Wikipedia:Peer review/Ancient Egyptian deities/archive1

Ancient Egyptian deities

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review for some final polishing before FAC. My biggest issue is what to do about the list of deities at the end of the article; see this talk page section for prior discussion about the list.

Thanks, A. Parrot (talk) 03:54, 4 April 2013 (UTC)

Comments from Tim riley

This is a very fine article. You manage to use dozens of terms and names unfamiliar to most readers while at the same time remaining comprehensible to the layman. The structure of the article works well (and must have taken a lot of thinking out). As to your particular question, I don't think it helpful to the reader to have an incomplete list of deities at the end. What does it add? Anyone looking for an individual deity can look him or her up at List of Egyptian deities and the incompleteness of the selective list here will irritate those who know anything of the subject. (My own eyebrows went up when I saw Thoth described as "ibis-headed" sans phrase – I am a personal friend of the British Museum's Baboon Thoth). There is also the question of how authoritative the sub-categories in the list are. Some might say at FAC that you need to cite a reliable source for the chosen categories. I'd dispense with the list, but if you do (and even if you don't) you need to add a prominent link to the stand-alone list. That list needs a fair bit of work, but that's another matter.

In the ordinary way of things I usually comment at PR on infelicitious prose, typos, ambiguities and so forth, but I can find nothing to quibble at here. Please let me know when you put the article up for FAC. It will be a pleasure to support it. – Tim riley (talk) 12:13, 14 April 2013 (UTC)

Thank you very much for the review, and for the encouragement. As for the list, your thinking pretty much agrees with mine. The only issue is that list of Egyptian deities is nothing more than somebody's duplicate of this one, so one could see it as the list that doesn't add anything. If it could be turned into a redirect back to this article, and if this article's list could be rewritten to be coherent, thorough, and compact, combining the list of deities and the article that explains what they are in one place might serve the reader better than dividing them. But rewriting the list that way probably isn't possible, so I suppose it's best to remove it here and leave the problems in the stand-alone list for some other time. One question: should I link that list in a "see also" section at the end of the article, in a hatnote at the top, or both? A. Parrot (talk) 18:29, 14 April 2013 (UTC)

Yes, the existing list article is lifted from the original here, and yes, it needs work (happy to chip in if I can be of use). I hope we'll have a complete-ish list of deities in due course, but that list does not belong in the present article, any more than, say, a complete list of compositions belongs in Mozart's article. I'm no expert on hatnotes and links, but my inclination in this case would be to go for both; if anyone thinks differently he or she can say so, but possession is nine points of the law, and FAC will smoke any objector out. Tim riley (talk) 19:44, 14 April 2013 (UTC)

Will do. A. Parrot (talk) 19:48, 14 April 2013 (UTC)