Wikipedia:Peer review/List of Icelandic writers/archive1

List of Icelandic writers
I've listed this article for peer review because…

I would like to submit this list to become a featured list. Any improvements or suggestions and feedback would be welcomed.

Thanks, &mdash; Frayæ (Talk/Spjall) 11:53, 6 June 2018 (UTC) & 12:57, 8 July 2018 (UTC)

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I can't quite work out where I'm supposed to write a peer review. Is it here? Or on the article's talk page? Anyway, I'll write it here and we can always paste it across.

Thanks for all the work you've done on this article! It's clearly already very high-quality. I've spot-checked for a wide range of authors who I know are represented on Wikipedia and they are nearly all here, so it's clearly very comprehensive. The only omission I've noticed is: Einar Ólafur Sveinsson. I'll make a point of adding writers here when I work on them, or references when I have the chance. (By the way, if you can access a copy, Mitzi M. Brunsdale, Encyclopedia of Nordic Crime Fiction: Works and Authors of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden since 1967 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016) is a handy source of references for the crime writers.)

I do think that the list is a bit overwhelming though, especially in its current format.

To me, one of the potentially really useful things about this article is that it's possible to sort the lists. But at the moment, that functionality isn't very useful, as there aren't many reasons why I would want to have a chronological list only of authors whose names begin with, say, þ. So I'd suggest you combine all the tables into one. That way readers can make proper use of the cool ability to sort by column: it would be easy to get an instant chronological list by date of birth/death or see male and female writers listed separately. If you made the other columns sortable, it would also be possible to get a rough division of the writers by principal genre too. And if a reader wanted to do more sophisticated sorting (e.g. to list female writers by date of death), they could easily paste the table into a spreadsheet.

Although it will never be perfect, it would be cool to make the terms used in the column 'Genre/Type' a bit more consistent. At the moment, poets are classified variously as Poet, Viking-Age poet, skald, 12th or 13th century skald, etc. Given that there's already information about the poets' dates in the table, I think all these terms could just be reduced to 'poet'. That way, this table could be quite easily be used to produce, say, a chronological list of male Icelandic poets, which would be pretty handy.

The talk page suggests splitting the list into several pages, and I agree that this might be a good idea. But rather than divide the list chronologically, I wonder if it would be more effective to divide the lists by genre? This page could focus on literary writers (novelists, poets, playwrights, and songwriters), because that accounts of most of the people on it so far. It would be easy to have a separate page like 'List of Icelandic scholars' or 'List of Icelandic journalists' (or 'List of Icelandic musicians', which might be a better place to put the songwriters eventually?). Obviously a lot of people would appear on multiple (or all!) lists, but it would make it easier to list their principal genres. Thus Sigrún Davíðsdóttir would appear as a novelist in the literary writers list, a finance journalist in the journalist list, and a medievalist in the scholar list. Davíð Oddsson would probably appear as a short-story writer in the literary writers list, editor of Moggan in the journalist list; Einar Ólafur Sveinsson as a poet in the literary writers list and a medievalist in the scholars list; etc. This would also make it possible for the leads to be more appropriate: at the moment, the lead to this article is fine for literary writing, but doesn't discuss the rise of journalism or the history of scholarly writing in Iceland.

At the moment, as you'll know, the tables are inconsistent because some have two columns for the name and some only have one. I'd suggest that one is enough: I can't think of a reason why I'd want to sort Icelandic writers by parentonym. But perhaps if you are keeping multiple columns, you could have given name | parentonym | surname, to help readers who struggle to understanding the naming system? Just a thought.

In terms of the lead, I think that the most important information is the last paragraph, especially "To help sort the writers by period, they are sorted according to the time period they lived. Although many more precise periods can be used, this list uses Contemporary for living writers, Modern for writers since the 16th century, and Medieval for the period from the 5th to the 15th century. In keeping with Icelandic naming conventions, the list is alphabetical by given name, as that is how Icelandic names are sorted." I'd suggest putting an adapted version of the last paragraph at the beginning of the lead, as a reader who wants to look at and understand a list of Icelandic writers may not wish to read a whistle-stop tour of Icelandic literary history before they find the key information about how the list works.

The second paragraph of the lead seems a bit irrelevant, given that it mainly discusses anonymous works. Maybe it would work better to say something like 'Although large amounts of prose literature survive from the Icelandic Middle Ages, these works are mostly anonymous. It was customary in medieval Iceland, however, to record the names of poets, and many of these are listed here...'

All in all, fantastic work! These are just suggestions, and I hope they're helpful :-)

(Ég veit ekki ef þú býst á landinu, en ég kem sjálfur til Reykjavíkur 8.-21. ágúst. Ef þú heldur að það væri gagnlegt að hittast til að ræða um íslenska bókmenningu í Wikipedíu, þá væri það líklega hægt. En líklega er það bara eins gagnlegt að gera allt á netinu. Vildi bara bjóða möguleikið!)

Alarichall (talk) 11:59, 1 August 2018 (UTC)


 * Thank you! That is all very helpful. (I do hope you enjoy your visit to Reykjavik, it is very nice this time of year.) I will divide the lists by genre as suggested and see how that works, hopefully it will be easier to work on smaller lists than such a large one. I agree the lead sections could be better organised if more focused too.
 * I previously made a list of List of skalds, but perhaps it would be better to not make such a distinction between skalds and modern poets.
 * I obtained a copy of the Encyclopedia of Nordic Crime Fiction and it is very detailed and I have already identified several missing articles here on Wikipedia and this should help fill them in. Although previously I have already found at least 980 Icelandic people not with articles (User:Frayae/sandbox). And around 18,000 articles that are on the Icelandic Wikipedia but not the English Wikipedia (Wikidata). Including many authors which I reckoned by making User:Frayae/sandbox/Bokmenntaborgin list and User:Frayae/sandbox/Höfundar Forlagsins. I believe it is reasonable to assume many of these people are notable and worth writing about. &mdash; Frayæ (Talk/Spjall) 15:35, 1 August 2018 (UTC)