Talk:List of archaeologically attested women from the ancient Mediterranean region

Wiki Education assignment: Classical Archaeology

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 9 January 2024 and 26 April 2024. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): SaxicolousArtume, 14141424c13131, Swiftmelody27, Brokendiscdrive, Da.Rich.Athenian.Lady, Doglover519, Happyracoon, 12Anonymous!, Birthdaycakepop, K.howard.1879, WofulWarrior131, Ys.uc55, KandiGr4ves (article contribs).

— Assignment last updated by Brianda (Wiki Ed) (talk) 22:51, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

Page discussion

Women with unknown names can be labeled by descriptive titles or customary designations (e.g., Rich Athenian Lady).

This page is beginning life as a WikiEdu project. Student entries will be moved from student sandboxes on April 2, 2024. — Preceding unsigned comment added by EtruscanMayhem (talk • contribs) 18:27, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

@User:Sage, We discussed this list during office hours recently and you gave me some suggestions for improving it. Can you take a quick look to provide any other feedback now that I have made those changes? I'll also try to get Brianda and Helaine to check it out. Thanks.

--EtruscanMayhem (talk) 15:43, 18 April 2024 (UTC)

@EtruscanMayhem: I think this is going in the right direction! Here's my feedback:

• Title should be lower case except for proper nouns.
• The first paragraph has somewhat of an argumentative/persuasive tone. I recommend either cutting some of the editorializing language that focuses on justifying the topic, or relying on quotations or explicitly attributed views from scholars about the importance of looking at archaeological examples to rectify the focus on elite women in the manuscript tradition. I think based on the sources, you can probably still cover almost all the ground that is in that first paragraph, it just needs to be more explicitly a summary of what others have written so that it won't be confused with being original synthesis.
• Typical Wikipedia style is to more strictly separate citations from editorial footnotes, and to cite each source in a separate footnote. A note like "This is not to say that no writings by women survive." would probably be better as a separate ref, and Blundell and Caldelli should each be cited separately.
• Rather than a complete list of references separately from the footnotes, I would suggest limiting the sources list at the end to the ones that address the scope/concept of this list more generally (ie, the ones that are primarily about the importance of archaeological evidence vs manuscript evidence, or ones that synthesize the literature to provide an archaelogical perspective on women in the ancient Mediterranean), and include the full source details as part of the inline citations for the sources that are not used in the intro but are used for individual entries in the table.

If you can get this to the point where there's at least a sentence and citation for each table entry, I think this will be ready to go live.

--Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:39, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

Thanks so much for your suggestions. I followed as much as I could, although I couldn't change the footnote instructions for the students at this late date, as their assignment is due in a few days. For now I have limited the references at the bottom using in-line citations, and will change things up going forward.

Each student entry will be about 250 words, so the intent is to have a pretty robust list by end of week. EtruscanMayhem (talk) 00:12, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

Significant discussion about this list occurred on the Project: Classical Greece and Rome talk page on April 23-25 2024. [1] ```` — Preceding unsigned comment added by EtruscanMayhem (talk • contribs) 20:51, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

Scope

Presumably, as a student project, the scope of "archaeologically attested women from the ancient Mediterranean" was chosen so that each student would have at least one figure to work on, but it does leave the article in a rather odd position scope-wise. As far as I can see, there is no source that purports to address the selected scope, which means that there was at least some WP:SYNTH/WP:OR in choosing the title of the article—it should be the other way around, with the article title chosen because of what the sources address.

As a student project where the editors have presumably gone on to other things, I don't expect these issues to be addressed at all in the near future, but if anyone comes across this post in the years to come and wishes to address it, please ping me. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 21:30, 2 May 2024 (UTC)

Not sure which aspect of the scope your referencing. The regional scope or the archaeology, or both. I can comment if you clarify.

If it hasn't been deleted, more entries will be added to the list this coming fall semester. EtruscanMayhem (talk) 21:51, 2 May 2024 (UTC)

Good to hear; I doubt it will be deleted then. I was referring to the regional and temporal scope, which seems somewhat arbitrary. Can you clarify if there was something I missed? ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 22:26, 2 May 2024 (UTC)