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Ancient Egypt

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This article has been massively expanded and rewritten in the last two months, and needs a MOS check badly. I'm interested in comments about the scope/coverage as well as readability. I'm looking for advice on how to structure the "ancient achievements" section and the "open problems" section. Do we need to include anything on fringe theories and the culture's legacy? My goal is to take this to FAC in a month or so. Thanks, Jeff Dahl (Talk • contribs) 20:36, 3 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

  • Lots of good stuff here but I will only comment on what I perceive as the weaknesses:
    • It has an ambitious History section that gets (dare I say) 'too long'. Continue summarizing, focusing on the sub-article History of ancient Egypt and less on the sub-sub-articles (listed in the "Dynasties of Pharaohs in Ancient Egypt" box - 'Dynasties'? the box looks like it is listing 'periods').
      • I'm working on it. Is the material up to and including the middle kingdom section succinct enough? (~JD)
    • There is an {{expand}} tag in the Language section but its presence is not explained on the talk page or at Wikipedia:Requests for expansion. Is the wrong tag being used?
      • I think the section probably needs to be re-organized into a 2 paragraph section with no subheadings, but should include a little more coverage, so I'll rewrite. (~JD)
  • On your specific questions: I cannot answer on quality of coverage. On the "ancient achievements" I would frame it less like "achievements" and more like "technology of". Song Dynasty#Technology, science, and engineering is an example. On the "open problems": maybe a Historiography section framed to illustrate what being academically debated. Don't have to include fringe theories. --maclean 23:35, 5 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • Referring to your questions, you don't need to include anything on fringe theories unless there is verifiable evidence that those theories are important in some way, in fact so important that they require coverage. But the legacy of Ancient Egypt would be a very important since it's one of the ancient civilization's that has a significant legacy and mindshare.
    • OK. In fact there is actually an article on Egypt in the Western imagination! I'll include some material about the "Egyptomania" craze in Europe, and the more direct legacy they had on greek and arab civilizations. (~JD)
  • Basically it's an issue of prioritizing - what can you justify as a major subtopic relating to Ancient Egypt and what not? I think "Open problems and scientific inquiry" should be condensed to "Ongoing research" or something and you would again need to prioritize what goes in that section by the most important ongoing research. Every section needs to include only the most important information on that subtopic.
  • A general category needed when discussing an ancient civilization would be the economics. You have a little on trade, but it needs to be more general to include what activities were most common, what information is available on the size of the economy, distribution of income, etc. Also demographics (slaves, free, foreign, etc) to the extent it is known.
    • Good suggestion about the economy, I can think of several important things about price and payment schedules and bartering that ought to be included. As for distribution of income, I'll add material that shows how the taxes were distributed, but nothing in terms of the percentiles that sociologists like to obsess over. As for demographics, I resist adding its own section because the history section already mentions when large numbers of foreigners/slaves came into the country; again doing percentiles is not the right approach due to the long span of time and vast changes involved, even though there is actually a decent amount of data available. I'll add demographic material about the total population size (which maxed out at 3 to 4 million in the new kingdom) and maybe some other general stuff but I want to keep it to a "broad-brush" approach. (~JD)
  • You've got your work cut out for you on researching to prioritize and justify what is important, but congratulations on working on such an important article. - Taxman Talk 15:41, 6 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the review, your perspective helps, especially with the socio-economic sections. Jeff Dahl (Talk • contribs) 18:02, 6 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

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