Talk:L'Anse aux Meadows/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Madalibi (talk · contribs) 05:50, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

I will review this article in the next few days. Madalibi (talk) 05:50, 31 January 2014 (UTC)

Here is my (incomplete) review:

Toolbox

• No DAB links
• Several external links are to articles for which journal subscription is required, but this is not a problem as such. For more comments on external links, see the section called "Notes and references" below.

Prose

• "French Canadian map": not sure a map can be "French Canadian". Even if there is no link to French Canadian, this is what the term evokes. Perhaps "French-language Canadian map" or "French Canadian map"?
• Still about that map, the "L'Anse aux Meadows" official website calls it "an 1862 French chart". Should we call it a chart and link to Nautical chart?
• Helge Ingstad refuted this theory: since it is not proven that L'Anse aux Meadows was part of "Vinland", it may not be appropriate to say Ingstad really refuted previous theories. You could say instead that "Helge Instad, however, argued that..." or "Helge Ingstad disagreed and argued instead that..." This formulation would connect better to the next sentence, which starts with "This speculation..."
• He thought that areas along the American Atlantic coast were not suitable for them. What were his arguments (in a nutshell)?
• the characteristics of structures and artifacts: "dwellings" would be clearer than "structures" (if this is indeed what "structures" refers to).
• based on the relative mass of the stone used: not clear what this means, as there not other references to stones in the paragraph.
  

[TO BE CONTINUED...]

Name of the site

• I don't think it's appropriate to present the French derivation of "L'Anse aux Meadows" from "L'Anse aux Méduses" as a fact. I notice that many sources and websites present "L'Anse aux Méduses" as a possible etymology rather than a certain one. A direct move from "L'Anse à la Médée" to "L'Anse aux Méduses" is unlikely without a transitional term like "L'Anse à la Méduse". And without written evidence like that 1862 chart, we don't know either way! All the official website of "L'Anse aux Meadows" says about the name of the site is this: The earliest recorded name for L'Anse aux Meadows appears on an 1862 French chart as Anse à la Médée or "Medee's Cove." The name is probably from "Medea," the heroine of Greek tragedy, after whom many 17th and 18th century ships were named. Settlements and shore stations were often named after ships. After the English settled in the area the name was anglicized to its present form. The bay in front of the village is still called Medee Bay.[1] Those who run the website certainly know about the "L'Anse aux Méduses" hypothesis, so they must have had a good reason not to include it in there. Suggestion: present "L'Anse aux Méduses" as a hypothesis rather than a fact.

Structure

• In the section on "Discovery and significance", three paragraphs devoted to pre-European settlements seem to cut the section in half, because they come between a claim that L'Anse aux Meadows is of confirmed Norse origin, and another claim that L'Anse aux Meadows is the only confirmed Norse site in North America. I think the most logical order of presentation for the article as a whole would be "Discovery and significance" (Ingstad's theories, brief mention of excavations from 1961 to 1968, and a brief claim that the site they discovered has been confirmed to be of Norse origins), "Norse settlement" (renamed from "Settlement": the transition would be fluid from the end of the previous section), "Pre-European settlements" (new section), and "Connection with Vinland sagas".
• The first mention of North America was by the German cleric Adam of Bremen in 1073: Considering how much speculation there is around the location (or even existence) of "Vinland", it is inappropriate to present this claim as a fact. All we have to support it is a citation from a 1974 article. (Note also that Adam's claims about vines goes against the hypothesis that helped Helge Ingstad to discover the L'Anse aux Meadows site.) Unless you present lots of reliable sources showing that there is a scholarly consensus that Adam de Bremen's text was the first to mention North America, I suggest you reword this sentence or delete it altogether. In any case I think this sentence, the quotation, and the sentence that follows would belong better under the Vinland section, where it would be given better context. [UPDATE: the 1974 article cited in the note states that, The first mention of Vinland is by the German cleric, Adam de Bremen, who was writing in about 1073. Changing "Vinland" to "North America" constitutes original research!]
• [NOTE: I made (and immediately reverted) a trial edit to show you what the article could look like after reshuffling and with fewer images. let me know if you think this looks better.]

Content
A few things are missing before the article can be considered complete:

• A few words on the community today (since L'Anse aux Meadows is an inhabited village): there is a short paragraph on this aspect of the site at http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/en/article/lanse-aux-meadows/.
• A referenced explanation to when the site was chosen as a World Heritage Site. The best place to insert this information is probably under "Discovery and significance".

Notes and references (all footnote numbers are to this version):

• Three of the four references to Stine Ingstad are to pages that are outside the page range mentioned in the bibliography. The bibliography should cite the entire book rather than a section of it.
• Note 1: you need a retrieval date, and arguably the author's name.
• Note 4 is to the index page of the L'Anse aux Meadows website: there must be a more specific page within that website that supports the information presented in the paragraph.
• Note 7 to that same index page seems unnecessary, unless you can find another more specific page to support info on pre-European settlements. Incidentally, the note says "Retrieved 006-04-12", a typo.
• Notes 8, 9, and 20: retrieval dates are not necessary for printed books and articles that are accessed online through JSTOR. These printed works are not web sources: they are just printed works that are available online.
• Note 8, which is the only reference to two full paragraphs of information on the Dorset people, is an article about Dorset settlements in Northern Manitoba. I accessed the article through my free JSTOR account, but it does not even mention L'Anse aux Meadows, let alone the dimensions of the Dorset houses found there. Are you sure the reference is right?
• Note 9: R.M. Perkins's article called "Norse Implications" seems to be part 5 ("V") of a larger work, probably on the fake Vinland map. Could you indicate either the complete title of that work, or at least add "V." to the article title?
• Note 13: the title contains "An Encyclopedia" twice, and the page numbers are incomplete.
• Note 16 to the Canadian Encyclopedia is missing the article author, the date of publication, and the access date. More seriously, that article does not mention any of the information it is used to support. Am I missing something?
• Note 20 only supports the last sentence of the paragraph it is placed in. The first two sentences of that paragraph – Norse sagas are written versions of older oral traditions. Two Icelandic sagas, commonly called the Saga of the Greenlanders and the Saga of Eric the Red, describe the experiences of Norse Greenlanders who discovered and attempted to settle land to the west of Greenland, which they called Vinland. – therefore need a reference, because these statements of fact may be chalenged.
• I'm not sure why the "References" section contains only some of the printed sources mentioned in the footnotes, and why only some of the references are in Harvard format while others are not. You should choose one citation format and stick to it (in this case full citations would probably look best), and if you want to have a bibliography, include all the cited articles and books into it.
• A minor issue: some author names appear in a different font than others.
• F. Donald Logan's The Vikings in History, Third edition (Routledge, 2005) is available on Google Books. Pages 82 to 89 (within a chapter titled "The Vikings and the New World") are all about L'Anse aux Meadows.[2] Logan is Emeritus Professor of History at Emmanuel College, Boston, so his book would seem to be a reliable source. The content of that book could replace some of the faulty references mentioned above!

Images

• I'm not sure we need such a long gallery of images. Pictures of buildings A, B, E, G, and J, seem too similar to deserve inclusion. So are two different pictures of a generic-looking boat. I moved and removed some of them as part of my trial edit (see "Structure" above) to show you what the article could look like with a smaller gallery.
• [PENDING: review of license tags and image captions]

General assessment: this is an interesting and well written article on a little corner of my country that I've never been to. It suffers from many content issues, so I've been taking more time than planned (five hours, and I'm still not done). I started with a "spotcheck" of the sources to look for copyvios. I found none, but I discovered many issues with verifiability instead. See "Name of the site", "Structure" (point 2), and "Notes and references" for details. I'm taking a break. I will look at the images and at the prose of the rest of the article in the next few days. Meanwhile, putting the article on hold to let the nominator work on the improvements! Madalibi (talk) 09:06, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

FAILED I failed the GA review, because the nominator made three GA nominations in about half an hour on 23 December 2013 (see that editor's contributions) without having made a single contribution to any of them, and did not respond to the first two reviews – Talk:Eiffel Tower/GA1 and Talk:The Shard/GA1 – which were of course failed. I don't expect a reply to this one either, so I'm failing right away. I will edit the article myself in light of what I found when I prepared the review, and I might present it again for GA in the future. Madalibi (talk) 11:39, 1 February 2014 (UTC)