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This website seems to be no longer functional, is there an archived version of this that can replace the current references? Alternately should the links to the said website be removed? This website has been extensively used in a large number of articles but is now dead.
I think it's irresponsible to not make mention of the questionable colonialist British practice of ransacking Egypt's historical burial sites in general, not to mention the multiple controversies that surround this tomb's excavation specifically. To quote Dr. Christian Loeben, an Egyptologist at the August Kestner museum in Hanover, Germany, "All objects from the tomb should be in Egypt, and if they're not in Egypt, they didn't get out legally" [1]. Howard Carter was an eager participant in this Western grave-robbing fad, and this page should accurately report that he violated even what little law was in place to protect these sites. "A little-known document written by a member of Carter's team, Alfred Lucas, in 1947 claimed that Carter knocked a hole into the doorway linking the antechamber to the actual burial chamber, and illegally entered it without waiting for Egyptian officials" [2].
In addition, Carter was caught on a number of occasions stealing or attempting to steal artifacts from the various sites for his own personal possession and use. Carter and his compatriot, the Earl of Carnarvon, "gave a clasp that showed the pharaoh on a war chariot as a present to Egyptian King Fouad I, for example. American oil baron Edward Harkness received a gold ring" [3]. There is evidence that the looting and historical damage goes beyond what history has recorded: "Doubts about Carter's methods are not new but the debate keeps resurfacing with the discovery of Tutankhamen artefacts in museum collections around the world. This, Egyptologists claim, suggests that they were secretly brought out of Egypt by Carter or members of his team" [4]. In addition to the multiple incidents of material losses, it is a real tragedy that "experts claim that his actions did lasting damage to research into ancient Egypt, because it will never be reliably known what the tomb looked like when he found it" [5], which is a disservice both to academia and to the cultural heritage of Egypt.
I'm also posting this in the Howard Carter talk section. SymWebb ( talk) 08:14, 9 May 2012 (UTC)
References
The result of the proposal was no consensus to move the page, per the discussion below. "King Tut's tomb" is probably the most common descriptive name for this, but no one seems to support using that as the title here. "Tomb of Tutankhamun" is also usually used as a descriptive title rather than as a proper-noun title - it is generally capitalized in book titles but not elsewhere. "KV62" should not be ordained as the title due to officiality (we don't do official names). However, because there are several spellings for the king's name, because of consistency within the category, and because other KVs have been called Tutankhamun's tomb, this seems to be an appropriate place for the article to remain. Dekimasu よ! 00:35, 16 November 2007 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Naming conventions (common names) says: "Convention: Use the most common name of a person or thing that does not conflict with the names of other people or things....When choosing a name for a page ask yourself: What word would the average user of the Wikipedia put into the search engine?
Wikipedia is not a place to advocate a title change in order to reflect recent scholarship. The articles themselves reflect recent scholarship but the titles should represent common usage."
As such the name of this article should be Tomb of Tutankhamun. KV62 can still be used on maps and diagrams for brevity, and then used as a redirect here.
The section in the main Tutankhamun article that discuss the Tomb is called Discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb rather than "Discovery of KV62".
There are thousands of examples across Wiki of common names being used - Gray Wolf rather than Canis lupus, Blue Tit rather than Cyanistes caeruleus, etc. I am proposing a move to Tomb of Tutankhamun. SilkTork * SilkyTalk 21:05, 2 November 2007 (UTC)
I support the move. Think for example of Howard Carter's book, titled The Discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamen. Though he has the variant spelling, the excavator referred to it by the more common, popular name. It's not just a popularity contest, there are good reasons for putting an article at the more commonly known title. I would say only use the KV system when it is needed, such as for tombs of unclear ownership. There can be no doubt that "Tomb of Tutankhamun" is the most common name, is unambiguous in this case, and we need not rigorously impose the KV system to article titles, even if the system is imposed elsewhere on wikipedia. Jeff Dahl ( Talk • contribs) 02:45, 7 November 2007 (UTC)
Also, from the naming conventions: "We want to maximize the likelihood of being listed in external search engines" and searching for Tomb of Tutankhamun on google does not return the currently named KV62 article even in the top 100 hits, when I stopped looking. Renaming the page will make it rank higher on search engine results for the term more commonly used by the public. Jeff Dahl ( Talk • contribs) 02:53, 7 November 2007 (UTC)
Could someone please summarize the above discussion, in particular the opposition? For me, it seems obvious that it should be renamed per WP:NAMING#Prefer spelled-out phrases to abbreviations, and browsing through the discussion did not change my mind. If there ever is any voting on this, please count this as a support vote. — Sebastian 17:59, 12 November 2007 (UTC) (I am open to changing or amending this vote or statement. If you feel facts changed sufficiently after I posted this, please let me know, as I may not be watching this page.)
Support I believe that this page should be renamed 'King Tutankhamun's Tomb'. Everybody knows 'Tut: The Boy King', but I think that keeping it's name (KV62) on the page would let everyone know that it's name is, in fact, KV62. Maybe in the main description of the tomb, that is where we could put KV62. All in all, I think it should be renamed 'King Tutankhamun's Tomb', but we should keep KV62 on the page somewhere. The reasons I have are these:
Abluescarab 05:09, 16 November 2007 (UTC)
Abluescarab ( talk) 04:59, 18 November 2007 (UTC)
Strong Oppose KV62 is, and always has been, the designated catalogue/reference number of Tutankhamun's Valley of the King's tomb since 1922 when the tomb was discovered by Howard Carter. There are at least 61 other tombs in the Valley of the Kings which belong to less well known but equally powerful pharaohs and relatives of the pharaohs. Are we going to rename them all too? I think we should follow the simple catalogue system and use KV62 for reasons of consistency. Most people who search for Tutankhamun's tomb in books and on the Net will quickly find out that it has been given tomb number KV62. So why should Wikipedia suddenly change this after more than 80 years of established practise? In 2006, another tomb was found in the Valley of the Kings and Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities designated it as KV63. Are we going to ignore the official Egyptian's government decision here and give this tomb another name next? Where do we draw the line? I firmly believe we must use the long established catalogue system for reasons of consistency and simplicity. If Egyptologists and the Egyptian authorities can live with KV62 as the catalogue number for Tut's tomb, so should Wikipedia. Thank You Leoboudv 06:53, 16 November 2007 (UTC)
Strong Oppose There is a redirect for people who will not find the structure under this name. What more do they need? Nothing. As long as they get here, the argument "People don't know that name" is invalid. They ought to learn it, as it is the only name. "Tomb of Tutankhamun," "King Tutankhamun's Tomb," etc., are not names whatsoever, they are descriptions for people who do not know the only name. Thanatosimii 15:44, 16 November 2007 (UTC)
Discussion and Dialogue and Consensus vs. Voting and Democracy and Autocracy:Let's try to steer away from voting and stick to arguments, let's try to move toward consensus.-- Keerlls ton 00:00, 18 November 2007 (UTC)
This is the area for noting clearly and succinctly the arguments for and against.-- Keerlls ton 00:00, 18 November 2007 (UTC)
In a nutshell:Generally, article naming should prefer what the majority of English speakers would most easily recognize, with a reasonable minimum of ambiguity, while at the same time making linking to those articles easy and second nature.
"Names of Wikipedia articles should be optimized for readers over editors; and for a general audience over specialists."
"Prefer spelled-out phrases to abbreviations"
From Biology Article Titles"In cases where there is a formal common name (e.g. birds), or when common names are well-known and reasonably unique, they should be used for article titles, except for plant articles. Scientific names should be used otherwise."
I think this raises issues that go far beyond this article. Two observations:
One: I have a principle that if we can't get consensus, it doesn't matter which way we go. Consensus is best of course, in that we get the best Wikipedia article when we can find common ground. But if there is no consensus, what this means is that it's not clear which way we will get the better article. We have two (or sometimes more) not-so-good options, and we may as well flip a coin. See user:andrewa/creed for more on this.
Two: IMO most (if not all) of the oppose arguments so far ignore some aspect of WP:NC or other. Now there's a lot in WP:NC, and I don't want to be specific, or at least not yet. My point for now is just that Wikipedia is changing. Specifically, there's a lot more emphasis on the use of official names now than there was say two years ago. Perhaps WP:NC needs to be updated to reflect this.
Of course it's also possible that the oppose case can be made in terms of the existing guidelines. All I'm saying is, it hasn't been done yet.
In any case, it won't be easy to get consensus here, but it still should be a goal. The underlying goal is only only to build the best Wikipedia we can. And sometimes this is tricky. Andrewa ( talk) 22:52, 17 November 2007 (UTC)
I found it very strange that the google search was one of the most quoted arguments for moving it. It should really be google that should change that, not wikipedia. How Google uses wikipedia is unimportant. The fact that KV62 is used less than tomb of tut both in common usage and in scholarly usage is significant however.-- Keerlls ton 23:37, 17 November 2007 (UTC)
We all want simplicity. We obviously want Dog, not Canis Lupus. We want Soviet Union, not Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. However, we do not believe that those are legitimate parallels to this case, because in both cases, both names are actually names. However, in the case of Tutankhamun's tomb, Tutankhamun's tomb is not a name, it's a descriptive phrase. Consider. I can rearrange "tomb of Tutankhamun" to make "Tutankhamun's tomb," and no one can tell me which one is more proper. Can we do that with other names? The name of the large statue in New York City is the Statue of Liberty. Notice, both words are upper case. If I called it the liberty statue, that would obviously not be its name. King George VI had the title "King of Great Britain, Ireland, and the British Dominions Beyond the Seas; Emperor of India." Now, we can shorten that to George, King of England, or even, King George VI, and we still have a valid title. However, if I were to write, George, England's king, I would have to make the word "king" lowercase, because it has ceased to be a proper title, but merely a description which people would use if they either did not know or care to use his title at all.
Likewise, "tomb of Tutankhamun" has not entered common parlance as a proper noun. It isn't a name, it's a phrase people use who do not know the name. It isn't the common name of what is technically named KV62, it's a description of what is only named KV62. And until the phrase becomes set as a proper noun, until schoolteachers can draw red marks over reports of their students, changing "Tutankhamun's tomb is in the valley of the kings" to "Tutanhamun's Tomb is in the Valley of the Kings," (note, the second proper noun, Valley of the Kings, is technically named Bibal al Maluk, however we can use the simpler name because it has become a name and it is flat out wrong to spell it lower case), then any of these "common" names fail to be names at all. Naming conventions do not say that we should get rid of obscure names and replace them with descriptions which are not names. Thanatosimii ( talk) 04:44, 18 November 2007 (UTC)
Oppose: KV62 is the widely accepted catalogue number for Tutankhamun's intact tomb. What gives us the right to discard this reference number--because some people prefer to call it as Tutankhamun's tomb instead? Its basically the same thing. The catalogue number for Tutankhamun is important because it establishes there are at least 62 tombs in the Valley of the Kings. Now there are 63 tombs with the find of KV63. I don't think any of us would like to tell the Egyptians how to catalogue their tombs. It would certainly be presumptuous of us to do so. Since the Egyptians are actively using the established catalogue reference number KV for tombs in the Valley of the Kings, we must too. If not, we could soon be engaged in an unproductive exercise trying to decide which paharaoh's KVXX tomb should be named Seti I's or Amenhotep II's tomb. We would be reduced to a laughing stock among Egyptologists who long ago followed this catalogue system for their books and who are finding more and more tombs and inscriptions each year throughout Egypt--not just in the Valley of the Kings. So, to keep up with their finds, they are forced to give a catalogue number for tomb X or rock inscription Y--with the official approval of the Egyptian government, of course. Artene50 ( talk) 09:52, 19 November 2007 (UTC)
KV62 is not a name recognized by the average reader typing into a search engine, plain and simple. Searching is how most people arrive at wikipedia articles, so we are trying to facilitate this. Google is not the ultimate source by which we name articles, but neither can we simply sweep away these concerns as unimportant. A rebuttal to the arguments against moving:
Is it really so important to have all the KV tombs named as KV-- or as "Tomb of N", using the same system for every single tomb? Here's a quick reality check for the folks wanting to stick to the KV system: do you have all the tomb numbers memorized? If not, what would you type into a search engine to find a specific pharaoh's tomb? We can use common sense and still maintain integrity, accuracy, encyclopedic professionalism, and readability. Jeff Dahl ( Talk • contribs) 21:19, 19 November 2007 (UTC)
Hi, can we move this discussion to Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Ancient Egyptian), as it no longer applies only to this article. Cheers. Markh ( talk) 21:15, 20 November 2007 (UTC)
"underneath the remains of workmen's huts built during the Ramesside Period; this explains why it was spared from the worst of the tomb depredations of that time"
How does it explain why the tomb had not been re-discovered sooner? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.53.124.87 ( talk) 19:22, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
I've removed the term "officially opened" and replaced it with "opened". Carter's diary is used as a source for "officially", but it says "Opened sealed doorway before officials Etc" [6], which, according to me, is not quite the same thing as an 'official opening'. Feel free to revert if I'm hopelessly wrong. Yintan 14:21, 27 August 2013 (UTC)
Shrine diagram is incorrectly interpretated in the 'Contents' section. Number 2 (the blue outline) is not the second shrine, but a wooden framework between 1st and 2nd shrines, on top of which pall linen was thrown. Second and third shrines are 3 and 4, and innermost shrine is the unnumbered black outline. -- Mikoyan21 ( talk) 19:28, 11 January 2015 (UTC)
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There may not be additional chambers after all: http://www.livescience.com/54708-nefertiti-missing-no-chambers-in-king-tut-tomb.html?cmpid=NL_LS_weekly_2016-5-11 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 108.68.104.232 ( talk) 11:13, 12 May 2016 (UTC)
I've read the above opposition and I'm afraid I'm not convinced. 'KV62' is an incredibly indescriptive and ineffective title, regardless of its designation. I vote instead for 'Tomb of Tutankhamun'. Per the naming convention guidelines:
A good Wikipedia article title has the five following characteristics:
---
According to Google Trends, "KV62" is by far the least recognizable term used in searching for this article. The unnaturalness and imprecision of the term is demonstrated in the apologetic opening line of the article: "KV62 is the standard Egyptological designation for the tomb of the young pharaoh Tutankhamun in the Valley of the King". Is the article about the designation or the tomb? Because the tomb's been around for a good 3300 years, and in that time it's always been the Tomb of Tutankhamun, but the designation 'KV62' has only been around for about a century.
I'll grant that it's concise, though the KV designation doesn't wholly distinguish it from the Köchel-Verzeichnis catalogue of Mozart music or the KV designation of the Kliment Voroshilov tank series, but the discussion of consistency is a little more interesting. Granted, the title of this article is consistent with the other articles related to the Valley of the Kings tombs, it's the naming conventions used in the Valley of the Kings which are the issue. The brevity is clearly designed to benefit the context of someone working within the narrow range of excavating that valley, not the encyclopedia reader. The conventions used are inconsistent with UNESCO World Heritage naming conventions and nearly every other archaeological site in the world, including other Egyptological sites. Even when the sites are serially named (Stonehenge 1-3, Troy I-IV), they are descriptive enough to allow the reader to identify them. Is the unfortunate naming convention of the Valley of Kings the cross of the reader to bear? Is this an encyclopedia for Egyptologists? It is and has been the Tomb of Tutankhamun since he was laid to rest there over 3 millennia ago. KV62 is just an arbitrary name assigned much later for the convenience of one select group. It's not only less convenient, it's less accurate. Scoundr3l ( talk) 21:27, 3 September 2016 (UTC)
Wikipedia naming conventions mandate that articles be given the name a general reader would search for, rather than the name a specialist would think of--that could not be more clear. But pages tend to be controlled by specialists, and so they overrule the spirit of the project as a whole in favor of their parochial viewpoint. This is why " Heart attack" redirects to " Myocardial infarction". Nareek ( talk) 11:31, 6 September 2017 (UTC)
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The veracity of the story of a water boy, said to be Hussein Abdel-Rassoul, finding the tomb has been questioned. It doesn't appear in any of Carter's diaries, but first appears in Hoving's book 'Tutankhamun: The Untold Story'. A great summary and further information can be found on Christina Riggs' blog, in the post Water boys and wishful thinking. I know a blog post isn't an ideal source, even if it is by a respected Egyptologist/historian. In light of this, I feel we should either delete the mention of the water boy, or expand it to acknowledge the factual murkiness/prevalence in popular thought. Let me know what you think! Merytat3n ( talk) 09:04, 24 June 2020 (UTC)
The result of the move request was: Consensus to move. Opposers make an argument from consistency, but consistency is only one criterion of the article titles criteria and others, such as recognizability ("The title is a name or description of the subject that someone familiar with, although not necessarily an expert in, the subject area will recognize.") and naturalness ("The title is one that readers are likely to look or search for and that editors would naturally use to link to the article from other articles.") can take precedence. ( non-admin closure) ( t · c) buidhe 03:22, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
KV62 →
Tomb of Tutankhamun – The present title is a clear violation of
WP:COMMONNAME, which states that an article title is a natural-language word or expression that indicates the subject of the article
. It additionally fails the
WP:CRITERIA of Recognizability and Naturalness for article titles, and arguably Consistency as well since the construction "Tomb of X" is
widespread on Wikipedia (though see paragraph below for discussion of consistency with other Egyptian tomb articles).
WP:TITLE states that [g]enerally, article titles are based on what the subject is called in reliable sources
, and according to
Google Ngram, "Tomb of Tutankhamun" is considerably more common than "KV62". Google Scholar results also support this:
2,760 for "Tomb of Tutankhamun", but only
1,540 for "KV62". Note that several of the results on the first page use "KV62" only as a parenthetical and treat some variation of "Tomb of Tutankhamun" as the primary name. These results are also biased towards "KV62" since it can refer to things besides the tomb (some of the results on the first page of Google Scholar have nothing to do with Egypt) and because variations in the spelling of "Tutankhamun" mean that the query "Tomb of Tutankhamun" does not capture all relevant uses. The present title of the article also forces the first sentence to be the awkward KV62 is the standard Egyptological designation for the tomb of young pharaoh Tutankhamun
rather than, e.g., the more natural The tomb of Tutankhamun, designated as KV62 in Egyptology, is...
.
I am specifically not proposing the renaming of any of the other articles about tombs in the Valley of the Kings, which all use the same "KV" format. While this is inconsistent, it is justified in this case because the tomb of Tutankhamun is vastly better known than any of the other tombs in the Valley of the Kings, which are plausibly more widely known by their official designations.
This renaming was previously proposed in 2007, with the result of "No consensus". You can read a summary of the arguments at Talk:KV62#Arguments_Synopsis. There was a second try at renaming in 2016, which received no objections but didn't go anywhere. Rublov ( talk) 01:04, 22 April 2021 (UTC)
@ UpdateNerd: I've tracked down the origin of the story that el-Rassul discovered the step, thanks to another book by Christina Riggs, Treasured: How Tutankhamun Shaped a Century (2021). It says, "More recently, and in conjunction with new tours of Tutankhamun objects that Zahi Hawass has facilitated, Sheikh Hassan's story of being photographed by Burton has been conflated with a story told by Thomas Hoving in his bestselling 1978 account of the Tutankhamun discovery. Hoving dug out a second-hand account in the Metropolitan Museum of Art archives, whose author claimed Howard Carter had told him that the actual discovery of the tomb's first step was made by an Egyptian boy who carried water to the workmen." (pp. 296–297) She goes on to describe a variant of this story, reported by the Boston Globe in 1924, that attributes the discovery to another boy named Mohamed Gorgar. Then Riggs says, "Neither Mohamed Gorgar nor the mysterious water boy of Hoving's version featured in any of Howard Carter's many accounts of the find, though Carter certainly didn't mind embroidering stories himself. In the hands of Zahi Hawass (or his ghostwriters), the water boy and the boy wearing Tutankhamun's gold jewels in Burton's photograph have both become Hussein Abd el-Rassul—and this uncorroborated story has been presented as firm fact in exhibitions, catalogues, and television documentaries. Some version of the story, or the earlier tale of Mohamed Gorgar, may be true... Hawass, who worked at Luxor in the early 1970s, claims to have had the water boy and necklace-wearing story from Sheikh Hassan in person." (pp. 297–298)
This is the only source in my possession that brings up el-Rassul in connection with the step, and it seems to be the most detailed discussion of the question of who discovered that first step. All the other sources I have (most significantly the meticulously researched Howard Carter: The Path to Tutankhamun (2000) by T. G. H. James, Howard Carter and the Discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamun (2006) by H. V. F. Winstone, Tutankhamen: The Search for an Egyptian King (2012) by Joyce Tyldesley, and The Complete Tutankhamun (1990) by Nicholas Reeves) either treat the tomb entrance as a discovery by the workmen, without giving further details, or mention an unidentified water boy, citing the version of the story that Hoving unearthed in 1978.
Given these complexities, I think it's best to avoid identifying the water boy in the text of this article. Right now I'm working on a subarticle, discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, which I hope to upload within the next month or so; the complexity of this question can be better dealt with there, where there's more space to focus on the sequence of events as opposed to the tomb itself. A. Parrot ( talk) 16:17, 29 March 2022 (UTC)
I mentioned a while ago that I was planning to rewrite this article, as well as create a separate article about the tomb's discovery. I hope to bring this article up to GA status. Unfortunately, my writing process, where I compose nearly everything myself in an offline text file, is more unilateral than many Wikipedians prefer. In the case of this article, which is far from terrible (unlike some others I've rewritten), it may not seem necessary to redo all the text, but I'm afraid that's just how my brain prefers to work. Therefore, now that I'm nearing completion on my draft of this article, I've put it in my sandbox so others can see it: User:A. Parrot/sandbox.
I've retained all the information that I think is important to this article, but I've put much more focus on the burial goods, which are, after all, the main reason this tomb is significant. I have also deemphasized subjects that I think receive disproportionate attention in the current revision. Details about the first moments of the tomb's discovery can be covered in the upcoming subarticle on that topic, and the recent claims about undiscovered chambers can be summarized in less detail than in the current revision. I have a link to the article on the meteoritic iron dagger, but I don't see why it should merit its own subsection, as the current revision has it.
Some parts of the article still need to have their references filled in or text added (%percent signs% are my way of noting to myself that something is still incomplete), but my general plan for the rewrite is clearly visible in the sandbox. If any editors have suggestions or criticisms, this section will be a good place to note them. A. Parrot ( talk) 01:42, 11 April 2022 (UTC)
GA toolbox |
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Reviewing |
Reviewer: Merytat3n ( talk · contribs) 10:33, 20 May 2022 (UTC)
I will review this over the next few days :) Merytat3n ( talk) 10:33, 20 May 2022 (UTC)
Thank you for the opportunity to review this article! Merytat3n ( talk) 10:01, 23 May 2022 (UTC)
I was pinged on user:Ceoil's talk page.
Here are my two cents. Writing an article offline and adding it to mainspace all at once is not something I'm entirely comfortable with. In part, this is because many editors of Wikipedia who might be interested in the topic, the anonymous, for example, are not given the chance to read the article, and in good time serve as informal peer reviewers. But, in equal part, I'm uncomfortable also because a previously existing text, the work of many other editors, has been replaced in an opaque manner by another. By opaque, I mean: we are not given the chance to observe gradually, in bits and pieces, how the sentences were improved, and learn. Many new editors learn by observing how articles change.
Consider the two sentences in the lead, "The tomb is smaller than other Egyptian royal tombs of its time, consisting of four chambers and an entrance staircase and corridor, and less extensively decorated. It probably originated as a tomb for a non-royal individual that was adapted for Tutankhamun's use after his premature death."
In the first sentence, the participial phrase, "consisting of four chambers and an entrance staircase ..." is the main information, as the common reader has no idea how big or small a standard tomb is, or at least at this stage of reading, particularly care about this comparison. So we can't really make "The tomb is smaller ..." the main clause. (I mean we can, but it is the kind of thing that will make a reader fleetingly pause in their reading.) In the normal course of evolution, another editor might notice this and turn it around by subordinating the less accessible information, i.e.: "Smaller than many other Egyptian royal tombs, Tutankhamen's tomb consisted of four chambers and an entrance staircase and corridor." Yet another might feel that the two "tomb"s, now almost back to back, sound repetitive, and change the second instance to "mausoleum," or somesuch ... and so it would evolve ... or not evolve, for obviously, I can't divine the future.
Or consider, "it probably originated ..." Well, "originate" has the meaning of coming into existence, springing, ... Tombs, on the other hand, are more purposefully made by humans. You could say "the tsunami originated in a minor earthquake six miles below ..." You could say the tomb's plan originated in the idea that ...
When you don't give the IPs a chance, the burden falls on the peer-reviewers and GA/FA reviewers, and they are depleted already in more senses than one. (I don't mean to overplay this hand either: in the end, you do need the peer-reviewers, but the article does settle with time, its tangles untangled a little.) So, without belaboring the point, how you proceed is for you to decide, but I would urge you to think about the sound moral principle here.
In terms of practical advice, next time, if writing off-line is what you prefer: add a section at a time, give it a week, then add another section, ... It is probably also a good idea to wait for a few months, as Ceoil says, before nominating this article as a FAC. Pinging some others. @ Bishonen, Vanamonde93, Drmies, Valereee, RegentsPark, Abecedare, and Doug Weller: Not trying to be intimidating, only requesting a more experienced body of opinion so you might be better served. PS I note with sadness the absence of @ Slimvirgin: who in the past had contributed richly to such discussions. Best, Fowler&fowler «Talk» 13:42, 15 June 2022 (UTC)
Thank you all for your input. I will consider how to make my writing process more transparent in the future. But my original plan was to bring this article to GA status, which it now has, and to take Discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, which is a new creation, to FAC. My thinking was that keeping this article at FA standard would require keeping up with the tomb's current condition, and I'm not good at editing based on news updates and the like. But this rewritten version turned out to be more thorough than it expected to be, while the article about the tomb's discovery has more potential to be politically touchy. I would like to take at least one of them to FAC, but now I'm unsure which it should be. A. Parrot ( talk) 03:45, 19 June 2022 (UTC)
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This website seems to be no longer functional, is there an archived version of this that can replace the current references? Alternately should the links to the said website be removed? This website has been extensively used in a large number of articles but is now dead.
I think it's irresponsible to not make mention of the questionable colonialist British practice of ransacking Egypt's historical burial sites in general, not to mention the multiple controversies that surround this tomb's excavation specifically. To quote Dr. Christian Loeben, an Egyptologist at the August Kestner museum in Hanover, Germany, "All objects from the tomb should be in Egypt, and if they're not in Egypt, they didn't get out legally" [1]. Howard Carter was an eager participant in this Western grave-robbing fad, and this page should accurately report that he violated even what little law was in place to protect these sites. "A little-known document written by a member of Carter's team, Alfred Lucas, in 1947 claimed that Carter knocked a hole into the doorway linking the antechamber to the actual burial chamber, and illegally entered it without waiting for Egyptian officials" [2].
In addition, Carter was caught on a number of occasions stealing or attempting to steal artifacts from the various sites for his own personal possession and use. Carter and his compatriot, the Earl of Carnarvon, "gave a clasp that showed the pharaoh on a war chariot as a present to Egyptian King Fouad I, for example. American oil baron Edward Harkness received a gold ring" [3]. There is evidence that the looting and historical damage goes beyond what history has recorded: "Doubts about Carter's methods are not new but the debate keeps resurfacing with the discovery of Tutankhamen artefacts in museum collections around the world. This, Egyptologists claim, suggests that they were secretly brought out of Egypt by Carter or members of his team" [4]. In addition to the multiple incidents of material losses, it is a real tragedy that "experts claim that his actions did lasting damage to research into ancient Egypt, because it will never be reliably known what the tomb looked like when he found it" [5], which is a disservice both to academia and to the cultural heritage of Egypt.
I'm also posting this in the Howard Carter talk section. SymWebb ( talk) 08:14, 9 May 2012 (UTC)
References
The result of the proposal was no consensus to move the page, per the discussion below. "King Tut's tomb" is probably the most common descriptive name for this, but no one seems to support using that as the title here. "Tomb of Tutankhamun" is also usually used as a descriptive title rather than as a proper-noun title - it is generally capitalized in book titles but not elsewhere. "KV62" should not be ordained as the title due to officiality (we don't do official names). However, because there are several spellings for the king's name, because of consistency within the category, and because other KVs have been called Tutankhamun's tomb, this seems to be an appropriate place for the article to remain. Dekimasu よ! 00:35, 16 November 2007 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Naming conventions (common names) says: "Convention: Use the most common name of a person or thing that does not conflict with the names of other people or things....When choosing a name for a page ask yourself: What word would the average user of the Wikipedia put into the search engine?
Wikipedia is not a place to advocate a title change in order to reflect recent scholarship. The articles themselves reflect recent scholarship but the titles should represent common usage."
As such the name of this article should be Tomb of Tutankhamun. KV62 can still be used on maps and diagrams for brevity, and then used as a redirect here.
The section in the main Tutankhamun article that discuss the Tomb is called Discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb rather than "Discovery of KV62".
There are thousands of examples across Wiki of common names being used - Gray Wolf rather than Canis lupus, Blue Tit rather than Cyanistes caeruleus, etc. I am proposing a move to Tomb of Tutankhamun. SilkTork * SilkyTalk 21:05, 2 November 2007 (UTC)
I support the move. Think for example of Howard Carter's book, titled The Discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamen. Though he has the variant spelling, the excavator referred to it by the more common, popular name. It's not just a popularity contest, there are good reasons for putting an article at the more commonly known title. I would say only use the KV system when it is needed, such as for tombs of unclear ownership. There can be no doubt that "Tomb of Tutankhamun" is the most common name, is unambiguous in this case, and we need not rigorously impose the KV system to article titles, even if the system is imposed elsewhere on wikipedia. Jeff Dahl ( Talk • contribs) 02:45, 7 November 2007 (UTC)
Also, from the naming conventions: "We want to maximize the likelihood of being listed in external search engines" and searching for Tomb of Tutankhamun on google does not return the currently named KV62 article even in the top 100 hits, when I stopped looking. Renaming the page will make it rank higher on search engine results for the term more commonly used by the public. Jeff Dahl ( Talk • contribs) 02:53, 7 November 2007 (UTC)
Could someone please summarize the above discussion, in particular the opposition? For me, it seems obvious that it should be renamed per WP:NAMING#Prefer spelled-out phrases to abbreviations, and browsing through the discussion did not change my mind. If there ever is any voting on this, please count this as a support vote. — Sebastian 17:59, 12 November 2007 (UTC) (I am open to changing or amending this vote or statement. If you feel facts changed sufficiently after I posted this, please let me know, as I may not be watching this page.)
Support I believe that this page should be renamed 'King Tutankhamun's Tomb'. Everybody knows 'Tut: The Boy King', but I think that keeping it's name (KV62) on the page would let everyone know that it's name is, in fact, KV62. Maybe in the main description of the tomb, that is where we could put KV62. All in all, I think it should be renamed 'King Tutankhamun's Tomb', but we should keep KV62 on the page somewhere. The reasons I have are these:
Abluescarab 05:09, 16 November 2007 (UTC)
Abluescarab ( talk) 04:59, 18 November 2007 (UTC)
Strong Oppose KV62 is, and always has been, the designated catalogue/reference number of Tutankhamun's Valley of the King's tomb since 1922 when the tomb was discovered by Howard Carter. There are at least 61 other tombs in the Valley of the Kings which belong to less well known but equally powerful pharaohs and relatives of the pharaohs. Are we going to rename them all too? I think we should follow the simple catalogue system and use KV62 for reasons of consistency. Most people who search for Tutankhamun's tomb in books and on the Net will quickly find out that it has been given tomb number KV62. So why should Wikipedia suddenly change this after more than 80 years of established practise? In 2006, another tomb was found in the Valley of the Kings and Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities designated it as KV63. Are we going to ignore the official Egyptian's government decision here and give this tomb another name next? Where do we draw the line? I firmly believe we must use the long established catalogue system for reasons of consistency and simplicity. If Egyptologists and the Egyptian authorities can live with KV62 as the catalogue number for Tut's tomb, so should Wikipedia. Thank You Leoboudv 06:53, 16 November 2007 (UTC)
Strong Oppose There is a redirect for people who will not find the structure under this name. What more do they need? Nothing. As long as they get here, the argument "People don't know that name" is invalid. They ought to learn it, as it is the only name. "Tomb of Tutankhamun," "King Tutankhamun's Tomb," etc., are not names whatsoever, they are descriptions for people who do not know the only name. Thanatosimii 15:44, 16 November 2007 (UTC)
Discussion and Dialogue and Consensus vs. Voting and Democracy and Autocracy:Let's try to steer away from voting and stick to arguments, let's try to move toward consensus.-- Keerlls ton 00:00, 18 November 2007 (UTC)
This is the area for noting clearly and succinctly the arguments for and against.-- Keerlls ton 00:00, 18 November 2007 (UTC)
In a nutshell:Generally, article naming should prefer what the majority of English speakers would most easily recognize, with a reasonable minimum of ambiguity, while at the same time making linking to those articles easy and second nature.
"Names of Wikipedia articles should be optimized for readers over editors; and for a general audience over specialists."
"Prefer spelled-out phrases to abbreviations"
From Biology Article Titles"In cases where there is a formal common name (e.g. birds), or when common names are well-known and reasonably unique, they should be used for article titles, except for plant articles. Scientific names should be used otherwise."
I think this raises issues that go far beyond this article. Two observations:
One: I have a principle that if we can't get consensus, it doesn't matter which way we go. Consensus is best of course, in that we get the best Wikipedia article when we can find common ground. But if there is no consensus, what this means is that it's not clear which way we will get the better article. We have two (or sometimes more) not-so-good options, and we may as well flip a coin. See user:andrewa/creed for more on this.
Two: IMO most (if not all) of the oppose arguments so far ignore some aspect of WP:NC or other. Now there's a lot in WP:NC, and I don't want to be specific, or at least not yet. My point for now is just that Wikipedia is changing. Specifically, there's a lot more emphasis on the use of official names now than there was say two years ago. Perhaps WP:NC needs to be updated to reflect this.
Of course it's also possible that the oppose case can be made in terms of the existing guidelines. All I'm saying is, it hasn't been done yet.
In any case, it won't be easy to get consensus here, but it still should be a goal. The underlying goal is only only to build the best Wikipedia we can. And sometimes this is tricky. Andrewa ( talk) 22:52, 17 November 2007 (UTC)
I found it very strange that the google search was one of the most quoted arguments for moving it. It should really be google that should change that, not wikipedia. How Google uses wikipedia is unimportant. The fact that KV62 is used less than tomb of tut both in common usage and in scholarly usage is significant however.-- Keerlls ton 23:37, 17 November 2007 (UTC)
We all want simplicity. We obviously want Dog, not Canis Lupus. We want Soviet Union, not Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. However, we do not believe that those are legitimate parallels to this case, because in both cases, both names are actually names. However, in the case of Tutankhamun's tomb, Tutankhamun's tomb is not a name, it's a descriptive phrase. Consider. I can rearrange "tomb of Tutankhamun" to make "Tutankhamun's tomb," and no one can tell me which one is more proper. Can we do that with other names? The name of the large statue in New York City is the Statue of Liberty. Notice, both words are upper case. If I called it the liberty statue, that would obviously not be its name. King George VI had the title "King of Great Britain, Ireland, and the British Dominions Beyond the Seas; Emperor of India." Now, we can shorten that to George, King of England, or even, King George VI, and we still have a valid title. However, if I were to write, George, England's king, I would have to make the word "king" lowercase, because it has ceased to be a proper title, but merely a description which people would use if they either did not know or care to use his title at all.
Likewise, "tomb of Tutankhamun" has not entered common parlance as a proper noun. It isn't a name, it's a phrase people use who do not know the name. It isn't the common name of what is technically named KV62, it's a description of what is only named KV62. And until the phrase becomes set as a proper noun, until schoolteachers can draw red marks over reports of their students, changing "Tutankhamun's tomb is in the valley of the kings" to "Tutanhamun's Tomb is in the Valley of the Kings," (note, the second proper noun, Valley of the Kings, is technically named Bibal al Maluk, however we can use the simpler name because it has become a name and it is flat out wrong to spell it lower case), then any of these "common" names fail to be names at all. Naming conventions do not say that we should get rid of obscure names and replace them with descriptions which are not names. Thanatosimii ( talk) 04:44, 18 November 2007 (UTC)
Oppose: KV62 is the widely accepted catalogue number for Tutankhamun's intact tomb. What gives us the right to discard this reference number--because some people prefer to call it as Tutankhamun's tomb instead? Its basically the same thing. The catalogue number for Tutankhamun is important because it establishes there are at least 62 tombs in the Valley of the Kings. Now there are 63 tombs with the find of KV63. I don't think any of us would like to tell the Egyptians how to catalogue their tombs. It would certainly be presumptuous of us to do so. Since the Egyptians are actively using the established catalogue reference number KV for tombs in the Valley of the Kings, we must too. If not, we could soon be engaged in an unproductive exercise trying to decide which paharaoh's KVXX tomb should be named Seti I's or Amenhotep II's tomb. We would be reduced to a laughing stock among Egyptologists who long ago followed this catalogue system for their books and who are finding more and more tombs and inscriptions each year throughout Egypt--not just in the Valley of the Kings. So, to keep up with their finds, they are forced to give a catalogue number for tomb X or rock inscription Y--with the official approval of the Egyptian government, of course. Artene50 ( talk) 09:52, 19 November 2007 (UTC)
KV62 is not a name recognized by the average reader typing into a search engine, plain and simple. Searching is how most people arrive at wikipedia articles, so we are trying to facilitate this. Google is not the ultimate source by which we name articles, but neither can we simply sweep away these concerns as unimportant. A rebuttal to the arguments against moving:
Is it really so important to have all the KV tombs named as KV-- or as "Tomb of N", using the same system for every single tomb? Here's a quick reality check for the folks wanting to stick to the KV system: do you have all the tomb numbers memorized? If not, what would you type into a search engine to find a specific pharaoh's tomb? We can use common sense and still maintain integrity, accuracy, encyclopedic professionalism, and readability. Jeff Dahl ( Talk • contribs) 21:19, 19 November 2007 (UTC)
Hi, can we move this discussion to Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Ancient Egyptian), as it no longer applies only to this article. Cheers. Markh ( talk) 21:15, 20 November 2007 (UTC)
"underneath the remains of workmen's huts built during the Ramesside Period; this explains why it was spared from the worst of the tomb depredations of that time"
How does it explain why the tomb had not been re-discovered sooner? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.53.124.87 ( talk) 19:22, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
I've removed the term "officially opened" and replaced it with "opened". Carter's diary is used as a source for "officially", but it says "Opened sealed doorway before officials Etc" [6], which, according to me, is not quite the same thing as an 'official opening'. Feel free to revert if I'm hopelessly wrong. Yintan 14:21, 27 August 2013 (UTC)
Shrine diagram is incorrectly interpretated in the 'Contents' section. Number 2 (the blue outline) is not the second shrine, but a wooden framework between 1st and 2nd shrines, on top of which pall linen was thrown. Second and third shrines are 3 and 4, and innermost shrine is the unnumbered black outline. -- Mikoyan21 ( talk) 19:28, 11 January 2015 (UTC)
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There may not be additional chambers after all: http://www.livescience.com/54708-nefertiti-missing-no-chambers-in-king-tut-tomb.html?cmpid=NL_LS_weekly_2016-5-11 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 108.68.104.232 ( talk) 11:13, 12 May 2016 (UTC)
I've read the above opposition and I'm afraid I'm not convinced. 'KV62' is an incredibly indescriptive and ineffective title, regardless of its designation. I vote instead for 'Tomb of Tutankhamun'. Per the naming convention guidelines:
A good Wikipedia article title has the five following characteristics:
---
According to Google Trends, "KV62" is by far the least recognizable term used in searching for this article. The unnaturalness and imprecision of the term is demonstrated in the apologetic opening line of the article: "KV62 is the standard Egyptological designation for the tomb of the young pharaoh Tutankhamun in the Valley of the King". Is the article about the designation or the tomb? Because the tomb's been around for a good 3300 years, and in that time it's always been the Tomb of Tutankhamun, but the designation 'KV62' has only been around for about a century.
I'll grant that it's concise, though the KV designation doesn't wholly distinguish it from the Köchel-Verzeichnis catalogue of Mozart music or the KV designation of the Kliment Voroshilov tank series, but the discussion of consistency is a little more interesting. Granted, the title of this article is consistent with the other articles related to the Valley of the Kings tombs, it's the naming conventions used in the Valley of the Kings which are the issue. The brevity is clearly designed to benefit the context of someone working within the narrow range of excavating that valley, not the encyclopedia reader. The conventions used are inconsistent with UNESCO World Heritage naming conventions and nearly every other archaeological site in the world, including other Egyptological sites. Even when the sites are serially named (Stonehenge 1-3, Troy I-IV), they are descriptive enough to allow the reader to identify them. Is the unfortunate naming convention of the Valley of Kings the cross of the reader to bear? Is this an encyclopedia for Egyptologists? It is and has been the Tomb of Tutankhamun since he was laid to rest there over 3 millennia ago. KV62 is just an arbitrary name assigned much later for the convenience of one select group. It's not only less convenient, it's less accurate. Scoundr3l ( talk) 21:27, 3 September 2016 (UTC)
Wikipedia naming conventions mandate that articles be given the name a general reader would search for, rather than the name a specialist would think of--that could not be more clear. But pages tend to be controlled by specialists, and so they overrule the spirit of the project as a whole in favor of their parochial viewpoint. This is why " Heart attack" redirects to " Myocardial infarction". Nareek ( talk) 11:31, 6 September 2017 (UTC)
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The veracity of the story of a water boy, said to be Hussein Abdel-Rassoul, finding the tomb has been questioned. It doesn't appear in any of Carter's diaries, but first appears in Hoving's book 'Tutankhamun: The Untold Story'. A great summary and further information can be found on Christina Riggs' blog, in the post Water boys and wishful thinking. I know a blog post isn't an ideal source, even if it is by a respected Egyptologist/historian. In light of this, I feel we should either delete the mention of the water boy, or expand it to acknowledge the factual murkiness/prevalence in popular thought. Let me know what you think! Merytat3n ( talk) 09:04, 24 June 2020 (UTC)
The result of the move request was: Consensus to move. Opposers make an argument from consistency, but consistency is only one criterion of the article titles criteria and others, such as recognizability ("The title is a name or description of the subject that someone familiar with, although not necessarily an expert in, the subject area will recognize.") and naturalness ("The title is one that readers are likely to look or search for and that editors would naturally use to link to the article from other articles.") can take precedence. ( non-admin closure) ( t · c) buidhe 03:22, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
KV62 →
Tomb of Tutankhamun – The present title is a clear violation of
WP:COMMONNAME, which states that an article title is a natural-language word or expression that indicates the subject of the article
. It additionally fails the
WP:CRITERIA of Recognizability and Naturalness for article titles, and arguably Consistency as well since the construction "Tomb of X" is
widespread on Wikipedia (though see paragraph below for discussion of consistency with other Egyptian tomb articles).
WP:TITLE states that [g]enerally, article titles are based on what the subject is called in reliable sources
, and according to
Google Ngram, "Tomb of Tutankhamun" is considerably more common than "KV62". Google Scholar results also support this:
2,760 for "Tomb of Tutankhamun", but only
1,540 for "KV62". Note that several of the results on the first page use "KV62" only as a parenthetical and treat some variation of "Tomb of Tutankhamun" as the primary name. These results are also biased towards "KV62" since it can refer to things besides the tomb (some of the results on the first page of Google Scholar have nothing to do with Egypt) and because variations in the spelling of "Tutankhamun" mean that the query "Tomb of Tutankhamun" does not capture all relevant uses. The present title of the article also forces the first sentence to be the awkward KV62 is the standard Egyptological designation for the tomb of young pharaoh Tutankhamun
rather than, e.g., the more natural The tomb of Tutankhamun, designated as KV62 in Egyptology, is...
.
I am specifically not proposing the renaming of any of the other articles about tombs in the Valley of the Kings, which all use the same "KV" format. While this is inconsistent, it is justified in this case because the tomb of Tutankhamun is vastly better known than any of the other tombs in the Valley of the Kings, which are plausibly more widely known by their official designations.
This renaming was previously proposed in 2007, with the result of "No consensus". You can read a summary of the arguments at Talk:KV62#Arguments_Synopsis. There was a second try at renaming in 2016, which received no objections but didn't go anywhere. Rublov ( talk) 01:04, 22 April 2021 (UTC)
@ UpdateNerd: I've tracked down the origin of the story that el-Rassul discovered the step, thanks to another book by Christina Riggs, Treasured: How Tutankhamun Shaped a Century (2021). It says, "More recently, and in conjunction with new tours of Tutankhamun objects that Zahi Hawass has facilitated, Sheikh Hassan's story of being photographed by Burton has been conflated with a story told by Thomas Hoving in his bestselling 1978 account of the Tutankhamun discovery. Hoving dug out a second-hand account in the Metropolitan Museum of Art archives, whose author claimed Howard Carter had told him that the actual discovery of the tomb's first step was made by an Egyptian boy who carried water to the workmen." (pp. 296–297) She goes on to describe a variant of this story, reported by the Boston Globe in 1924, that attributes the discovery to another boy named Mohamed Gorgar. Then Riggs says, "Neither Mohamed Gorgar nor the mysterious water boy of Hoving's version featured in any of Howard Carter's many accounts of the find, though Carter certainly didn't mind embroidering stories himself. In the hands of Zahi Hawass (or his ghostwriters), the water boy and the boy wearing Tutankhamun's gold jewels in Burton's photograph have both become Hussein Abd el-Rassul—and this uncorroborated story has been presented as firm fact in exhibitions, catalogues, and television documentaries. Some version of the story, or the earlier tale of Mohamed Gorgar, may be true... Hawass, who worked at Luxor in the early 1970s, claims to have had the water boy and necklace-wearing story from Sheikh Hassan in person." (pp. 297–298)
This is the only source in my possession that brings up el-Rassul in connection with the step, and it seems to be the most detailed discussion of the question of who discovered that first step. All the other sources I have (most significantly the meticulously researched Howard Carter: The Path to Tutankhamun (2000) by T. G. H. James, Howard Carter and the Discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamun (2006) by H. V. F. Winstone, Tutankhamen: The Search for an Egyptian King (2012) by Joyce Tyldesley, and The Complete Tutankhamun (1990) by Nicholas Reeves) either treat the tomb entrance as a discovery by the workmen, without giving further details, or mention an unidentified water boy, citing the version of the story that Hoving unearthed in 1978.
Given these complexities, I think it's best to avoid identifying the water boy in the text of this article. Right now I'm working on a subarticle, discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, which I hope to upload within the next month or so; the complexity of this question can be better dealt with there, where there's more space to focus on the sequence of events as opposed to the tomb itself. A. Parrot ( talk) 16:17, 29 March 2022 (UTC)
I mentioned a while ago that I was planning to rewrite this article, as well as create a separate article about the tomb's discovery. I hope to bring this article up to GA status. Unfortunately, my writing process, where I compose nearly everything myself in an offline text file, is more unilateral than many Wikipedians prefer. In the case of this article, which is far from terrible (unlike some others I've rewritten), it may not seem necessary to redo all the text, but I'm afraid that's just how my brain prefers to work. Therefore, now that I'm nearing completion on my draft of this article, I've put it in my sandbox so others can see it: User:A. Parrot/sandbox.
I've retained all the information that I think is important to this article, but I've put much more focus on the burial goods, which are, after all, the main reason this tomb is significant. I have also deemphasized subjects that I think receive disproportionate attention in the current revision. Details about the first moments of the tomb's discovery can be covered in the upcoming subarticle on that topic, and the recent claims about undiscovered chambers can be summarized in less detail than in the current revision. I have a link to the article on the meteoritic iron dagger, but I don't see why it should merit its own subsection, as the current revision has it.
Some parts of the article still need to have their references filled in or text added (%percent signs% are my way of noting to myself that something is still incomplete), but my general plan for the rewrite is clearly visible in the sandbox. If any editors have suggestions or criticisms, this section will be a good place to note them. A. Parrot ( talk) 01:42, 11 April 2022 (UTC)
GA toolbox |
---|
Reviewing |
Reviewer: Merytat3n ( talk · contribs) 10:33, 20 May 2022 (UTC)
I will review this over the next few days :) Merytat3n ( talk) 10:33, 20 May 2022 (UTC)
Thank you for the opportunity to review this article! Merytat3n ( talk) 10:01, 23 May 2022 (UTC)
I was pinged on user:Ceoil's talk page.
Here are my two cents. Writing an article offline and adding it to mainspace all at once is not something I'm entirely comfortable with. In part, this is because many editors of Wikipedia who might be interested in the topic, the anonymous, for example, are not given the chance to read the article, and in good time serve as informal peer reviewers. But, in equal part, I'm uncomfortable also because a previously existing text, the work of many other editors, has been replaced in an opaque manner by another. By opaque, I mean: we are not given the chance to observe gradually, in bits and pieces, how the sentences were improved, and learn. Many new editors learn by observing how articles change.
Consider the two sentences in the lead, "The tomb is smaller than other Egyptian royal tombs of its time, consisting of four chambers and an entrance staircase and corridor, and less extensively decorated. It probably originated as a tomb for a non-royal individual that was adapted for Tutankhamun's use after his premature death."
In the first sentence, the participial phrase, "consisting of four chambers and an entrance staircase ..." is the main information, as the common reader has no idea how big or small a standard tomb is, or at least at this stage of reading, particularly care about this comparison. So we can't really make "The tomb is smaller ..." the main clause. (I mean we can, but it is the kind of thing that will make a reader fleetingly pause in their reading.) In the normal course of evolution, another editor might notice this and turn it around by subordinating the less accessible information, i.e.: "Smaller than many other Egyptian royal tombs, Tutankhamen's tomb consisted of four chambers and an entrance staircase and corridor." Yet another might feel that the two "tomb"s, now almost back to back, sound repetitive, and change the second instance to "mausoleum," or somesuch ... and so it would evolve ... or not evolve, for obviously, I can't divine the future.
Or consider, "it probably originated ..." Well, "originate" has the meaning of coming into existence, springing, ... Tombs, on the other hand, are more purposefully made by humans. You could say "the tsunami originated in a minor earthquake six miles below ..." You could say the tomb's plan originated in the idea that ...
When you don't give the IPs a chance, the burden falls on the peer-reviewers and GA/FA reviewers, and they are depleted already in more senses than one. (I don't mean to overplay this hand either: in the end, you do need the peer-reviewers, but the article does settle with time, its tangles untangled a little.) So, without belaboring the point, how you proceed is for you to decide, but I would urge you to think about the sound moral principle here.
In terms of practical advice, next time, if writing off-line is what you prefer: add a section at a time, give it a week, then add another section, ... It is probably also a good idea to wait for a few months, as Ceoil says, before nominating this article as a FAC. Pinging some others. @ Bishonen, Vanamonde93, Drmies, Valereee, RegentsPark, Abecedare, and Doug Weller: Not trying to be intimidating, only requesting a more experienced body of opinion so you might be better served. PS I note with sadness the absence of @ Slimvirgin: who in the past had contributed richly to such discussions. Best, Fowler&fowler «Talk» 13:42, 15 June 2022 (UTC)
Thank you all for your input. I will consider how to make my writing process more transparent in the future. But my original plan was to bring this article to GA status, which it now has, and to take Discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, which is a new creation, to FAC. My thinking was that keeping this article at FA standard would require keeping up with the tomb's current condition, and I'm not good at editing based on news updates and the like. But this rewritten version turned out to be more thorough than it expected to be, while the article about the tomb's discovery has more potential to be politically touchy. I would like to take at least one of them to FAC, but now I'm unsure which it should be. A. Parrot ( talk) 03:45, 19 June 2022 (UTC)