Talk:Taxila/GA1

GA Review
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Reviewer: Chiswick Chap (talk · contribs) 19:41, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

Comments
The Taxila article has an interesting and important subject with a history back to ancient times, and it will be a pleasure to see editors working to improve it to GA standard.

However, I'm really sorry to say that this will have to be a Quick Fail as the article is not ready for GA review.

I note that the reviewer is rather new to the GA process; has not edited the article at all; and does not seem to have made any attempt to approach existing editors to check if taking over the process would be acceptable to them.

Technical issues with the article include uncited statements, with some whole paragraphs and an entire section (Kushan) without citations. In 'Notable students and teachers' there are multiple tags to be addressed.

On the article's coverage (GA Criterion 3A), I'd have thought that the 'World Heritage Site' section would need to be expanded to do rather more than simply list the names of the key monuments; given their importance, each one of these needs to be summarized in a short paragraph or section, preferably each one accompanied by an image so that the article's core is appropriately structured and illustrated. Some of the 18 monuments are in fact illustrated in 'Gallery', but these are neither numbered nor physically grouped with accompanying text at the moment so it all looks a bit slapdash and random.

The 'History' section is rather better developed, but again it is not as systematic as it might appear. Why, for instance, is Indus Valley Civilisation not linked? What is a stone celt? And so on.

The 'Gupta' section claims that the city "features heavily in classical Indian literature": in which texts? To what end, is this religious or secular? Perhaps a short quotation or two would be helpful.

The 'Notable students and teachers' section seems to be very poorly written, making wide generalisations supported by very little evidence. It would be better to give a concrete example for each point made, and citing each to a fresh source. Sources 71, 72, 73, 74, 75 and 76 must be replaced. Apte (sources 77 to 80) is I think not a WP:RS (Reliable Source), being just a "brochure" written in 1950 without any academic apparatus such as footnotes or bibliography, i.e. we have no way of telling where Apte may have gathered the claims that he makes, nor whether modern scholarship would accept anything he has written. I suggest therefore that the safest approach will be to discard the current text entirely and start over from modern scholarly sources.

As for the sources used in the rest of the article, I am afraid that they are a very mixed bag. Mookerji and Needham are among the soundest; Trautmann would be fine but is not used anywhere in the article; Needham is listed both in Sources and in ref 4 where it is cited in full, but for the one thing needed there, the actual page. Cameron Petrie is spelt out twice in the Notes when it should be in Sources, once, and then used as needed. These are just a few examples, there's plenty more. In short, it's a mess.

The article will need quite a bit more work before it is ready to bring to GA again. Chiswick Chap (talk) 19:41, 17 December 2021 (UTC)