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Aspasia article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
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![]() | Aspasia is a featured article; it (or a previous version of it) has been identified as one of the best articles produced by the Wikipedia community. Even so, if you can update or improve it, please do so. | ||||||||||||
![]() | This article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page as Today's featured article on February 28, 2007. | ||||||||||||
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Fronticla, it is not POV to call someone "influential." I am not sure why you cannot seem to grasp this. Calling Pythagoras, for instance, "influential" in no way implies that I like or dislike him; it just means that his teachings impacted a lot of people. It is important that we note Aspasia's historical impact in the first sentence. Otherwise, the sentence just tells us she was "an immigrant" and that she was "the lover and partner of the statesman Pericles," which fails to explain why she even has an encyclopedia article in the first place. -- Katolophyromai ( talk) 21:10, 14 November 2017 (UTC)
The text says, "Her name, which means "the desired one . . . ." I think we need a source for this, or a breakdown into the component elements. Is it Greek? The Perseus encyclopedia interprets it as "Warmly Welcomed," but again without a source or support. NotkerQ ( talk) 19:11, 26 July 2020 (UTC)NotkerQ
Reviewing this old featured article as part of WP:URFA/2020, I am concerned that it may not meet the modern FA criteria. Most significantly, the article relies heavily on ancient writers – Plutarch, Xenophon, Thucydides, etc. – outdated nineteenth-century books, and sources of questionable reliability (e.g. a bachelor's degree thesis). By contrast, more modern sources – for example, this book (and its many reviews), this book, this article, this book, this article, and others – are cited only sparsely or not at all. This is particularly problematic since modern scholars seem to be skeptical of the traditional accounts of Aspasia's life, as the article explains. Some text lacks citations altogether. The lead is short, and the sections on literature and art need expansion. Verification may also be a problem: for instance, a scholarly consensus claim that "these statements are generally regarded as false" doesn't seem to be backed up by the cited source, and the same is true for the claim that "It is apparent that she belonged to a wealthy family" due to her education. If these concerns are not addressed, the article may be taken to featured article review, where editors will consider whether to delist it. Extraordinary Writ ( talk) 19:53, 13 January 2022 (UTC)
Following Extraordinary Writ's notice above about reassessing this article in light of the modern interpretation of the featured article criteria, I started doing some reading and pretty soon decided that while most of the actual content of the article is pretty solid, I have enough issues with the structure and sourcing that it might be easier(?!) to redraft it from scratch. Broadly my concerns with the article as it stands are:
Therefore, I've started to draft an alternative article on Aspasia from scratch which will try to fix these problems here. It's not yet complete – I still need to read at least the second half of Henry's book and Geraths & Kennerly's article "Painted Lady: Aspasia in Nineteenth Century European Art" in order to write up a "modern reception" section, and the lead is kinda minimalist at the moment and will need expanding once that is done – but I figure there's now enough there that interested parties can take a look at my proposed approach and tell me whether or not I'm being completely stupid in even suggesting this. Caeciliusinhorto ( talk) 10:47, 23 January 2022 (UTC)
Hellos, I came over for a read after seeing the note at WP:WIG. The article seems much improved, although I wonder how much an article can be revamped before it needs to go through a review process again. I added a a couple of wikilinks and had a few brief comments on readability:
Honoré Daumier's lithograph of Socrates at the House of Aspasia depicts as an Aspasia identified in its caption as a "lorette", an ambiguous social position which referred to "loose, vulgar or 'liberated' women"-this reads a bit garbled and also who is being quoted?
The twentieth century saw both interest in Aspasia separately from her relationships with men, and on the other hand more prurient concern with her sexualityi think that could be rephrased
Extraordinary Writ, Caeciliusinhorto, Mujinga does this article now meet the featured article criteria or is there still more work to do? Z1720 ( talk) 23:12, 23 March 2022 (UTC)
Aspasia plays a very important role in the AAA game Assassin's Creed Odyssey. A franchise which is known for it's storytelling. Should this be mentioned in the section on modern reception? The title of the section doesn't quite fit the contents of the section which focusses a lot on modern representations. Here's two sources (with potential spoilers): link 1, link 2. PizzaMan ♨♨♨ 21:03, 2 April 2022 (UTC)
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 23 August 2022 and 12 December 2022. Further details are available
on the course page. Student editor(s):
Patt0400 (
article contribs).
— Assignment last updated by Patt0400 ( talk) 18:04, 13 December 2022 (UTC)
@ Trakking: I really continue to think that the rhetoric sidebar is not helpful in this article. The sidebar denotes the article as "part of a series on rhetoric", but this article is not "on rhetoric", even if the topic of rhetoric comes up in it. You say in your edit summary that "Aspasia's connection to rhetoric is mentioned SEVEN times" in the article, which is true but that doesn't suggest a strong connection to the subject to me – that's seven uses of the word "rhetoric" in 2699 words. By comparison Quintilian, whose connection to rhetoric is clear, uses the word or its derivatives 22 times in the body text in only 2232 words, and Isocrates has 32 mentions in an even shorter article. On the other hand Aspasia uses the word "courtesan" six times, " hetaira" three (once overlapping with "courtesan"), and "prostitute"/"prostitution" four times, and yet we do not use any template connecting Aspasia to prostitution.
So much for the case for the sidebar. Against the sidebar we have WP:NPOV and WP:V. The sidebar uncritically lists Aspasia as a rhetorician: modern scholarship on Aspasia recognises that Aspasia has historically been associated with rhetoric, but does not call her a rhetorician without qualification. Madeleine Henry, for instance, discusses how e.g. Plato makes Aspasia the author of the funeral oration in Menexenus but does not say at any point that she was herself a rhetorician. In writing the article I was careful not to call Aspasia a rhetorician in wikivoice because the sources do not support that. Additionally, we have the fact that almost none of the links here are relevant to readers of this article. Other than the ancient figures already mentioned and linked in the body text of the article, I have a hard time imagining which of the links in this enormous template are going to be relevant to people reading about Aspasia. Caeciliusinhorto-public ( talk) 15:14, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
Being a hetaira is not something that will give a person historical significance. Nonsense. Phryne is the most obvious counterexample.
Aspasia is identified as a rhetorician and a teacher in Rhetoric throughout the article, if you haven't noticed.as I wrote most of the current article, I have in fact noticed that she is not identified either as a rhetorician or as a teacher of rhetoric: we are careful to say that she was portrayed in ancient sources as a rhetorician and teacher of rhetoric.
And she is mentioned as a prominent rhetorician several times in the main article on Rhetoric as well: by my count she is mentioned twice in rhetoric, once without a citation, and the other time qualified as "believed to be". At any rate, wikipedia articles are not a reliable source and when our wikipedia article on rhetoric contradicts the consensus of ancient historians then we should go with the academic consensus. Caeciliusinhorto-public ( talk) 16:36, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Aspasia article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
Archives: 1 |
![]() | Aspasia is a featured article; it (or a previous version of it) has been identified as one of the best articles produced by the Wikipedia community. Even so, if you can update or improve it, please do so. | ||||||||||||
![]() | This article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page as Today's featured article on February 28, 2007. | ||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||
Current status: Featured article |
![]() | This article is rated FA-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to multiple WikiProjects. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Fronticla, it is not POV to call someone "influential." I am not sure why you cannot seem to grasp this. Calling Pythagoras, for instance, "influential" in no way implies that I like or dislike him; it just means that his teachings impacted a lot of people. It is important that we note Aspasia's historical impact in the first sentence. Otherwise, the sentence just tells us she was "an immigrant" and that she was "the lover and partner of the statesman Pericles," which fails to explain why she even has an encyclopedia article in the first place. -- Katolophyromai ( talk) 21:10, 14 November 2017 (UTC)
The text says, "Her name, which means "the desired one . . . ." I think we need a source for this, or a breakdown into the component elements. Is it Greek? The Perseus encyclopedia interprets it as "Warmly Welcomed," but again without a source or support. NotkerQ ( talk) 19:11, 26 July 2020 (UTC)NotkerQ
Reviewing this old featured article as part of WP:URFA/2020, I am concerned that it may not meet the modern FA criteria. Most significantly, the article relies heavily on ancient writers – Plutarch, Xenophon, Thucydides, etc. – outdated nineteenth-century books, and sources of questionable reliability (e.g. a bachelor's degree thesis). By contrast, more modern sources – for example, this book (and its many reviews), this book, this article, this book, this article, and others – are cited only sparsely or not at all. This is particularly problematic since modern scholars seem to be skeptical of the traditional accounts of Aspasia's life, as the article explains. Some text lacks citations altogether. The lead is short, and the sections on literature and art need expansion. Verification may also be a problem: for instance, a scholarly consensus claim that "these statements are generally regarded as false" doesn't seem to be backed up by the cited source, and the same is true for the claim that "It is apparent that she belonged to a wealthy family" due to her education. If these concerns are not addressed, the article may be taken to featured article review, where editors will consider whether to delist it. Extraordinary Writ ( talk) 19:53, 13 January 2022 (UTC)
Following Extraordinary Writ's notice above about reassessing this article in light of the modern interpretation of the featured article criteria, I started doing some reading and pretty soon decided that while most of the actual content of the article is pretty solid, I have enough issues with the structure and sourcing that it might be easier(?!) to redraft it from scratch. Broadly my concerns with the article as it stands are:
Therefore, I've started to draft an alternative article on Aspasia from scratch which will try to fix these problems here. It's not yet complete – I still need to read at least the second half of Henry's book and Geraths & Kennerly's article "Painted Lady: Aspasia in Nineteenth Century European Art" in order to write up a "modern reception" section, and the lead is kinda minimalist at the moment and will need expanding once that is done – but I figure there's now enough there that interested parties can take a look at my proposed approach and tell me whether or not I'm being completely stupid in even suggesting this. Caeciliusinhorto ( talk) 10:47, 23 January 2022 (UTC)
Hellos, I came over for a read after seeing the note at WP:WIG. The article seems much improved, although I wonder how much an article can be revamped before it needs to go through a review process again. I added a a couple of wikilinks and had a few brief comments on readability:
Honoré Daumier's lithograph of Socrates at the House of Aspasia depicts as an Aspasia identified in its caption as a "lorette", an ambiguous social position which referred to "loose, vulgar or 'liberated' women"-this reads a bit garbled and also who is being quoted?
The twentieth century saw both interest in Aspasia separately from her relationships with men, and on the other hand more prurient concern with her sexualityi think that could be rephrased
Extraordinary Writ, Caeciliusinhorto, Mujinga does this article now meet the featured article criteria or is there still more work to do? Z1720 ( talk) 23:12, 23 March 2022 (UTC)
Aspasia plays a very important role in the AAA game Assassin's Creed Odyssey. A franchise which is known for it's storytelling. Should this be mentioned in the section on modern reception? The title of the section doesn't quite fit the contents of the section which focusses a lot on modern representations. Here's two sources (with potential spoilers): link 1, link 2. PizzaMan ♨♨♨ 21:03, 2 April 2022 (UTC)
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 23 August 2022 and 12 December 2022. Further details are available
on the course page. Student editor(s):
Patt0400 (
article contribs).
— Assignment last updated by Patt0400 ( talk) 18:04, 13 December 2022 (UTC)
@ Trakking: I really continue to think that the rhetoric sidebar is not helpful in this article. The sidebar denotes the article as "part of a series on rhetoric", but this article is not "on rhetoric", even if the topic of rhetoric comes up in it. You say in your edit summary that "Aspasia's connection to rhetoric is mentioned SEVEN times" in the article, which is true but that doesn't suggest a strong connection to the subject to me – that's seven uses of the word "rhetoric" in 2699 words. By comparison Quintilian, whose connection to rhetoric is clear, uses the word or its derivatives 22 times in the body text in only 2232 words, and Isocrates has 32 mentions in an even shorter article. On the other hand Aspasia uses the word "courtesan" six times, " hetaira" three (once overlapping with "courtesan"), and "prostitute"/"prostitution" four times, and yet we do not use any template connecting Aspasia to prostitution.
So much for the case for the sidebar. Against the sidebar we have WP:NPOV and WP:V. The sidebar uncritically lists Aspasia as a rhetorician: modern scholarship on Aspasia recognises that Aspasia has historically been associated with rhetoric, but does not call her a rhetorician without qualification. Madeleine Henry, for instance, discusses how e.g. Plato makes Aspasia the author of the funeral oration in Menexenus but does not say at any point that she was herself a rhetorician. In writing the article I was careful not to call Aspasia a rhetorician in wikivoice because the sources do not support that. Additionally, we have the fact that almost none of the links here are relevant to readers of this article. Other than the ancient figures already mentioned and linked in the body text of the article, I have a hard time imagining which of the links in this enormous template are going to be relevant to people reading about Aspasia. Caeciliusinhorto-public ( talk) 15:14, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
Being a hetaira is not something that will give a person historical significance. Nonsense. Phryne is the most obvious counterexample.
Aspasia is identified as a rhetorician and a teacher in Rhetoric throughout the article, if you haven't noticed.as I wrote most of the current article, I have in fact noticed that she is not identified either as a rhetorician or as a teacher of rhetoric: we are careful to say that she was portrayed in ancient sources as a rhetorician and teacher of rhetoric.
And she is mentioned as a prominent rhetorician several times in the main article on Rhetoric as well: by my count she is mentioned twice in rhetoric, once without a citation, and the other time qualified as "believed to be". At any rate, wikipedia articles are not a reliable source and when our wikipedia article on rhetoric contradicts the consensus of ancient historians then we should go with the academic consensus. Caeciliusinhorto-public ( talk) 16:36, 30 October 2023 (UTC)