Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Titus/1

Titus

 * • [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Good_article_reassessment/Titus/1&action=watch Watch article reassessment page] • GAN review not found
 * Result: Delisted Iazyges   Consermonor   Opus meum  20:13, 7 October 2016 (UTC)

This is a very surprising GA. Out of more than a hundred inline citations, all but nineteen are from first- and second-century sources.

If the answer to either of the first two, especially the second, is "yes", then the article as it stands is an OR nightmare.
 * Are we taking the extant textual traditions Tacitus, Suetonius and Josephus at their words?
 * Are we interpreting them critically?
 * Or is all the information in the article actually gleaned from the small number of modern critical works that are listed as "sources" but are only cited inline a few times each?

If the answer to the third is "yes", then the article, while not necessarily containing OR, is very poorly formatted and is not easily verifiable, as in order to check it against its sources one would need to make a detailed list of the factual claims in the article and then read two books from start to finish, checking the points off one by one.

Hijiri 88 ( 聖やや ) 06:30, 3 July 2016 (UTC)
 * I agree that the use of sources appears problematic. The prose mostly looks fine (though e.g. the introductory paragraphs to "Adult life" could stand to be improved).  I'm also not hugely keen on the list of "Titus in later arts", especially because I'm not convinced by the blurbs given here that Titus actually even appears in some of the works (e.g. Ecce Romani and The Roman Mysteries).  Even if they were cut out, however, it's still essentially a list of artworks and books where Titus is depicted: it would be much preferable, to my way of thinking, if it were a couple of paragraphs talking about how e.g. the story of his relationship with Berenice inspired later writers of romances, while the visual arts were more influenced by the sacking of the temple at Jerusalem and Titus' subsequent triumph for his successes in the Jewish wars. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 09:32, 3 July 2016 (UTC)
 * Well, I would be partial to a distinction being made between "fictional" modern works and "legendary" works from late antiquity and the middle ages. Up until I added it yesterday the article made no reference to the fact that apparently at least some medieval Christian antisemites believed Titus was a Roman client king, in the kingdom of Libya, north of Judah (LOL!). This is relevant historiographic information, but as the article is currently structured I could think of nowhere to put it except the shopping list of fictional representations. Hijiri 88 ( 聖やや ) 23:29, 3 July 2016 (UTC)


 * On the one hand, I don't have a problem with using primary sources in an article. There are many significant historical topics where an editor needs to rely more on primary sources than she/he prefer to. But in the case of this article, Titus lived during one of the better-documented (& analyzed) periods of Roman history. There are an abundance of good secondary sources that I'm amazed weren't used: for instance, there are three solid books in English on the Year of Four Emperors alone, which was an important event Titus played a role in. Ronald Syme has written an authoritative study of the works of Tacitus, & F. Millar has written another valuable study on Cassius Dio -- neither of which were cited for this article. Okay, the relevant articles on Titus' father Vespasian & his brother Domitian don't use these works either (although they'd be better articles if they did), but they do rely more on secondary sources than this one does. My guess about how this achieved GA status is based on the date it occurred -- July 2007. Standards were still evolving, & I doubt anyone would expect a GA class article to use secondary sources more extensively 9 years ago. I'd try to fix some of these issues, were it not that my available time is tied up with trying to fix problems in another set of articles about ancient Rome. -- llywrch (talk) 07:14, 9 July 2016 (UTC)
 * Not to nitpick, but There are many significant historical topics where an editor needs to rely more on primary sources than she/he prefer to actually doesn't make much sense -- if a topic has not been covered in any modern reliable sources, then it doesn't meet GNG and should be deleted. It is theoretically acceptable to use ancient primary sources, but ideally those should be replaced when better (modern, critical) sources are found, and if no such sources exist, then the article should be deleted or merged. Obviously this is completely irrelevant for the topic at hand, though; I'm just talking about theory here. An article on a topic where modern reliable sources probably do exist should not be deleted, but it also shouldn't be listed as a GA as long as those sources are not cited. Hijiri 88 ( 聖やや ) 11:53, 11 July 2016 (UTC)
 * Most of the examples that come immediately to my mind are from Ethiopian history. For example, the general history books mention several important battles -- Battle of Shimbra Kure, Three battles of Sarbakusa, much of the recent Ethiopian Civil War -- yet there are no easily accessible secondary sources about these battles that supply any detail. And I know this because I looked -- hard. It's a result of systemic bias in Anglo-European academia & news media; they don't consider it important, so the secondary sources aren't there, & those that exist often aren't collected into libraries -- both academic & public -- because that group doesn't consider it important. (No, I can't read Amharic, Oromo, or similar Ethiopian languages, so I'm unable to access modern secondary sources in those languages.) And in the case of Greco-Roman history, most consuls -- who are notable individuals due to being chief executives of the Roman state -- aren't the subject of studies in the secondary literature, so anyone writing about them will be forced to rely on Livy, Diodorus Siculus, & other primary sources exclusively to write articles about them. So either one simply repeats with minimal interpretation what the primary sources say about the subject, or leave the subject little more than a stub article -- which is what I have had to do in those cases. I'm not interested in fighting a futile battle with mindsets that can't accept that handicaps of structural biases in Western secondary sources exist & thus justify WP:Ignore all rules, so I've moved on to easier topics to research & write about. -- llywrch (talk) 20:40, 11 July 2016 (UTC)
 * Technically, modern secondary sources written in other languages are just as good as modern secondary sources written in English, and should not be replaced with English-language sources unless those English sources are of the same or superior quality. Modern secondary sources written in other languages are therefore preferred to English translations of ancient and medieval primary sources. There is no rule here that needs to be ignored: if you wrote an article based on English translations of ancient sources, that's ... okay, I guess ... but ideally they should be replaced with modern reliable sources -- regardless of the language of those sources. The article as you wrote it, though, should not be listed as a GA, because it is essentially an OR nightmare. Hijiri 88 ( 聖やや ) 08:36, 12 July 2016 (UTC)
 * I think we're getting off into the weeds here. You may disagree with me about the needs sometimes to rely heavily on primary sources. However, were you to agree with me about that exception, I believe we'd both agree there is no reason for this article to fall into that exception: there are sufficient secondary sources about the life & career of Titus that they should be used here more extensively than they have been. -- llywrch (talk) 18:22, 18 July 2016 (UTC)
 * Agreed. I thought it unnecessary to respond directly until now, as I thought my agreement with you as relates to this article was obvious, but I've seen some pretty shitty GAR closes recently, and someone might come along and interpret what you wrote above as a "don't unlist" !vote, when it clearly isn't, and close this as a 2-1 "no consensus to delist", so clarifying that we're all in agreement that this article does not meet the sourcing criterion for GA (and apparently never did) seemed like a good idea. Hijiri 88 ( 聖やや ) 23:51, 8 September 2016 (UTC)