Talk:Sobekneferu/GA1

Page contents not supported in other languages.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

GA Review[edit]

Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch

Reviewer: Caeciliusinhorto (talk · contribs) 17:14, 9 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]


An interesting article. Review coming shortly. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 17:14, 9 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The prose is mostly fine for GA (if this were at FAC, I might be more picky here!), but I still have a few suggestions:

  • "Notably, Sobekneferu adopted the full royal titulary, distinguishing herself from prior female pharaohs." - WP:WTW doesn't like "notably" in WikiVoice, and nor do I – I would suggest "Unlike prior female pharaohs, Sobekneferu adopted the full royal titulary".
  • Your proposed rephrase is fine, but I wonder if it'd also work just to drop the word 'notably' or rephrase to 'Sobekneferu distinguished herself from prior female pharaohs by adopting the full royal titulary'.
    • Looking at the changes you've made, I think just dropping "notably" is fine here. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 15:51, 10 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • "Though two kings of the Thirteenth Dynasty, Sobekhotep I and Sonbef, are attested to him" this is pretty awkward. I assume that what it must mean is that Sobekhotep and Sonbef are attested as children of Amenemhat IV? "attested to him" is pretty unclear, though.
  • I meant to write 'attributed', not 'attested' here. It's not clear whether they are actually his sons, the connection between them is in nomen 'ỉmn-m-hꜣt' [Amenemhat]. I don't know if just correcting the error helps.
    • This is better, though I think still could be clearer. How about something like: Sobekneferu's accession may have been motivated by a lack of male heir for Amenemhat IV. However, two Thirteenth Dynasty kings, Sobekhotep I and Sonbef, have been identified as possible sons of his based on their shared nomen 'Amenemhat'. As such, Sobekneferu may have usurped the throne after Amenemhat's death, viewing his heirs as illegitimate.?
      • Done.
  • "Setibhor is suggested to have been a female king regnant". Another phrasing which reads awkwardly to me. I would write "Setibhor may have been a female king regnant".
  • Done with additional tweaking.
  • "At the time of her accession": I assume that this is Sobekneferu's accession, but the article has mentioned three other women since it last discussed her, and this is the beginning of a new paragraph so we should be clear who we are talking about here.
  • Done.
  • "there is limited evidence of the events during his reign": can we say "little is known of events during his reign"?
  • Done.
  • Done.

I'm also not sure about "the beautiful Nitocris" in Wikipedia's voice. Even if Nitocris' beauty were relevant to this article, this would be the kind of opinion-based statement that we should be attributing, rather than stating as fact; as it is, I'd cut the extra colour and just say "the kingship of Nitocris", prosaic as that may be.

  • I meant to put it in quotes, as it's the Greek historians who invented this legendary story of a beautiful woman that got revenge on the murderers of her brother and threw herself into a burning pit so that no-one could exact revenge against her, but without that full context it'd just stick out like a sore thumb, so removed.

Other than these few prose points (and some hopefully uncontroversial minor copyediting in this series of edits), I think this article is well on its way to GA status. Works cited all seem to be reliable enough; spotchecks of a couple of sources found no issues (either of copyvio or misuse of sources). Images are all fine. As an ancient history article, there are the inevitable omissions of things that you would expect to find in a modern biography, but where we just don't know very much the article often explicitly says that, and given the good articles that I write I'm in no position to complain about that! Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 18:44, 9 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I completely forgot to add this page to my watchlist after the notification. So sorry. I've addressed your prose comments, though you'll want to take a second look at the first two points you made. Thanks for the review Caeciliusinhorto. Let me know if you have further suggestions or comments (I've added the page to my watchlist now). Mr rnddude (talk) 06:07, 10 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Suggested a further tweak to the second point, but I'm happy with the change you made in the lead. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 15:52, 10 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Done. Mr rnddude (talk) 18:11, 10 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Just did a final read through. This is one of those articles where it feels like there ought to be more that we can say about the topic, but because of the nature of the sources there just isn't any more that we can cover. So despite my personal wish to know more about Sobekneferu (get on that, Egyptologists!) I think this does meet the GA criteria, and I'm happy to pass it. Congratulations! Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 15:08, 12 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]