Talk:Roman Republic/GA1

GA Review

Good article nomination on hold

This article's Good Article promotion has been put on hold. During review, some issues were discovered that can be resolved without a major re-write. This is how the article, as of June 15, 2008, compares against the six good article criteria:

1. Well written?: Pass. Impressive, I hope none of it's copyrighted and tone can be a little dusty! "Much of what is known about the Constitution of the Roman Republic comes to us from the Greek historian Polybius."

2. Factually accurate?: Culture section does not have any inline citations. Refs need to be consistent, see Wp:Citing sources. template:cite book is a very accepted way of making them consistent i.e. for book list at the end. with author-date referencing need to include the dates and make sure you've got each book on the list at the end i.e. 'anchors'. the main thing I would concentrate on is the inlines in culture as this is the most obvious obstacle to GA. All statistics and published opinion need references.

3. Broad in coverage?: Pass

4. Neutral point of view?: Pass

5. Article stability? Pass

6. Images?: Some nice use of images and diagrams. Please check all the images have clear sources indicated on their description pages.

Article is long, so any material that can be moved to the sub-articles might improve wp:summary style, also it can get quite dense and technical (with latin references and parenthetical asides) so anything that can make it more accessible without unnecessarily 'dumbing down' would improve things.

Please address these matters soon and then leave a note here showing how they have been resolved. After 48 hours the article should be reviewed again. If these issues are not addressed within 7 days, the article may be failed without further notice. Thank you for your work so far. Tom (talk) 19:25, 15 June 2008 (UTC)

I agree with Tom, the article is very well written and passes all sections except citations. Great work! There are multiple paragraphs without inline citations. As a general rule, each paragraph should almost always include at least one inline citation. The statements are accurate, so I don't think locating refs should be difficult. Charles Edward 18:53, 17 June 2008 (UTC)

I believe this article was passed in error, as it clearly fails to meet 2a, WP:RS ("some material may be outdated by more recent research"). Large sections of the article rely exclusively on a book that was written over a century ago, and scholarship has of course advanced since then. Instead, books like Flower (which is mentioned, but not used for refs) or Bringmann (which isn't even in the sources) should have been used. I'm considering delisting the article, or bringing it up for WP:GAR; WP:V is about quality as much as quantity of sources. Lampman ^{Talk to me!} 15:35, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

Do you know anything about this topic, or are you just applying generic rules? The book you refer to, A History and Description of Roman Political Institutions, is about the only book (the only one published after the 1880s anyway) that goes into this topic in any depth. Most of these (Abbott) references pertain to the section on the political history of the Roman Republic. Needless to say, this is an exceedingly narrow topic. The books you suggest generically cover various topics pertaining to the Roman Republic. The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Republic devotes only 30 pages to this topic, while A History of the Roman Republic devotes 20 pages to the topic. Abbott's book devotes 400 pages to the topic. You could not get this level of detail about Roman political development from these generic books. Given the thoroughly researched nature of Abbott's book, and the lack of anything comparable in the 100 years since its publication, its quality is unmatched. Do a search on amazon.com or Google Books, using keywords such as "Roman constitution" or "politics of the Roman Republic" or "political institutions of the Roman Republic". There is, in effect, almost nothing else out there. Actually, much of what is out there dates to the late 19th century or early 20th century. The few post-1950 books that cover this topic to any degree (such as generic books like The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Republic or the few politically-oriented books) focus almost exclusively on the late republic.

'Recent scholarship' has not "of course advanced since then". That rule might work well in a generic manner, but it doesn’t on this topic. There has not been 'recent scholarship' on this topic to the degree you would find in countless other academic areas. Again, you seem to be applying generic rules to an area where those rules have no real relevance. In terms of academic 'scholarship', this topic has effectively been dead for the last century. This topic was very thoroughly studied in the 18th and 19th centuries, however. Take, for example, Edward Gibbon's masterpiece "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", which was published in 1776, or Theodor Mommsen's "Roman Constitutional Law" from 1888 (of which I cannot find a copy anywhere). You can't apply a generic rule like this to a topic so specialized. If I were to do what you suggest, I would have to delete most of the section on the political history of the Roman republic. This would not only narrow the scope of this article, but it would also shut the door on an area that is poorly understood in the 21st century. RomanHistorian (talk) 04:52, 21 June 2008 (UTC)

Ok, you've convinced me, thanks for your reply. I am indeed not an expert on this field, and I was applying "generic rules", as I found it hard to believe that any field of historical research could lay entirely dormant for over a century. But you seem to know what you're talking about, and I'll take your word for it. I was a little bit puzzled that the issue was not brought up in the review though. Unless the reviewer had your level of expertise on the subject it should have been an issue. It will probably come up again if you decide to take the article to WP:FAC. Lampman ^{Talk to me!} 05:17, 21 June 2008 (UTC)

Remember that we need sources, not just words. ¤IrønCrøw¤ (Speak to Me) 00:58, 22 June 2008 (UTC)

The overuse of constructions like "He would become commander in xx B.C", to mean "he became commander in xx BC". is distracting. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.144.163.84 (talk) 17:04, 22 June 2008 (UTC)