Talk:Onneca Fortúnez

Good Article nomination
I think the nomination of this article for Good Article status is premature. First, having just been written, it takes time for editors with a familiarity with the sources to discover a new page and add their insight to it. Second, while a reference has been given for each statement, the coverage of events, particularly in the reigns of her grandsons (more on this below), seems to me to be somewhat superficial, not indicating the breadth of the historical literature (e.g. the respective roles of Toda, Garcia, and Abd ar Rahman in 934 have been portrayed very differently by other authors, having Adb ar Rahman acting on behalf of Garcia against Toda). Finally, I have concerns about the focus. Let's face it - what we know about Oneca is that she was daughter of Fortun, she married Abdullah and Aznar, she was called Durr, and she had the six named children. We can deduce a little more from the ages of her ancestors and descendants and the political context. Everything else in the article is about her children and grandchildren, her husband and father. This is a whole lot of article about a historical cipher, who just happens to be the shared mother/grandmother of the protagonists in events that occurred a half-century later. That doesn't make these events all that relevant to her: just compare the coverage of events in the 930s here, involving Toda and Garcia, to those on Toda's and Garcia's pages, and you would think that Onneca played the central role in these events. As far as I am aware, Onneca has not received significant coverage in any of the cited sources, or any other sources for that matter, just passing reference, to a degree that when this page was created, I wondered whether she even merited a page. In writing so much about such peripheral events and connections it risks giving undue weight, via OR by synthesis, to someone who is treated as little more than a genealogical placeholder by most sources. Agricolae (talk) 18:56, 14 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Since the above comment does not point to specific issues which can be addressed, there's not much I can do to improve the article. If other users feel the same about the article being disproportionately long compared with the paucity of sources about Onneca's life, then this GA nomination should be closed. --BomBom (talk) 17:49, 16 September 2010 (UTC)
 * To be specific, this is what the only Christian source says of Onneca: "Fortun Garces married Oria, and had . . . . Onneca, who married (her cousin) Aznar Sanchez of Lauron. Onneca then married king Abdella and had Mohamet ibn Abdella." and later "Aznar Sanchez married Onneca, daughter of Fortun Garces, and had Sancho Aznar, and queen Toda and Sancha." I am less familiar with the Al-Andalus sources, but from the cited references, they appear to say little more than that Abdullah's Basque wife Durr was mother of Muhammad (and perhaps of specified daughters, else they are simply explicitly called full sisters of Muhammad, and hence of necessity daughters of 'Durr').  That is the historical record.  The next step is what historians have done with this historical record.  This includes the identification of Durr with Onneca, that the order of marriages must have been reversed, and various speculation about when and under what circumstances Onneca must have gone south, and when she went north again, and finally what this marriage implied about the marital practices of the Emirate, and of the Pamplona kingdom.  The reference to all of this is well founded in the published record (even if some of the published speculation is dubious or dated). It is the Legacy section that goes beyond this, talking about the next 70 years of Navarre history as the inevitable consequence of Onneca. That section is well documented with respect to the events, but none of the sources cited credit Onneca for the events or make them the her legacy.  Some of them refer to Toda being aunt of Abd er Rahman, or to Garcia being cousin of Abd er Rahman, but do not mention Onneca as the link, and certainly not making her anything but a footnote in relating the events. That the events happened is not in doubt, nor that historians have described these events.  That the relationship between the protagonists is important in interpreting them is also discussed by WP:RSes, but that these represent a legacy of Onneca is no more valid than to suggest that the Hundred Years War is a legacy of Phillip III of France simply because he was the common ancestor of the combatants. That doesn't stop historians from doing such things, but in this case I know of no source that has, so this section swerves toward WP:SYN. The well-documented details would be much more useful, much more relevant, and much more appropriate on the pages of the people involved in the events, Toda, Garcia and Abd er Rahman.
 * As to my other complaint, for this to be a GA, even in its reduced form, how can it not refer to Lacarra's analysis of the specific text that represents Onneca's Christian identity, the interpretation of which is key to her entire biography? I mention this not to complain about one specific omission, but because while this is a good first pass bringing together as many references as can be found by a Google Books search, many of these are little more than passing reference in the midst of telling a different story. Take Stasser, for example. His paper is about the tendency of the Pamplona royalty to marry their cousins, and since Onneca did this, he mentions her and the source for the marriage and some off-the-cuff speculation about circumstances: his is not specifically studying her history, just placing her marriages in context.  This is just skimming the surface of what is available on the reign of Fortun and how Onneca fits into it. It takes years of editing by a group of people with a breadth of knowledge in the published sources to synthesize a Good Article. This (minus most of the Legacy section) is a good start, not a Good Article. (And part of the solution is for me to find the time to dig out the relevant material I have available and improve it, but alas, time . . . ) Agricolae (talk) 17:00, 29 September 2010 (UTC)