Talk:Alpamysh

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An entry from Alpamysh appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know? column on April 3, 2007.
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Alpamysh was a good article nominee, but did not meet the good article criteria at the time. There are suggestions below for improving the article. Once these are addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.

Reviewed version: April 14, 2007

Contents

[edit] Comments

[edit] Copyvio

The text was copied from an e-book found at this site. According to the copyright information from the site, this donated e-book is under copyright. -- Whpq 21:38, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

all true, give me 30 minutes to re-write it. Thank you. --Wisconsin96 21:48, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
I added several new sources, quotes, links and removed excessive excerpts from the one source (Paksoy). Currently, the page is looks as a normal beginning stub. --Wisconsin96 00:43, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
Despite the rewrite, the article still contains verbatim copies of the text that I have referenced. If you need the time to do a proper rewrite, then just let the article be deleted. You can then write the article properly, and add it back to Wikipedia without the copying. For reference, I point you to the lead sentence of the article which is a verbatim copy of the source text. I am adding the copyvio tag back. -- Whpq 12:42, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
where is the text, how can I edit it further? all references were given, by the way, to Paksoy, and with more time my revised version could be revised further with no problem. Let's bring the text back and edit it more. --Wisconsin96 20:54, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
The article was deleted because it still contains verbatim copying from the source. You need to write the article in your own words. -- Whpq 21:04, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
It had a lot of quotes and research unrelated to the Paksoy article, to which full attribution was made. Can the deleted version be seen, I did not save my own writings? --Wisconsin96 22:18, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] But What Is It?

The article talks about its significance, but it doesn't say what the Alpamysh is. How about a summary of the plot, at least? David Bofinger 06:55, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

good point, shall do it right away. --Wisconsin96 20:27, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
done. --Wisconsin96 21:55, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Failed good article

There's some good material here, but the article is not broad enough in its coverage for GA. See section 3 of "What is a good article?" for more details.

A couple of specific points:

  • This sentence in the lead: "The tale of Alpamish was supplanted in ninth-tenth centuries from Altay mountains to Syr-darya river by the Oghuz Turks, where the story line continued on independently and became part of the Salor-Kazan tale, one of the main characters in the Book of Dede Korkut" is unclear to me. The Oghuz Turks are a people, so they can't supplant a tale; I think you mean something like "The tale of Alpamish was supplanted in ninth-tenth centuries from Altay mountains to Syr-darya river in the traditions of the Oghuz Turks, for whom the story line became part of the tale of Salor-Kazan in the Book of Dede Korkut." Could you clarify please?
  • This sentence is also a little clumsy: "Alpamish is one of the best known Turkic epics from among a total of well over 1,000 recorded epics among the Mongolian and Turkic language families by international scholars." Do you mean something like "Alpamish is one of the best known Turkic epics from among a total of well over 1,000 epics among the Mongolian and Turkic language families that have been recorded by international scholars"? If so, I'd cut everything after "families"; I think you're trying to establish the credentials of the people who have recorded the epics, but that's not really necessary to your point here. Anyway, the sentence needs a little clarification.

The main problem, however, is that the article is insufficiently broad in its coverage. Take a look at Epic of King Gesar, just as an example of an article about a major epic. (It's not a GA and I'm not suggesting it should be; it's just a similar article.) There are separate discussions of cultural roots, performance, relation of the epic to reality, and the history of manuscripts and scholarly translations. Does the Alpamysh dastan get a lot of cultural references in present-day Turkic culture? Is it taught in schools? Have there been adaptations of the story to other media? I think the article needs to cover the cultural context, the historical transmission of the story and how it was captured in written form, and so on. The Trial of Alpamysh sounds interesting; how about a little more about that?

Some additional suggestions, which don't need to be addressed to meet GA:

  • Consider moving some material out of the lead. Specifically, the two lists of alternative names and ways to write "Alpamysh"; this is good information but it's a bit distracting right at the start of the article. I'd also suggest that you drop the reference to "according to scholars . . . "; just put the information in, and mention the source in a reference.
  • You mention the repression of Turkic identify by the Soviet Union. It would be good if you can find a source for this; I'm not going to fail the article on this, because I don't think it's really controversial, but ideally you should have something like a respected history of the Soviet Union that discusses their repression of local cultural identities. If you can find one that talks about such things as repressing oral histories, or which provides details, that would be great.
  • Can you find a relevant image for this? Ideally it would be an image of an early manuscript, or of an enactment or performance, or even related artwork.
  • Finally, there's a long unreferenced section in the synopsis. I assume this synopsis deals solely with the Uzbek variation. It could presumably all be sourced from one reference, and I don't think you need to add a ref to each sentence or paragraph. However, I think if you don't add detailed refs, you need to make it clearer at the top of that section that the following synopsis is drawn from a specific reference, and cite that reference.

-- Mike Christie (talk) 19:43, 14 April 2007 (UTC)