User:Vedisobe/Buddhism and violence/Cognitura Peer Review

General info

 * Whose work are you reviewing? Vedisobe, Tarabien
 * Link to draft you're reviewing
 * User:Vedisobe/Buddhism and violence - Wikipedia
 * Link to the current version of the article (if it exists)
 * Buddhism and violence - Wikipedia

Evaluate the drafted changes
Lead

As your note says, the lead needs some restructuring. It's written like an essay and could probably be simplified and definitely reflect all the topics discussed within the article.

Content

Your research questions are a great place to start. Because there are several regions already mentioned, it seems like a good idea to focus in those areas instead of all Buddhist countries; perhaps even more focused in the smaller sections like Thailand (as you mention), India, and Russia. I think it would be interesting to add in where a country or two where Buddhism isn't the main religion to see if there are comparisons to be made.

Furthermore, if at all possible, the section on Sri Lanka, and it's sub-sections, are dauntingly long. Some sentences have 9 citations in them, which doesn't seem probable for the information provided in the sentence. (eg. the first sentence of the mytho-historical roots).

The "Teachings, interpretations, and practices" section might do better broken up, there seems to be a lot happening. Maybe expound more on self-inflicted violence? That just seems interesting, and could help with the redirection of the tone.

Tone and Balance

As mentioned above, adding information on violence outside from State intervention would bring some balance to the article. Filling in more information about the other small region sections, and/or revising the Sri Lanka section, would also balance the article. Sri Lanka is heavily overrepresented compared to the others.

There doesn't seem to be an inherent persuasive tone, but it is not balanced either, which could be altered for the better with the above suggestions.

Sources and References

I can't view any of the references in the bibliography, and there are no descriptions or brief summaries of their information, but they do appear to be mostly from Journals, which are generally reliable secondary sources.

For the outline of changes you have, you have a good balance of resources to accomplish your intentions.

Most are current sources, though there are a few that, if possible, should try to be found in a more recent context. One of the sources is from 2002, which if it's used for historical context is fine (it does appear to be on chronology of events from 1966?) but might be a little too outdated otherwise.

Overall

Your contributions will certainly help this article become better, more organized and balanced in representation. It will take a lot of work from a lot of people to get that article to a point of unbiased, equal representation of information, though, so best of luck with what you can do.

~

Vedis Response:

The leading section before the article proper will be the first thing I start to draft further, as it'll help me outline the additional changes I need to make.

I'm gonna nibble a bit at the "teachings [etc]" section to improve clarity and break up the difficult to parse block of text.

The Sri Lankan section definitely needs to be trimmed a bit.

I think, regionality-wise, I'll put some extra focus on Thailand. It's section is incredibly short compared to the others, and I've done research on Thailand in the past for previous projects - so I think I'll have an easier time finding resources and expanding upon Thai-specific context in regards to buddhism and violence.

I did neglect to attach my planned Bibliography to my sandbox article, my mistake.