Wikipedia:Peer review/Philitas of Cos/archive1

Philitas of Cos

This peer review discussion has been closed.
Thinking of FAC; need other pairs of eyes to look for items that would be obvious to an expert but are confusing to general readers, along with any other gotches. Also, this article is relatively brief, as not all that much is known about this important figure; is the article too short to be featured?

Thanks, Eubulides (talk) 20:22, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

• A script has been used to generate a semi-automated review of the article for issues relating to grammar and house style; it can be found on the automated peer review page for September 2008.

The automated review recommended an expanded lead and thorough copyediting for "engaging, even brilliant" prose. I expanded the lead, and hope the prose is engaging and brilliant enough. Eubulides (talk) 22:06, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

Yannismarou

• "was the most important intellectual in the early years of Hellenistic civilization, and was the first major writer who was both a poet and a scholar." Not an example of brilliant prose. And it is the introducing sentence. The rest however reads quite well IMO (though not a native English speaker).
• "A Greek associated with Alexandria, he flourished in the second half of the 4th century BC". Check MoS about wikilinking. The last trend in FAC is not to link anything (neither full dates or simple years or centuries).
• Some sources' full data are in "Bibliography"; some other full data are in "References". Why did you choose not to have all the books together? For instance, why Kayser, Bach etc. aren't they together with Spanoudakis, and the full data are in References? Maybe (and this is just an idea not necessarily correct) you could think about turning "Bibliography" into a prose section explaining how his fragments survived diachronically and are now available to us.
• Reading the picture in the infobox I see that most sources say that this is not Philitas' image. Then, why should it be there? Just for the sake of having an image?
• "and his mother, perhaps, Euctione". Why perhaps? Which is the ancient source here?
• WP:MOS needs " " between any number and unit, symbol or abbreviation that it goes with, such as 92 BC or c. 340. Have a look here. I did some of this stuff. Check the rest.
• "4th century BC", "Sixth Century B.C.". Inconsistencies in style. I fixed this one. Check the rest.
• If this note at the end of the article is after you work inaccurate, remove it.

The article is short, but you said yourself that we don't know much about his life. I don't know therefore if it can be further expanded. I liked it in general, but I am not sure if it is ready for FAC; you could try first GAC for further feedback.--Yannismarou (talk) 08:22, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the review. To address the points one by one:

• This edit trims one of the "was"es from the intro sentence. I don't see an easy way to trim the other one; for what it's worth, the 2nd one doesn't grate on my ear.
• Your edit removed the wiklink to 4th century BC; thanks. I was never much of a fan of wikilinking to dates.
• Philitas of Cos #Bibliography is about Philitas' works (as published in several editions). They're all books; I'm not sure what is meant by "all the books together". Only Spanoudakis is cited in References because his edition's commentary is in English, and the other editions' are not.
• Image:Pseudo-Seneca-Brogi.jpg was there because it is an ancient representation of a type of person that Philitas is supposed to have looked like. It is no more a portrait of Philitas than it is of Hesiod (an article that also uses that image), as the ancient sculptor was just imagining the type (and had no access to an actual portrait of either Hesiod or Philitas). It is a bit of a liberty, yes, but this sort of thing is common in scholarly works that talk about ancient authors, so long as the image is accurately identified. For the same purpose, Andrew Stewart in The New Posidippus: A Hellenistic Poetry Book (2005, ISBN 0199267812), page 201, uses a photograph of a bronze dubbed Philospher from the Antikythera wreck (c. 250–200 BC) to illustrate his discussion of the (now-lost) Hecataeus bronze of Philitas. This is a much-better source than the 19th-century Brizio speculation, so I switched to Image:Antikythera philosopher.JPG, an image of the Philosopher. Thanks for bringing this up.
• The cited source (Spanoudakis, p. 26) says of Philitas' parents: "His father was called Τήλεφος (Σ Theoc. Tt. 12a?, b, Procl. T. 18a — and Σ A.R. fr. 22?) and if T. 12a is correctly supplemented, his mother Εὐκτιόνη." I made this edit to fold this information in.
• I checked for more spaces-before-"BC" problems and made this edit to fix what I found.
• Normally the text uses the usual Wikipedia style "4th century BC", but "Sixth Century B.C." is part of the title of a work, so we should leave that alone. I searched for other inconsistencies with the usual Wikipedia style and found and fixed one, and also changed the title back to match that of the original book.
• By "If this note at the end of the article is after you work inaccurate" I assume you are referring to the {{1911}}, which says "This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)". That note is still accurate; some of the phrases in Philitas of Cos are still taken from the 1911 encyclopedia.

Thanks again for your nice review; I hope I've addressed all the points satisfactorily. Eubulides (talk) 19:47, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

P.S. I forgot to mention, the article went through GAC twice and is now listed as a good article. Eubulides (talk) 20:06, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Wronkiew

•	The first sentence should include the years of his birth and death, as per WP:MOSBIO.
•	You could get by with fewer inline citations in the introduction.
•	I think some references to three digit years could be improved by adding "the year" or "BC".
•	This sentence is too long: According to St. George Stock's analysis of the story in the Deipnosophistae (9.401e) of Athenaeus of Naucratis, Philitas worried so much over the liar paradox that he wasted away and died of insomnia, as, according to Athenaeus, his epitaph recorded: Suggested replacement, which can probably be improved further: Philitas worried so much over the liar paradox that he wasted away and died of insomnia, according to St. George Stock's analysis of the story in the Deipnosophistae (9.401e) of Athenaeus of Naucratis. According to Athenaeus, his epitaph recorded:
•	Again with this one: His pupil Hermesianax wrote that a statue of him was erected by the people of Cos, depicting him as "frail with all the glosses"; his contemporary Posidippus wrote that a bronze of Philitas in old age was commissioned from the sculptor Hecataeus of Lesbos by Ptolemy II Philadelphus, and that it "included nothing from the physique of heroes.
•	A short definition of preceptor would help to establish continuity with the later sentence "later tutors of Ptolemaic royal offspring..."
•	"After he returned to Cos he seems to have led a brotherhood of poets including Theocritus and Aratus" needs a reference citation.
•	Very briefly explain notation such as "9.401e" on first use.
•	"Fictitious funerary epigram merely pokes fun at Philitas' literary exactitude" uses uncommon words unnecessarily. Replace it with something simpler.
•	"Fragments quoted in later authors" should be "fragments quoted by later authors".
•	Rework sentences at the beginning of paragraphs to say the most familiar things first, for example this sentence: Philitas wrote Disorderly Words (Ἂτακτοι γλῶσσαι, Ataktoi glôssai), a vocabulary explaining the meanings of rare and obscure poetic words, including words peculiar to certain dialects. Philitas wrote a vocabulary explaining the meanings of rare and obscure poetic words, including words peculiar to certain dialects, titled Disorderly Words (Ἂτακτοι γλῶσσαι, Ataktoi glôssai).
•	"His most famous was Demeter (elegiacs)" it might be helpful to expand this to say again that elegiacs is a poetic style.

As a non-expert in Greek history, I found this article to be unnecessarily difficult to comprehend. There's plenty of room to add content to this short article, and I think you should use it by explaining some less common terms. Also, the article would be more readable if you broke up your longer sentences. Hope this helps. Wronkiew (talk) 22:36, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Also, since you explicitly asked for it, here is a list of terms in the article that I was not entirely familiar with: lexical study, elegiac verse, Dodecanese island, Anatolia, Suda, preceptor, Ptolemaic, grammarian, Antigonus I Monophthalmus, Megarian dialectic, Deipnosophistae, Boeotia, Persephone, hexameters, paegnia, epigram, and Musaeum. These terms could use some explanation. For example, nowhere in the article is it stated that Cos is an island in the Aegean Sea. Wronkiew (talk) 23:27, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for that review, particularly for the list of unfamiliar terms. I made a series of edits that tried to address each of your points. With one exception: I couldn't come up with a good definition of grammarian that didn't make matters worse ("writer about and teacher of grammar"? but that's pretty wordy, and if grammarian is unfamiliar then grammar is also likely to be unfamiliar too), so I left grammarian alone and hope its wikilink to Grammarian will suffice. Eubulides (talk) 06:54, 7 September 2008 (UTC)