Talk:Sulpicia (satirist)/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Chiswick Chap (talk · contribs) 15:05, 5 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Comments

Well, thiis is well-written, clearly annotated and cited, and obviously of interest. I have therefore little to say.

"Thomas Hubbard", "Giorgio Valla", "Pierre Pithou" - who are they? Need a word or two of introduction. Same for J.C.G. Boot and Emil Baehrens, who should also be wikilinked.

"Two lines of iambic trimeter ... are ... the only surviving fragment of Sulpicia's poetry". Well, they're obviously relevant to the article, so we should have them in a quote box, with a translation, in the article.

Paragraph starting "A seventy-line hexameter poem": this is about the work of another author. Maybe it should go in a separate section ("===Work of the author of Sulpicia's Complaint===" or something like that)?

Paragraph starting "Martial compares Sulpicia's poetry": this is actually a 'Reception' section. Why don't we have a heading "==Reception==" for the paragraph?

Domitian, Ausonius and Sidonius Apollinaris can be wikilinked in the article body as well as in the lead.

All the books cited should have an ISBN listed, or failing that an OCLC.

Thanks for your helpful comments.

I have quoted the iambic couplet & translation given in Hemelrijk: I think it's short enough that copyright concerns don't apply!
You're right that the final paragraph is probably better off in a reception section; I have sectioned it off.
I've put the material on the conquestio into a subsection of §Poetry.
Added ISBNs for all the books.
Wikilinked Baehrens and added an {{interlanguage link}} for Boot; also added wikilinks for all the ancient figures into the body.
Added an in-text gloss for Pithou
Regarding explaining who the other people you mentioned are, I haven't bothered:
- The fact that Valla edited Juvenal and the date are already in the text; I'm not sure it would be useful to explain this any further.
- Re. Hubbard, my general practice is not to introduce modern scholars: they're all classicists, if I am to introduce all of them as "classicist Thomas Hubbard" then both I and any reader will be sick of the word after seeing it three times in three sentences (for Richlin, Courtenay, and Hubbard), and it's pretty clear from their cited publications that they are classicists.
- I think the same is broadly true of Baehrens and Boot. Interested readers can follow the wikilinks if they want to know who they were; if they don't, they can probably infer from the context that they were classical scholars, and explicitly saying so doesn't add anything.
I'm willing to be persuaded that I should, but my current practice is that unless there's something particularly surprising or relevant about a cited scholar, I tend not to gloss who they are. (So if Hubbard wasn't a professional classicist, that might be worth glossing, but then giving his view such prominence would probably be a violation of WP:DUE!)

Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 18:18, 5 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Many thanks, that all makes sense. Happy to promote the article now, good work. Chiswick Chap (talk) 19:25, 5 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Summary

That's about it from me. A nice clear article; I hope to see it as a Good Article shortly. Chiswick Chap (talk) 16:37, 5 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]