User talk:Wpfortlewisstudent

You recent edit to Sappho
Thank you for your contribution to the article Sappho. I wanted to more fully explain my revertion of your additions than I did in my edit summary.

The sourcing that you used for your edits is, I am afraid, not great. Wikipedia's policy on sourcing can be found here. Taking your sources in the order that they appear in your edit:


 * Mary Mills Patrick, Sappho and the Island of Lesbos. Patrick had a PhD, and was published by a reputable press (Houghton Mifflin).  Both of these are points in her favour, but in the "cons" column, the book was first published in 1912, more than 100 years ago.  Even if the 1927 edition that you cite was revised, that's still nearly a hundred-year old source.  Significant chunks of Sappho's poetry hadn't been rediscovered in 1912!  If this were for a less widely-studied figure, this would likely be a useful source – but there are so many recent works on Sappho that such an old source is simply not very helpful.  If the scholarship in it is still current, then we can cite the current scholars who are saying it; if it isn't, then it's probably undue weight to include any claims made.  (And, as an aside, if you are citing a book it really helps to give page numbers for where the information you are using comes from: it is much easier to verify whether a source supports a narrow claim like "Sappho's father was probably not named in her poetry" if readers don't have to check through the entirety of a 250-page book.
 * Poets.org, "Sappho". Even if this were a strong source, this article does not actually support the claim it is used for: there is no mention of Sappho's supposed iambics, elegiacs, or epigrams, or of the Suda.  The whole point of inline citations is that they support a particular claim (or sentence, or paragraph).  Not one of the claims preceding the citation is, so far as I can see, supported by it.  (Even if it were, I have questions about how strong a source poets.org is: there's no byline, and no reason to believe that it was written by a subject matter expert, for instance; there are some widely-doubted claims (such as the infamous Gregorian book-burning of 1073) uncritically cited as facts.)
 * World History Encyclopedia/Joshua J. Marks. Tertiary sources are permitted on Wikipedia, but policy is to prefer secondary sources.  Tertiary sources are best for citing broad summaries of a topic, rather than particular narrow claims, and for evaluating what the consensus of reliable secondary sources is. In this case the point being made about the story of the burning of Sappho's poetry, and that experts in fact think that it was lost due to the usual problems of time that caused the loss of all other archaic lyric, is already discussed in greater depth and using stronger sources elsewhere in the article.  If there were various secondary sources which disagreed on the truth of the Gregorian burning of Sappho's books, then tertiary sources like this one would be useful to help evaluate what the academic consensus is – but in this case it isn't disputed; as far as I know no reputable ancient historian or classicist believes that Sappho's work was lost because Pope Gregory had it burnt.
 * tcm5173/Queer Culture Collection. This appears to be work from an undergraduate student in an "introduction to queer history" course.  Again, compared to the numerous high-quality sources available, this is weak.  Our policy on using academic work as a source says that "Completed dissertations or theses written as part of the requirements for a doctorate, and which are publicly available (most via interlibrary loan or from Proquest), can be used but care should be exercised [...] Masters dissertations and theses are considered reliable only if they can be shown to have had significant scholarly influence."  This isn't even at the level of a Masters dissertation, and I can find no evidence that it has undergone any sort of scholarly review before publishing (indeed, the "Publishing a Post" guide on the website implies that no such review is necessary!)
 * Tess Waxman, "Sappho's Queer Female History". This is a conference paper presented by a high-school student at the "Young Historians' Conference", which is a conference for high school students to get experience of what academic conferences are like.  There is apparently some sort of judging panel as to which proposed papers are accepted, so it's not completely unmoderated, but these are still high-school students: if the claim is significant enough to be included in a wikipedia article, better sources will be available.  In fact, sources which support the claim at all will be available, because I don't find in Waxman the claim that Sappho's poetry was seen as masculine, or written from the male perspective.

Sappho is such a widely studied topic that plenty of good sources are available. Currently our article on Sappho was largely written a couple of years ago, and the 2021 Cambridge Companion to Sappho, for instance, is barely referenced. If you are interested in Sappho's sexuality, Melissa Mueller has a chapter in that book about "Sappho and Sexuality". If you are interested in her poetry, the entirety of Part II would be relevant.

Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 09:57, 20 October 2021 (UTC)

Welcome!
Hello, Wpfortlewisstudent, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Ian and I work with Wiki Education; I help support students who are editing as part of a class assignment.

I hope you enjoy editing here. If you haven't already done so, please check out the student training library, which introduces you to editing and Wikipedia's core principles. You may also want to check out the Teahouse, a community of Wikipedia editors dedicated to helping new users. Below are some resources to help you get started editing. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:27, 20 October 2021 (UTC)