sense rather directly. Let's see how that looks. Chiswick Chap (talk) 13:53, 3 February 2021 (UTC)


 * Looks good! --Usernameunique (talk) 22:41, 3 February 2021 (UTC)


 * I think we could probably lose the mead-hall hyphen without being accused of too much misuse of sources; it doesn't add anything and it looks weird. And we've already wasted hundreds of bytes on that one rather dull byte of text! Let's chop it. Chiswick Chap (talk) 11:02, 1 February 2021 (UTC)


 * Ditched the hyphen. The relevant Chicago Manual of Style section, 13.7, states that "If spelling and punctuation are modernized or altered for clarity, readers must be so informed in a note, in a preface, or elsewhere", so the citation now reads "Rundkvist 2011, p. 9 (hyphen omitted)". --Usernameunique (talk) 05:52, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

Batch 2

 * Early life and education
 * "Jeopardy!." - super-minor, but should Jeopardy end '!.'? I appreciate the '!' is part of the title, so perhaps it should, but it looks odd to me.
 * It's correct, and as you say minor.


 * Career
 * "growing disillusionment with the labour market for Scandinavian humanities scholars" - I think this rationale is accurate and I am treading with some care, as I appreciate we are in a draft BLP, which the subject reads! But reading R9 myself, I detect a little of what in English we'd call a chip. "how little meritocracy there is / how gross the nepotism is there". Those are quite "strong" expressions. I suppose what I am saying is, while that is clearly Mr Rundkvist's view, is that how others might describe/perceive it? This leads on to the bigger issue - quite a lot is sourced to Mr R himself. I understand why, but I fear it will remain a difficulty at AfD.
 * Agree, removed; we need neither that tone nor the content.


 * Research
 * "a Late Iron Age cemetery on the island Gotland" - ""island of Gotland"?
 * Done.


 * "the first of a boat inhumation" - "inhumation" rather threw me. "burial"?
 * Done.


 * "23 rare amber gaming pieces" - this is only a query, were there ever only 23, or does one remain lost? Thinking of chess/draughts, you sort of think there should be 24?
 * Very likely, but...
 * Rundkvist sort of suggests that he was looking for a 24th ("A small spherical stone was also found here. It is unlikely to have functioned as a 24th gaming piece, as it is much smaller than the amber pieces and has no flat face to keep it from rolling off the game board."), but he says later in the article that's it's unclear how many gaming pieces were found in a full set:
 * "The Skamby grave contained 23 amber gaming pieces. Taphonomic factors complicate a reliable assessment of what number would be normal for use: cremation shatters many bone or antler gaming pieces and preserves the fragments, while soil chemistry may destroy unburnt bone in inhumations. The best opportunities to find out how many gaming pieces there should be to a Viking-period set are offered by inhumation graves with glass gaming pieces or occasional good bone preservation (Tab 2; gaming pieces are unknown from the Viking-period graves of Gotland, where calciferous soil provides good preservation conditions). The median number of gaming pieces per grave in this sample is 25. Therefore, there is statistically speaking no reason to suspect that there had originally been any additional bone or antler gaming pieces in the Skamby grave, obliterated by the soil conditions."
 * Table 2, referenced above, lists nine graves. They had 20, 15, 28, 27, 22, 26, 25, 17, and 26 pieces. --Usernameunique (talk) 19:19, 6 February 2021 (UTC)


 * "oblong brooches from the Vendel Period. The article catalogued nearly 600 brooches from the Vendel Period" - the second "from the Vendel Period" looks unnecessary?
 * Fixed.


 * "Mead-halls of the Eastern Geats" - I hate to be a bore, but mead-hall is back with a hyphen.
 * Guess a book title had better be literal.


 * "and the general nature of Rundkvist's landscape descriptions" - is "general" quite right here? I had to read it a few things to "get it". "unspecific/nonspecific/vague"?
 * Diffuse it is.


 * "Several reviewers suggested the book worked better for the public than an academic audience" - is this being a little weasel wordy? I have not one word of Finnish or Swedish, but were the reviewers actually saying that this was a populist, rather than an academic, work?
 * No weasel intended. Said 'non-technical'. Populism is very different.
 * Yep. One reviewer termed it the "interested public," i.e., which I take to mean the literate/informed but non-academic audience. --Usernameunique (talk) 19:12, 6 February 2021 (UTC)


 * Aska Mead Hall
 * "they may originally have been attached to support posts or high seats" - two small things. Does this mean they were 'tacked onto pillars', presumably for decoration, or that they actually provided some support themselves, i.e. reinforced the post in some way? And what's a high seat? A throne, or one of these?
 * Linked.
 * Nice find with öndvegissúlur. --Usernameunique (talk) 19:12, 6 February 2021 (UTC)


 * "where the rich burial had been found 100 years earlier, and the East Cemetery, discovered near the platform mound in 2006. The survey uncovered rich finds". Is the "rich/rich" a bit repetitive. "major/important"?
 * Said "similarly"; it's clearly significant that the burial sites were "rich".
 * Changed to "significant", since the 1920 excavation found silver etc. objects that are richer than those found in 2020. --Usernameunique (talk) 19:12, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

That's enough nitpicking, which you didn't actually ask me to do! On the issue of Mr R's Notability, it looks pretty clear to me. Reviewing the earlier AfDs, there's certainly no puffery (and the involvement of the first nominating editor was certainly very focussed! as well as impolite). But some editors whose judgement I respect are saying Mr R doesn't meet the academic notability guidelines. For me, they are construing these rather narrowly, but they may well disagree. I know Other Stuff Exists is a poor argument but Wikipedia is a big ole place, not bound by paper limitations, and I think it would be improved by an article on Mr R. This cannot be said of many, many of the articles Wiki currently holds. All the very best with it, and I shall certainly offer my two cents in the event of another AfD. KJP1 (talk) 12:00, 6 February 2021 (UTC)


 * Many thanks! I think we're about ready to roll. Chiswick Chap (talk) 16:14, 6 February 2021 (UTC)


 * Thanks, —those were really good and useful comments. I agree with your points about notability. In particular, the academic notability guidelines were construed narrowly, and without needed context; an h-index is going to be a lot lower for a Scandinavian archaeologist than it is for a computer scientist, for example, and should accordingly be evaluated in relation to its field. --Usernameunique (talk) 21:25, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

In the news
It occurred to me to take a look in Scandinavian national newspapers, as these are poorly indexed by Google (at least in English). Rundkvist has been in the news for various reasons since 2002, so I've reported on these briefly with citations to Svenska Dagbladet, Dagens Nyheter and others. (That's not counting the articles that he wrote.) Chiswick Chap (talk) 13:55, 7 February 2021 (UTC)


 * Good idea, . Can you tell if this paywalled article gives a decent description of why Rundkvist criticized Kristian Berg? It would be nice to briefly add (without having to resort to a primary source) if possible. --Usernameunique (talk) 18:46, 7 February 2021 (UTC)
 * 
 * KJP1 (talk) 19:13, 7 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Well, Rundkvist describes Berg as "a non-archaeologist whose attitude to the museum placed in his care may be summarised as politically expedient, instrumental and post-modernist." I'd have thought a primary source was ideal for expressing the subject's opinion (and indeed the SvD article cites MR's blog), but a reliable secondary source is Carl-Johan Svensson's PhD dissertation "Festligt, folkligt, fullsatt? Offentlig debatt om Historiska museets publika verksamhet från Den Svenska Historien till Sveriges Historia", pages 134-135 which has plump quotes from both CB and MR, and juicy stuff like "Enligt Rundkvist hade Sverige ”inte längre någon museal auktoritet på det arkeologiska området.” Fler debattörer stämde in i kritiken mot Berg och uppsägningarna. Birgit Arrhenius ville lyfta fram samlingarna, ”de mest kompletta i Nordeuropa”, och värna den kunskap om samlingarna som personalen besatt." Chiswick Chap (talk) 19:40, 7 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Sorry about that Undo edit. Not sure how it happened. KJP1 (talk) 06:46, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Not at all, . I've come perilously close to fat fingering a rollback in this article a couple times myself. --Usernameunique (talk) 05:22, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

Is the 'in the news' material a) sufficient as it stands, or does it need b) some text from the refs listed in this section, or even c) an 'In the news' section in the article? Chiswick Chap (talk) 08:52, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * We probably don't need a standalone section; most of the news articles seem to have enough substance that they fit in somewhere else in the article. I've added the two KJP1 noted, along with a few more found via Google News. There are a couple other sources that may or may not be worth working in. I'll also take a look at those Berg-related sources in the next couple days. --Usernameunique (talk) 05:22, 10 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Great. I've bolted in the SciAm ref. Chiswick Chap (talk) 08:53, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

Deleted once. Link?
Hi. Great this article is back again. I voted for keep, but in vain. However, I can not see any link or so that it has had a deletion discussion, and I think ther was text on the old article that is missing (I might be wrong). Good work of you. And thanks for highlighting that the article is back on svwp, where some seems to want to delete it. Adville (talk) 20:19, 14 March 2021 (UTC)
 * The two deletion discussions are displayed and linked in the history box at the top of this page. Chiswick Chap (talk) 20:26, 14 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks, ! I remember your keep vote, and appreciate it. The deletion discussion was here; it's also linked at the top of this page (under "Article milestones"). And is what the article looked like at the close of the last deletion discussion. I don't think any significant text has been removed, but let me know if you think it's missing anything. --Usernameunique (talk) 20:28, 14 March 2021 (UTC)
 * I missed the "milestones" section. Sorry. I did not think about the old article, but the discussion page. Was there nothing written on this page before 16:21, 30 January 2020? Things leading to the firs and second discussion for deletion. (Not that I want it to be deleted, but for the tranpiracy of the discussions). I might be wrong, of course. Adville (talk) 20:39, 14 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Ah, that would require a history merge to get the old discussions back, we'd need to ask an admin for that. Chiswick Chap (talk) 20:42, 14 March 2021 (UTC)
 * I've asked . --Usernameunique (talk) 20:50, 14 March 2021 (UTC)
 * For anyone wondering, the first edit to this talk page was indeed at 16:21, 30 January 2020. There is nothing from before then, deleted or otherwise. –&#8239;Joe (talk) 11:04, 20 May 2021 (UTC)

Featured article badge
Since this is a featured article, shouldn't there be a badge in the top right corner indicating its status? If so, can someone please add it? ElementSix (talk) 14:31, 4 April 2022 (UTC)
 * I restored the star --Gerda Arendt (talk) 14:44, 4 April 2022 (UTC)