Talk:The Indian Antiquary

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:The Indian Antiquary/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: David Eppstein (talk · contribs) 23:38, 11 December 2016 (UTC)

Reviewing. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:38, 11 December 2016 (UTC)

First reading

1. Writing quality: generally good, but with some opportunities for improvement.

• The lead should summarize material from the rest of the article, where possible, rather than including new claims of its own. So the description in the lead of the publication dates and sponsorship should be repeated in more depth in the history section; currently they are only in the lead (and the sponsorship material is unsourced). Similarly, important aspects of the rest of the article (like its founding by Burgess and some brief summary of the content section) should appear in the lead.
• The date it ceased publication is given as 1933 in the lead but 1932 in the history section. Please resolve this apparent contradiction.
• "the financial resources of the publishers": who were the publishers? The same as the editors or someone else?
• "(Volumes 14 to 62 of the original Antiquary were described as the "second series")": sentence missing period
• I was not familiar with epigraphy, and had to follow the link to find out what it meant. Would it be possible to make this article more self-contained by providing a brief gloss here?
• "work on the epigraphic illustrations at a distance": this phrasing seems overly vague to me. I assume that it means that the scholars could perform research on the epigraphs themselves (not on their illustrations) without traveling to their locations.
• "those translations": There is no previous noun to which this reference could be attached, so "those" is the wrong word. "their translations" would be clearer.

2. Sourcing: needs work.

• Reference formatting is inconsistent, with some citations (e.g. Temple and Salomon) appearing to use Citation Style 1 (the style produced by the "cite" series of templates) while others use a more ad hoc formatting.
• "published under the authority of the Council": needs a source, especially as this is formatted as a direct quote.
• Footnote 2 (the 1922 note in The Antiquaries Journal) is online at doi:10.1017/S0003581500088879. It is mostly an announcement of the publication of the Temple reference, but it does adequately source the sentence it is attached to about the purpose of the journal. It could be re-used as a source for "In 1922, Temple had published in Bombay a volume entitled "Fifty years of 'The Indian antiquary' ".", which currently has no source listed.
• "Despite the evident demand for the Antiquary, however, its first incarnation did not long survive Richard Temple's death in 1931 and it ceased publication in 1932." has no source.
• "The journal is no longer produced." has no source.
• "to ensure the highest possible quality": this explanation for why the plates were printed in London is not supported by the source.
• "It was the first to systematically record those of the Punjab" is not supported by footnote [5] (Temple p.7) which does state that it recorded the folklore of the Punjab, but also that it was the first to "classify the incidents on which folk-tales are built up", a different thing.
• I'm taking the British Library and Salomon references on good faith as they are not accessible for me to check.
• There appears to be some close paraphrasing from reference [10]. Compare our article's "Important inscriptions were deciphered by scholars like Georg Bühler and John Faithfull Fleet, Eggeling and B. Lewis Rice, Bhandarkar and Bhagvanlal Indraji" with the source's "important inscriptions and their decipherment by scholars like Buhler and Fleet, Eggeling and Rice, Bhandarkar and Indraji". This needs to be rephrased.
• "Some volumes of the journal were reprinted by Swati Publications, Delhi, 1984." has no source.

3. Broadness of coverage of the topic, without going into unnecessary detail: no issues noted.

4. Neutrality and lack of editorial bias:

• "an important journal": the editorialization needs to be sourced or removed. Compare "the premier source of European scholarship", another editorialization which is however adequately sourced.

5. Stable: very. No significant changes since mid-2014.

6. Image relevance, captions, and licensing.

• The lead image is highly relevant and I believe properly licensed per Commons:Threshold of originality. However, the caption is uninformative and could state more clearly that this is the cover page of the journal, rather than just giving the journal's name.
• I am unsure that File:Richard Carnac Temple 1850-1931.jpg is properly licensed. It is labeled as being public domain per the copyright term of author's life plus 70 years; however, "author" in this case means the photographer (not the subject) and we're not told who the photographer is. Without that knowledge, how do we know that the photographer died more than 70 years ago?

@Philafrenzy: These all look straightforward to handle, but if you need extra time let me know and I can put the review on hold until they are completed. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:59, 12 December 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the detailed review. It might take me a couple of weeks to address these things but they will be done. Philafrenzy (talk) 10:01, 12 December 2016 (UTC)

David Eppstein, Philafrenzy, it has been nearly four weeks, but I don't see that any edits have been made to address the issues raised in the review. If Philafrenzy doesn't have time to work on the article—despite making well over 2500 other edits in that period—perhaps the review should be closed. BlueMoonset (talk) 16:25, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

I did say there would be a delay. I had multiple DYKs to complete first. I will make a start tomorrow. Philafrenzy (talk) 21:23, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

• @David Eppstein: I think I have dealt with everything you mentioned except for the referencing where it is only different because the sources are of a different type, eg book, website, database etc. Thanks. Philafrenzy (talk) 22:11, 10 January 2017 (UTC)
  • Almost all issues addressed. Re the reference formatting: it's really a tiny thing, but CS1 (the "cite" series of templates) uses periods to separate the components of a reference from each other, while CS2 (the "citation" template) uses commas. This article still mixes both styles. But detailed nitpicking of reference formatting doesn't seem to be in the good article criteria (just reference layout) so I'm going to go ahead and pass this. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:54, 12 January 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for the pass. I don't generally use those templates unless I am using http://reftag.appspot.com/ I will look at it again when (if) it gets to FA. Philafrenzy (talk) 09:11, 12 January 2017 (UTC)