Talk:Proverb/GA1

GA Review
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Reviewer: Katolophyromai (talk · contribs) 02:38, 23 November 2017 (UTC)

I will review this article. It deals with a very important and encyclopedic subject that has great significance to literature and society at large. On a side note, I would like to mention that I have nominated the article ancient Greek literature in this same category, as well as the articles Inanna, Enlil, Anunnaki, Athena, Jonah, and Pythagoras in the "Philosophy and religion" category, all of which are currently awaiting review. --Katolophyromai (talk) 02:38, 23 November 2017 (UTC)

First order of business: This article has a lot of statements that are currently uncited. I am fine with passing the article with a few uncited statements, but the current level is unacceptable. I have tagged all of the statements that require sources. I expect the nominator to either remove these statements or find sources to support them. I have also tagged one uncited statement as dubious because it claimed that most English speakers do not know what the word "cobbler" means, which I suspect is false. It may not be a commonly used word, but it certainly is not "unknown." I tagged the final section, entitled "Noteworthy proverb scholars (paremiologists and paremiographers)" as needing to be converted into prose. If these people are really important enough to be mentioned in the article, you need to explain who they are and how their work is significant, not just drop in a list with a bunch of names on it.

In general, having read it over a few times, I have noticed a number of obvious problems with this article:
 * 1) There are a large number of uncited statements.
 * 2) The lead is too short and does adequately summarize the contents of the article.
 * 3) The article has almost no organization structure and consists of a massive number of sections, which are not grouped in any logical manner and seem to simply be thrown together aimlessly.
 * 4) The article generally consists of a large number of short, disjointed paragraphs that do not flow very well. (Some sections are better than others, which I will go into when I begin reviewing the article section-by-section.)
 * 5) Some of the material seems to be rather trivial and insignificant. For instance, just to give one example, in the "Music" section, it says "There have been at least two groups that called themselves 'The Proverbs', and there is a hip-hop performer in South Africa known as 'Proverb'." After reading the section, I am thinking "So what?" How does this relate to proverbs themselves and how they are used? Why are these music groups or this hip-hop performer significant? Have they affected popular usage of proverbs in any way? None of them appear to have their own articles and they seem to be unimportant, at least from my perspective.
 * 6) Several statements stuck out as not necessarily biased, but certainly statements that someone knowledgeable on the subject might disagree with, such as the peculiar "cobbler" gaffe I noted above.

I will not fail the article yet, because I still think it may be able to pass, but only with a considerable amount of effort. I will provide much more extensive criticism in the coming days. --Katolophyromai (talk) 03:18, 23 November 2017 (UTC)
 * I noticed another problem with the article, which is that the article covers contemporary proverbs extensively, but seems to say very little about the history of proverbs. I do not know if this is necessarily a top priority to cover, but you might want to add some mention of the fact that compilations of proverbs are a major component of the surviving corpus of ancient Mesopotamian literature. --Katolophyromai (talk) 01:55, 25 November 2017 (UTC)

I hope no one minds, but I just went through and organized the article into sections and subsections because the lack of organization was really bothering me. If anyone disagrees with how I have organized it, feel free to make adjustments as you think are necessary. --Katolophyromai (talk) 17:43, 25 November 2017 (UTC)

Verdict
I am going to have to fail this article. Progress has been made, but the article is still a long way off from meeting all of the GA criteria and, at the current rate, I think it will take several months at least before the article is ready for GA. Some major concerns include: Things have definitely improved, though. The citation quality is certainly much better than it was before this review started. I look foreword to possibly reviewing this article again once it is in better condition.
 * 1) The article still contains a lot of information that is rather trivial and insignificant, or whose significance is not really explained.
 * 2) The writing quality in some of the sections requires some improvement. In some parts the writing quality is good, but in other parts it is rather uneven.
 * 3) Paragraph length is often highly variable and some of the paragraphs are only one of two sentences. It might be a good idea to reorganize the paragraph structure to make the paragraphs more even.
 * 4) The lead section is too short and fails to adequately summarize the contents of the article as a whole. It really needs to be rewritten as a summary of the article body.
 * 5) A main image that epitomizes the meaning of the word "proverb" might be useful. Currently, the article does not have one, but I think that adding one might prove helpful to the reader if it can illustrate the meaning of the word.
 * 6) Overall, I think that the article as a whole has good coverage, but some sections contain glaring omissions.
 * 7) The "Noteworthy proverb scholars (paremiologists and paremiographers)" section, I think should probably be written as more of a "History of paremiology" section. As it is right now, it still reads like essentially just a list of names; whereas I think it should focus less on particular individuals and instead have a broader coverage of the overall movements and trends within the field.