Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Siege of Melos/archive1


 * The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was archived by Ian Rose via FACBot (talk) 22:59, 27 January 2019.

Siege of Melos

 * Nominator(s): Kurzon (talk) 11:19, 25 January 2019 (UTC)

This article is about the Siege of Melos. I cannot think of any way to improve it further. Kurzon (talk) 11:19, 25 January 2019 (UTC)

Image review

 * File:Milos.jpg--I'm not clear why this has Creative Commons licensing, as a crop of a NASA photograph it should be in the public domain?
 * The other image looks fine.
 * Not doing a source review, but the scripts I use show that Fns 12, 20 and 28 don't point to any source. Also Herodatus, Michell, Midlarsky, Sabin and Smith don't seem to be used for any footnotes and you may want to move those to a further reading section.--Wehwalt (talk) 23:24, 25 January 2019 (UTC)

Nominator note re. Paul Chrystal

 * I'm leaving a note to say that the book by Paul Chrystal (2018) seems to have copied what I wrote in this Wikipedia article almost verbatim. I don't want anyone to think I plagiarized him, because this article was finished before 2018. Kurzon (talk) 06:28, 26 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Why is a source that copies your work being cited in the bibliography? It's obviously not a source you've cited, so it should not appear there. There are several publishers that copy Wikipedia articles and then pass them off as their own. Merriam Press is one that I've encountered that publishes Wikipedia articles under the titles "World War 2 In Review No. #: Warplanes". Mr rnddude (talk) 07:17, 26 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Paul Chrystal is a published scholar of the classics, so I figured that he validated my work. Like, he took a look at the article and found it so correct that he saw little need to change the wording.  But I took your advice and deleted his book from the article. Kurzon (talk) 12:27, 26 January 2019 (UTC)

Comments by Mr rnddude
I don't see this passing FAC right now. There is only a single footnote "[25]" in the entirety of the Melian dialogue section, and it's not really a citation. The footnotes often tell me what sources are used, but not where in the source the material is cited from. Insufficient from a verifiability perspective. This is a recurring problem as many "citations" are just source names. Page numbers do appear in some places, though. The sources are inconsistently formatted, and several of them show up as not being used (Herodotus (1998), Michell (1964), Smith & William (1890) all have harvnb errors pertaining to this). Similarly, many of the sources mentioned in the footnotes are not present in the bibliography: e.g. footnote 37 is to Aristophanes translated by Ian Johnson 2008, but that's nowhere to be found in the bibliography. Meritt & McGregor (1950) and Michell (1964) have ISBNs, but their publication is too early for ISBNs. Looking at the footnotes, the article relies disproportionately on ancient sources (16/35 citations to Thucydides, Herodotus, Xenophon, Plutarch, Isocrates, Andocides, The Suda and Aristophanes). Articles must primarily rely on secondary sources, which none of these (except perhaps The Suda) would qualify as. Footnote 20 is an unacceptable citation ("Thucydides' account suggests the siege lasted only from summer to winter of 416 BC. Barry Strauss in Sabin et al. (2008) wrote that it lasted one year. Several online sources, such as the official tourism website of Melos, say it lasted two years.") <- Always, always, always, name all of your sources. "Several" is just a weasel. That's all from a ten minute skim through. An effort has clearly been put in – I know exactly how difficult it is to write an article on an obscure topic – but the presentation is not there. This article would fail MILHIST's B-class review in this current form. "B1 - As a rule of thumb, the absolute minimum is that all paragraphs should at least end with a citation and and all direct quotes should be attributed to a source" from here. I don't have time for more currently, but in a best case scenario, the citations need an overhaul for presentation. Mr rnddude (talk) 07:17, 26 January 2019 (UTC)


 * Wikipedia doesn't ban primary sources, but cautions on their use because when you use primary sources you are veering dangerously close to doing original research. The main issues, as I understand, have to do with authenticity and impartiality.  With regards to these ancient Greek texts, I did not reference the original texts but translations by modern writers. Kurzon (talk) 09:53, 26 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia doesn't ban primary sources ... - A smattering of primary sources here and there would generally be fine, but nearly half of your citations are to primary sources. I'm not suggesting that you've been misusing them to conduct OR, I'm making the observation that the article over-relies on them. I know how much of a stick this is from personal experience. When I submitted Battle of Antioch (218) to MILHIST's A-class the first time, it was shot down for over-relying on Dio and Herodian. I had to cull Herodian entirely and cut down Dio to no more than a handful cites. This is what the article looked like when it was rejected. Ignore the formatting of the references, I didn't know what sfn and harvn cites were at the time as I was using visual editor and was brand new to editing Wikipedia. I still don't think that it's an FA standard article. For Wikipedia purposes secondary sources contain an author's analysis, evaluation, interpretation, or synthesis of the facts, evidence, concepts, and ideas taken from primary sources. A translation isn't any of those, so these sources remain primary. Mr rnddude (talk) 11:41, 26 January 2019 (UTC)
 * A translation solves the problems of authenticity and verifiability. Other than that, I don't see how the mere age of a source makes it unreliable.  Just how recent does a source have to be to be considered secondary?  If it's "close to the events described" then any article on recent events will be using entirely primary sources. Like, any article on Kim Kardashian will unavoidably reference contemporary sources. Besides, the secondary sources that discuss the Siege of Melos just paraphrase Thucydides. For ancient events, secondary sources are often better because they synthesize multiple sources of evidence, including newer findings, but in this case virtually all historians just refer to Thucydides, who wrote the only account of the Siege of Melos.Kurzon (talk) 12:22, 26 January 2019 (UTC)
 * The idea that every paragraph needs an inline citation is silly. I could get around that with a few formatting tricks. The only part which "lacks" inline citations is the synopsis of the Melian Dialogue, and I don't think there is any need here because it should be obvious that I based this on modern translations of Thucydides, and I did not insert any modern interpretations or commentaries, I only paraphrased what Thucydides wrote. Interpretations and commentaries go in the Analysis section, with references to the scholars who made them. Kurzon (talk) 09:53, 26 January 2019 (UTC)
 * I know there's a consensus somewhere that movie synopses don't need inline citations, and so perhaps the same is true for a book synopsis. I haven't worked on articles in either area. If there's agreement that inline citations are not needed in that section, so be it. Now that I'm looking at it again, is there any reason why that section consists of 8 2-3 sentence paragraphs? "The Melians argue... The Athenians counter..." appears in 5/8 lines. It's a rather repetitive read. Mr rnddude (talk) 11:41, 26 January 2019 (UTC)
 * I did it that way to break down the individual arguments presented. I care more about clarity and precision over "elegant prose".Kurzon (talk) 12:20, 26 January 2019 (UTC)

Oppose by Gog the Mild
I dislike being harsh about articles, and it is clear that a lot of work has gone into this. Nevertheless I feel a need to be blunt. This article would be a rapid fail at GAN, unless it found a very sympathetic assessor, willing to work to bring it up to scratch. It is not yet ready to be considered for FA. I would suggest putting it in for peer review, then GAN, then ACR, before considering bringing it back to FAC. It falls short of FA in so many ways that I do not feel that it would be helpful to list them. If the nominator were to submit it for PR with a view to a subsequent GAN, then I would be happy to list what it needs to achieve that level, if pinged. Gog the Mild (talk) 19:16, 26 January 2019 (UTC)
 * You don't explain what's wrong with it. Kurzon (talk) 19:44, 26 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Just to mention a few issues:
 * The whole The Melian Dialogue section has one cite - for ten paragraphs.
 * Another paragraph not ending in a cite.
 * Section titles start with "the".
 * Too many short, choppy, two or three sentence paragraphs.
 * A military conflict infobox is used, and entries are left blank despite the information being in the main article. Eg, the Athenian strength, the Athenian commanders.
 * Information in the lead, eg the last sentence, which is not in the article.
 * POV pushing prose; eg "the proud Melians".
 * More information on the cultural record than the actual siege.
 * The actual information on the siege presented is very limited. This may well be due to lack of sourcing. If so, then, IMO, this alone precludes it from becoming a FA; if it isn't then the missing information needs to be included.
 * "Starvation is a normal goal of sieges and the ancient Greeks had much experience with them, so this suggests that the Melian experience was extreme." is not cited and smacks of OR. Starvation is not the goal of a siege, capturing the place besieged is.
 * A number of sources lack, available, OCLCs.
 * Several books have ISBNs given when they were published before ISBNs were introduced.
 * This list is not exhaustive. Gog the Mild (talk) 20:52, 26 January 2019 (UTC)

Coord note
I have to admit that a quick glance of the article suggested the nom was premature but I wanted to see if the first reviewers thought likewise. I think it's fairly clear that they do so I'll be archiving this shortly. I can't add much to what Gog has suggested as the way forward after making improvements, except to say that you'd be eligible to try the FAC mentoring program as well. Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 22:58, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

Ian Rose (talk) 22:59, 27 January 2019 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.