Wikipedia:Peer review/Matsuo Bashō/archive1

Matsuo Bashō

I am planning to improve this to featured quality, but first I'd like to know where it's most deficient. Ashibaka tock 13:54, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

Hello. A few items I would note:

• The lede is quite short. At FAC, they like to see at least three paragraphs.
  • Actually, the lead is good- see WP:LEAD. Extending it to 2 paragraphs (at most) would be good of course though. AndyZ _t 22:54, 27 March 2006 (UTC)
• You mention at the opening that his name when he was a child was Kinsaku, yet the name never comes up again. With three other names, unless you have a really good reason, I would drop the childhood name.

How the heck did this guy feed himself? Seriously. He apparantly moved all over and I can't figure out how he paid his expenses. How did he publish? Who were his sponsors?

• If his father was a samurai, was he also? He works for the same local lord, but is it as a samurai or otherwise?
• What's a Bashō hut? There's no explanation. Don't assume your readers are familiar with the terminology. This is particularly true since I don't have a firm understanding of his religious
• You state that in his third hut "he took in a nephew and a woman friend, Jutei, who were both unwell." yet they nephew and woman friend just disappear after that. What is their significance? If they are not significant, why are they mentioned? What about his parents? What sort of upbringing did he have - harsh, kind?
• Tsuboi Tokoku became his lover. I assume this was a male but only because there is a citation to a volume on Homosexuality and civilization (but you need to point this out in the article). How did being gay influence his work, or did it not influence it? WHat social reaction would he have gotten for being gay? Or was he closeted?
• Since this is an author, there must be an extant bibliography. I found this on Barnes and Noble. Note: Bibliography (works by the subject of the article) and References are two separate sections.
• Re: the haiku: "Travelling sick; My dreams roam, On a withered moor." Where is this from? You need to cite sources.
• Two references are unlikely to pass muster. There have to be more references you can cite. Look at the nature of haiku as a form and provide some historical materials. If you are going to cite to the volume Homosexuality and Civilization, you need to add this to your references.
• Three footnotes are inadequate and several more items need citation. You state that "Shiki not only criticized Bashō but also reformed hokku according to his own tastes in the late 19th century." Where does this come from. Other statements are made of a similar nature that require citation.
• The second two footnotes are simply html links with no description. Check out the featured articles posted on the mainpage and see how the text can be interwoven with a link.
• You have divided the article into Life and Works sections. This should all be integrated together. I would focus first on giving the reader a general introduction of the time period, the castes and other background data. Next section: Talk about his childhood, where he was socially, his family's beliefs and status. Next: His wanderings and how he came across haiku and what significance it was to others. His popularity: who were his fans? How did he aggregate followers? His death: how did he die? Stomach illness is vague. Is there anything more specific?
• Prose on the article needs a lot of attention, particularly the first part; it comes off as a bunch of declarative sentences stuck together into paragraphs. As the article nears the end it becomes more fluid and I sense you are more "into" this section -- and it shows.
• When citing books, only the hardbound is needed. Also, use the following template that's becoming almost required in FACs:
  • {{cite book | author= | year= | title= | id= }}
• You need more images than one. Try to obtain a map showing where the subject lived, where he travelled to, etc. Also, since the haikus are all in the public domain, consider using frames to move the quotes from the Quotes section (and the "Quotes" should be deleted because we have WikiQuotes for this material). Look at the boxes on the Gerald Ford article for what I am doing as a sample.

Hope this helps. Jtmichcock 02:37, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

It does; thanks. I'll start work on this shortly. Ashibaka tock 17:12, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

• The biggest hurdle to FAC with this article is probably getting the prose to a higher standard. There are no easy solutions for this but mixing in information from more sources might help, as would getting a set of fresh eyes to look at it and make edits. I will create a map of his travels in Japan and see how that looks in the article. I contacted you on your talk page about a potential map. --maclean25 19:12, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

• The intro is truly horrible. Quite aside from its shortness; I mean, "today, after centuries of commentary, he is recognized as an author of hokku." No, really? I was very much expecting to see something along the lines of "today, Basho is universally agreed to be the greatest hokku poet ever, hailed as the 'God of Haiku' by his countrymen". Also, more sources and especially quotes from primary sources would be good, in addition to simply expanding the article. There's not too much discussion of 'context' - what came before, and how Basho was such a watershed in haiku; I vaguely remember a line which went like this: "Without Basho, we would still be licking the spittle of old man [Matsunaga] Teitoku." Little is mentioned of his travel diaries, and as others have pointed out, how he actually lived is not really touched upon. This could be done so much better than it is; as I've said, Basho is possibly the single most important Japanese poet, up there and and mebbe even exceeding the likes of Teika and Hitomaro (to name two). An article on Basho should be at least as long as the one on Teika. Lord knows there is more material in English on Basho! Far too little space is devoted to, among other things, his travel diaries. --maru (talk) contribs 03:14, 24 June 2006 (UTC)