Talk:Kaundinya

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An entry from Kaundinya appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know? column on 30 November 2006.

	Kaundinya has been listed as one of the Philosophy and religion good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can delist it, or ask for a reassessment.
July 18, 2007 Good article nominee Listed

[edit] Good article nomination on hold

This article is stable, neutral, and quite well written. But it is not yet sufficiently broad in its coverage of the topic and more content is needed.

I would like to see an expanded lead section, perhaps three or four paragraphs long, which summarises the main points of the article (see WP:LEAD). I would also suggest a section immediately following the lead where more context is given for those readers who are unfamiliar with basic Buddhist history and terminology. Some events surrounding the birth of Siddartha at Lumbini and his early life could be usefully discussed here.

Later in the article, there seems to be a sudden jump to the "Later years" section and I wonder if some additional material could smooth the transition to this section. I found the second last paragraph of the article (about reincarnations) difficult to follow and think it should be re-written.

My other main suggestion is that the citations be improved by making sure that references to books include page number where possible. More than one in-text citation may be needed to support infomation provided in long paragraphs.

I've decided to put this article on hold as the article has the potential for GA status, however the issues noted above must be dealt with before GA status can be awarded. I hope that this can be addressed within the seven days allowed by on hold, and wish you all the best with your editing... -- Johnfos 10:36, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

Hi John. Thanks for the detailed comments. The lead was indeed an oversight, I forgot to expand it as necessary, but have now done so. In regards to the lead, it is now about 1/6 or 1/7 of the main body text. I feel that increasing it any more would make the lead too diluted with respect to the main text.

I have added a little bit about Siddhartha's upbringing and the attempts to shield him from suffering. I also noted that he was the only son in 20 years of marriage so Suddhodana expected more from him. I think this gives people more context on what the historical persepctive is. With regards to Buddhist doctrine, I'm not sure that this is the place to give definitions of karma and reincarnation, and these concepts are quite popular in the western world nowadays so I think people have a basic idea.

I managed to scounge out a bit more info. I forgot that I had not finished going through the encyclopedia article when I last did this page in January. But that seems to be the extent of the details in Buddhist textbooks and such. I also added a bit about his nephew Punna, who later became one of the leading disciples. Hopefully this info about proselytising makes it smoother to the later years, but I could not find more info about any notable developments, eg unlike Devadatta's assassination attempts and other non-clockwork type things.

The encyclopedia article is actually only 2 pages long. It was typo in the ref, so one ref in that regard should be enough

In the reincarnations section, I have given a bit more context at the start.

I hope these are improvements. Blnguyen (bananabucket) 04:03, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the improvements. I'm pleased to be able to award GA status. If you get a chance to put a few in-text citations in the lead, and explain a few basic terms such as bhikkhu and arahant, that would benefit the general reader. Thanks. -- Johnfos 05:52, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Red links

Are all the red links potential articles? If not, they need not be wikilinked. It doesn't look good in the article and it confuses many new readers. LaraLove 14:56, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

Yes, they are important things but unfortunately the coverage of Buddhism on wikipedia is poor. Gautama Buddha's five lead disciples were Moggallana, Sariputta, Anuruddha, Ananda and Mahakassapa. See how stubby all of them are. Blnguyen (bananabucket) 01:09, 19 July 2007 (UTC)