Wikipedia:Peer review/Indo-Scythians/archive1

Indo-Scythians

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because of my starting a review of Azes II at Wikipedia:Peer review/Azes II/archive1. Truth is, both the kings of the Indo-Scythian kingdom need work, as does the kingdom itself. Timelines are in some cases obscure, poorly sourced, or hard to verify. Given that this topic covers a large part of the history of what is today Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India, I have to think we can find a way to improve the article considerably.

Thanks, Hiberniantears (talk) 19:18, 31 January 2010 (UTC)

All contributions to this article are welcome: this is a highly fascinating, if little-known (and sometimes obscure) part of history. Some of the chronology and dynastic content has to be changed: according to User:Sponsianus, Azes II had recently been shown to be identical to Azes I thanks to the analysis of a coin overstrike by Senior. Although I haven't read the Senior's analysis myself, I fully trust Sponsianus's research. Sponsianus has always shown to be an excellent and highly knowledgeable contributor in this area. The differentiation of Azes I and Azes II was always suspect to me anyway (personal opinion). I think a merging of the two articles into Azes I (or into, even better, a single Azes article) would be highly legitimate. Best regards Per Honor et Gloria ✍ 19:48, 31 January 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the kind words, PHG! This is a good initiative by Hiberniantears. As PHG pointed out, not much is known, but to make matters worse, the Indo-Scythian period seems to have been a turbulent one, with a patchwork of smaller rulers co-existing alongside the major kings. But even so, the article should not be a patchwork of old and new (including some of my own) edits. I'll try to look into the consistency this weekend.Sponsianus (talk) 23:25, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

And thank you both for working towards an expanded (or at least refined) article on a subject which admittedly is unknown to many, and certainly of great interest to me. Hiberniantears (talk) 04:32, 4 February 2010 (UTC)

Note: This is the second nomination on 31 January from Hiberniantears. WP:PR limits ediors to one nomination per day - see the main PR page. Please help us by observing this in future. Brianboulton (talk) 00:45, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

Whoops! Sorry about that! Hiberniantears (talk) 16:09, 6 February 2010 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: The article has many problems, as you mention above, among them the complete lack of sourcing in many places and a kind of instability related to the question of whether the article should be merged with other articles or not. It would be a mistake for me to attempt a line-by-line commentary when the article is so unsettled, but I still have several suggestions for improvement.

• The merge tag needs to be dealt with. If the consensus is to merge the article with something else, that should be done before proceeding with other revisions. Otherwise it will be very difficult to maintain a sensible internal organization and, eventually, to write an excellent lead.

• Large sections of the article lack sources and therefore fail to meet WP:V. My rule of thumb is to provide a source for every paragraph, every set of statistics, every claim that has been challenged or is likely to be challenged, and every direct quote. Many paragraphs in the article are unsourced.

• The lead should be an inviting summary of the whole article. My rule of thumb is to include at least a mention of each of the main text sections. The existing lead says nothing about many of these sections.

• The article is over-illustrated; that is, it does not have enough text to accommodate so many images without spoiling the layout. For example, the existing layout includes text sandwiches in which a small column of text is sandwiched between images on either side. The Manual of Style suggests avoiding text sandwiches. It also advises against displacing heads with images (as for example, the toilet tray image does to the Bimaran casket subhead) and advises against placing an image so that it overlaps two sections, as the Bimaran casket image does. Some of these problems can be solved by moving the images around, but I think you should consider moving some to a gallery on the Commons and then adding a link to the gallery from the "See also" section.

• Scrolling footnote sections are a specific no-no. Please see MOS#Scroll

• Generally, the Manual of Style deprecates extremely short sections and extremely short paragraphs. The two main solutions are to expand or merge.

• The images need alt text, meant to describe the image content to people who can't see the images. WP:ALT has details and examples.

• The disambiguation tool in the upper right-hand corner of this review page finds 13 wikilinks that go to disambiguation pages rather than their intended targets.

• Citation 29 has a dead url.

• The list of references is not of much help if not tied to specific claims in the article. In some cases, such as "Early History of North India, S. Chattopadhyava", the bibliographic data is incomplete; the entry lacks a publisher, date of publication, and place of publication. It's good to make it as easy as possible for people interested in the subject to be able to find the sources if they want to learn more.

• In "Descendants of the Indo-Scythians" it's very odd to see "Jats" supported by 15 citations and some of the other entries by none at all. Do you really need 15?

• I'd consider doing something about the long list under "Main Indo-Scythian rulers". Perhaps creating a separate article, List of Indo-Scythian rulers would solve the problem. You could simply link to it from this article. That would improve the layout and make the article a bit shorter and more direct.

I hope these suggestions prove helpful. Finetooth (talk) 03:24, 9 February 2010 (UTC)