Talk:Medieval Japanese literature/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Cerebellum (talk · contribs) 13:09, 13 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Hey there, I'll be reviewing this article :) --Cerebellum (talk) 13:09, 13 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Hijiri88: Review complete. --Cerebellum (talk) 13:52, 14 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

GA review (see here for what the criteria are, and here for what they are not)

It is reasonably well written.
a (prose, spelling, and grammar): b (MoS for lead, layout, word choice, fiction, and lists):
The prose is flawless, just need to expand the lead.
It is factually accurate and verifiable.
a (reference section): b (citations to reliable sources): c (OR): d (copyvio and plagiarism):
Personally I think you rely on Ichiko a little too much for your sourcing, but I don't see anything about that in the GA criteria, and you at least have Keene to balance things out.
It is broad in its coverage.
a (major aspects): b (focused):
It follows the neutral point of view policy.
Fair representation without bias:
It is stable.
No edit wars, etc.:
It is illustrated by images and other media, where possible and appropriate.
a (images are tagged and non-free content have fair use rationales): b (appropriate use with suitable captions):
I'd like to see a few images to illustrate.
Overall:
Pass/Fail:
Very cool article, since I know nothing about the topic I learned a lot, and it was fun to see all of those red links and how many articles there still are to be written about this. ~~I'll place it on hold for now, please take a look at the comments below and let me know if you disagree with any of them.~~ Thank you for your revisions. You've addressed my concerns and I'm happy to pass as a GA. If you want to improve the article further, I'd work on expanding the sourcing beyond Ichiko and using his name less in the article. --Cerebellum (talk) 14:18, 27 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Comments

Lead: The lead is a little short, I recommend expanding it to three paragraphs: the one you have now, one on the early medieval period, and one on the late medieval period (see MOS:LEADLENGTH.
Images: Could you add some images?
Buddhist literature and songs: Please revise the sentence The zuihitsu described above, written by monks training by living secluded lives in the wilderness, are of course a form of Buddhist literature, but it goes without saying that the most important specifically Buddhist literature consists of the writings of great monks.... I'm not sure I even understand the point you're making here, and the phrasing gives it a stronger editorial tone than I think Wikipedia should have. I recommend changing to something like Another important form of Buddhist literature, distinct from zuihitsu, is the writings of the great monks....
Renga: In the statement Ichiko notes that while some haikai ventured too far into absurdity, saying the hakai ventured too far into absurdity in Wikipedia's voice is a value judgment that seems unencyclopedic to me. Maybe revise to something like According to Ichiko, some haikai ventured.
Foreign terms: The article was hard to follow for me as a non-Japanese speaker, could you go through and include some translations? I understand some literary terms won't have an English equivalent, but at the first mention of rekishi monogatari you could add in parentheses (historical tale). This would especially help with the titles of works that are translatable, so when you first mention Ichiko, adding that its title translates roughly to Dictionary of Classical Japanese Literature would help the reader understand what kind of work it is. Does that make sense? You already do it a few times, e.g. known as risshin-shusse mono (立身出世物, "tales of rising up in the world"). --Cerebellum (talk) 13:52, 14 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Cerebellum: Thank you very much for the review, and for your helpful comments!

TBH, I nominated this page in January, and then shortly thereafter suffered some ... serious trauma, and briefly left the site. The other article I GA-nominated at the same time was autofailed because I wasn't around anymore, and my plan for this article was briefly for it to be deleted and for the GA nomination to be automatically undone in the process, before I realized that wasn't cool (I was actually even successful for about half an hour). And I basically forgot I had nominated the page, leaving me with indefinite time to finish writing the last few paragraphs (there's a draft of some of it currently commented out under the "Late medieval gunki monogatari" heading -- I basically skipped ahead and wrote the "Kirishitan" and "folk songs" sections because I wanted to).

So my plan at this point is to fix the article to address all of your concerns (which are reasonable) and finish writing those last three subsections with the same in mind, over the next two or three days. The material in the unfinished sections accounts for about 1/7 of Ichiko's article (whose structure, including section titles, I borrowed for this article), so it shouldn't take longer than a few days. I might also need to go to the library to address the "Buddhist literature and songs" part; I wasn't sure about that stuff myself, and Ichiko (the one source I have on hand at the moment) is somewhat unclear about what he means, and so if I can't find another source that appears to say something similar, a bit clearer, just cutting it may be the only solution. As for images, that's a pretty simple matter if we're not picky about the type and distribution of the images, since Commons has a lot of images in Commons:Category:Nō and Commons:Category:Emakimono -- I'll take a look through them tomorrow and see what fits; several of the named individuals also have articles on English or Japanese Wikipedia, so I'll do a bit of digging and see which images would be most appropriate.

I'm really sorry to have had you read through the whole article and then have to read more that I had been too careless to finish off in the months since I nominated the page. If you want to consider the review to be "on hold" while I address this, or some such, I wouldn't mind that either. Whichever works best for you at this point, since the messup was something of a brain-fart on my part.

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 16:10, 14 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Hijiri88: No worries, I enjoyed reading it! It's on hold for now and you can take your time working on it, I'm happy to leave it on hold for up to two weeks. If you can just ping me when you're done I'll finish up the review. You do good work, I'm glad you came back to the site. --Cerebellum (talk) 19:41, 14 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Cerebellum: Sorry to be late. (You gave me up to two weeks, so ... actually I was still planning on getting it done in two or three days anyway, but real life being as it was ...) I've finished adding the new stuff (apart from the image captions and new stuff in the lead, it's almost all in the "Late medieval setsuwa literature", "Late medieval diaries, travel literature and essays" and "Noh, kyōgen and kōwakamai" sections near the bottom) and adding/changing stuff according to your recommendations. I'm not sure about, for example, the lead (which is very condensed and perhaps too info-dumpy), but rather than going over it myself and then asking your opinion only to potentially have you say it was better the first time, it'd probably be more constructive to ask your opinion up front. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 15:22, 26 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Hijiri88: It looks good to me! Thanks for fixing everything. --Cerebellum (talk) 14:18, 27 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]