Wikipedia:Peer review/Surena/archive1

Surena
This peer review discussion has been closed. I've listed this article for peer review because it deserves much more than "Start Class".

Thanks, *** in fact ***   (contact)  13:24, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: This is a good start, but providing more context for the reader would make the article more accessible to a wide audience. Here is a list of comments and suggestions:


 * The Manual of Style advises against extremely short paragraph and extremely short sections. Two possible solutions are to expand the shorties or to merge them. Examples of extremely short paragraphs are the one-sentence paragraphs that begin the lede and the "House of Suren" section, and the first and last paragraphs of the "General Surena" section. The article also has a few two-sentence paragraphs. The result is a choppy look and feel.

Lede


 * "From Ammianus Marcellinus (24.2.4)" - What does "(24.2.4)" refer to?


 * The lede should be an inviting summary of the whole article rather than an introduction. My rule of thumb is to try to at least mention each of the main text sections and to include nothing important in the lede that is not developed in the main text. For example, the existing lede mentions Ammianus Marcellinus, but he is not mentioned in the main text. Information about the name origin appears in the lede but not in the main text. Perhaps the first section of the article could become "Name origin". WP:LEAD has other suggestions.


 * 'Surena' remains to be popular in Iran. - Wikipedia prefers double quotation marks except in case of nested quotations (single inside of double) as in the preceding sentence of the lede. Most (but not all) of the single quotation marks in the article should be changed to double quotation marks.


 * Why does note d appear as a note instead of an inline citation?

House of Suren
 * "... in sources dateable to the Arsacid period." - I'd suggest moving the period dates up to this first mention rather than waiting until the second mention in the next sentence.


 * "Following the 3rd century AD defeat of the Arsacids and the subsequent rise of the Sassanids, the Surenas then switched sides and began to serve the Persians... ". - Would it be helpful here to make clear that the Sassanids were Persians?


 * "The last attested scion of the family" - Would "descendant" be more clear to the average reader than "scion"?


 * "active in northern Chine" - Can "Chine" be linked to something that would explain it, or can its location be briefly described?


 * "was once a much larger region than the present day province" - In which country is the present-day province?

General Surena


 * ""Ernst Herzfeld maintained that the dynasty of [the Indo-Parthian emperor] Gondophares represented the House of Suren." - When quoting an entire sentence like this, it's often good to include some sort of attribution; e.g., "According to A.D.H. Bivar, "Ernst Herzfeld... ". I wonder, though, why Herzfeld is not cited directly. Why quote Biver quoting Herzfeld instead of quoting Herzfeld?


 * "Other notable members of the family include the 1st century BC cavalry commander General Surena (see below)... ". - Instead of telling the readers directly to do something, in this case to "see below", I'd just delete "(see below)". It doesn't seem necessary.


 * "during the reign of the Arsacid dynast Orodes II (r. 57–38 BC)" - What does "r." stand for? Should it be spelled out rather than abbreviated to make it more accessible to the readers?


 * "written c. 225 years after the commander's time" - Here "about" would be more familiar than "c.".


 * "on the western Arsacid vassalaries" - Is "vassalaries" the right word? I don't find it in my dictionary, and I'm unsure of its meaning. "Vassal" means "servant".


 * WP:MOSQUOTE advises against linking any words inside direct quotations. If you want to link "Rustam" and "Shahnameh", you should paraphrase the quoted material rather than quoting directly. Alternatively (and perhaps better in this case), you could expand the article by explaining these terms.
 * "In some ways, the position of [Surena] in the historical tradition is curiously parallel to that of Rustam in the [Shahnameh]." "Yet despite the predominance of Rustam in the epic tradition, it has never been possible to find him a convincingly historical niche." - These sentences should be attributed within the text. More context would also be helpful for readers who have never heard of Rustam or Shahnameh.


 * The last sentence of this section needs a source.

Images
 * File:Crest (Black Back).jpg overlaps two sections. MOS:IMAGES suggests placing an image entirely within the section it illustrates. Also, the license page should say where this image comes from. What source supports the idea that it is the crest of the House of Suren?


 * File:SurenaImage.jpg. What source supports the claim that this image is "believed to represent General Surena"?

Other
 * The tools in the toolbox at the top of this review page finds two dead urls in the citations.

I hope these suggestions prove helpful. If so, please consider reviewing another article, especially one from the PR backlog at WP:PR; that is where I found this one. I don't usually watch the PR archives or check corrections or changes. If my comments are unclear, please ping me on my talk page. Finetooth (talk) 04:29, 26 December 2010 (UTC)