Wikipedia:WikiProject Biography/Peer review/Basiliscus

Basiliscus

Hello. This article was submitted for peer review (Wikipedia:Peer review/Basiliscus/archive1), and greatly improved thanks to the collaboration of the reviewers. It has been suggested by them to submit this article for review also here.--BlaiseMuhaddib 13:55, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

Yannismarou

Much much better! As you can see the article is now rated as A-Class by the Wikiproject Biogaphy. I have nothing more to suggest. Let's see what the other reviewers are going to say. I just wanted to laud the good work done.--Yannismarou 14:41, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

Plange

Good article... Just a few things:

• In the lead, this doesn't sound right to my ear, but I can't cite why: "wider accepted" -- more widly accepted sounds better to me....
• Whose doing the rejecting here? A source that can be cited, or the editor who wrote this part? "be rejected as either an error of the copyists or a gross exaggeration"
• Need a different verb than impelled here, since the subject is not human: "In the obscurity of the night, these destructive vessels were impelled against the unguarded and unsuspecting fleet of the Romans."
• "did not like the Isaurian officers affiliated by Leo I in order to reduce his dependency by the Ostrogoths" -- "affiliated by" doesn't make sense here-- are you trying to say they were officers "affiliated with" Leo?
• I'd change "should have been" to "was probably" or "was most likely" (if the sources support this), since otherwise it sounds like the editors are making a judgement call? "Finally, the support of Illus should have been wavering, given the massacre of the Isaurians allowed by Basiliscus"
• I caught some misuse of prepositions, and fixed them, as well as some grammar problems, but I would suggest someone going over this to catch for this, and also mixtures of UK and US spelling. Assumed you were using UK, since it was used early on, so I changed a US spelling to UK I found.
• I'm not familiar with this word "ostenting" in this sentence "ostenting his disdain towards Basiliscus"
• Several footnotes have no notes, i.e., they're like this: "^ a b c d e f g h i j k"
• There are a lot of instances of years wikilinked when not accompanied by a month and day. While not wrong, make sure it's helping to further the story -- see WP:CONTEXT and its policy of "Only make links that are relevant to the context."
• Also, your reference section should be just the full citation to your source, while the page numbers should go with the corresponding footnote...

plange 01:06, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

Never mind on flaky footnotes thing not having rest of citation -- cite.php is having issues and I did a purge on the page and it fixed it!

Thanks for the review. I mostly followed your suggestions, with some notes:

• As regards the rejection of Nicephorus Gregoras figures, the rejection is made by Gibbon, who is cited at the end of the paragraph (the paragraph is heavly based on Gibbon);
• "impelled" -> "propelled";
• the Isaurian officers were associated with Leo, but I wanted to stress that it was Leo who associated them in order to balance the Germanic influence, so I choose "associated by". Should I change it?
• "ostenting" is arcaic, and has been changed in "showing";
• Are you sure about the pages in notes? The cite book template has a pages parameter, so I tought it was meant to be filled when a subset of the book has been used.

--BlaiseMuhaddib 13:56, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

• re: the rejection, I might weave Gibbon into that sentence just so it's clear who's doing the rejecting.
• How about: "did not like the Isaurian officers that Leo I affiliated with in order to reduce his dependency on the Ostrogoths" (also changed dependency by to dependency on)
• I'm reasonably sure I'm right-- that pages param is used if you're using the cite template in your ref tag. Since you're doing the CMS style (which I prefer too) the reader needs to know which page the particular part you cited is pulled from. I will get another opinion though, as I'm still kinda new...

plange 05:13, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

I rewrote the bit about the number of ships in the fleet, let me know if now it goes better. I also adopted the formulation you suggested about the Isaurian affiliation.

As regards the pages in the footnotes, my opinion is that the current way is better, since it shortens the list of notes. There are no problems for those who want to check the references, since only few pages of each reference is actually used.--BlaiseMuhaddib 13:04, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

(Plange asked me to comment here.)

The method currently used would probably be a valid—if rarely used—form of citation if all the citations were in that form. At the moment, however, some page numbers are listed in the references, while others (and their associated works) are present only in the notes (e.g. Krautschick, Samuel, etc.). I would suggest having all page numbers in one place—either directly in the footnotes with no page numbers in the reference list, or directly in the reference list with no numbers in the footnotes—but definitely not mixing the two, which is rather confusing. Kirill Lokshin 02:44, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

I put all of the citations with pages in the reference section, with the footnotes only referring the work cited. The only exceptions are the references for claims made in the footnotes themselves, but otherwise not recalled by the text. Let me know if this is good.--BlaiseMuhaddib 15:29, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

Seems fine to me. Kirill Lokshin 15:56, 5 September 2006 (UTC)