Talk:"Sappho" fresco (Pompeii)

Did you know nomination

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. You can locate your hook here. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Dclemens1971 talk 23:47, 2 October 2025 (UTC)

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The Sappho Fresco

• ... that the Sappho Fresco of Pompeii (pictured) is not a portrait of Sappho?

• Source: https://panoramadelart.com/analyse/portrait-de-jeune-femme

• • Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/No Kaebang

Created by NeverBeGameOver (talk). Number of QPQs required: 1. Nominator has 6 past nominations.

NeverBeGameOver (talk) 18:49, 8 August 2025 (UTC).

• Article new and long enough. QPQ provided, hook interesting and cited inline and verified in the source, image properly licensed. Copyvio not detected. Good to go. Juxlos (talk) 03:59, 10 August 2025 (UTC)

• I came here from the WP:CGR page, where I saw that this article had been nominated for DYK. I know nothing about the DYK process, but my impression of the article itself is mostly negative. In order to avoid cluttering up the DYK template, I've started a separate section on the talk page listing some of the problems (misspellings, ungrammatical sentences, inadequate sources, sources not properly credited, at least three citations that fail verification). WP:DYK says "Articles must meet the basic criteria set out on this page, but do not have to be of very high quality". Fair enough. I don't know how low the bar is; perhaps this is within the range considered normal and acceptable at DYK. But to me, as an outsider to the process, it certainly does not seem "good to go", or ready to be featured on the front page. Crawdad Blues (talk) 23:53, 8 September 2025 (UTC)
• Pulling this from the approved list to address Crawdad Blues' comments; courtesy ping to NeverBeGameOver, Juxlos Dclemens1971 (talk) 01:54, 9 September 2025 (UTC)

@NeverBeGameOver and Juxlos: Please address the above.--Launchballer 16:26, 16 September 2025 (UTC)

I took the feedback made and cleaned out my sources, incorporating more peer-reviewed content over at JSTOR. I still stand by utilizing Sources 5 and 6 in my citations given that they have lined up with all the other resources I have utilized in the article NeverBeGameOver (talk) 17:02, 16 September 2025 (UTC)

New review now needed. Dclemens1971 (talk) 14:35, 17 September 2025 (UTC)

General: Article is new enough and long enough
New enough: Long enough:

Policy: Article is sourced, neutral, and free of copyright problems
Adequate sourcing: Neutral: Free of copyright violations, plagiarism, and close paraphrasing:

Hook: Hook has been verified by provided inline citation
Cited: Interesting:

Image: Image is freely licensed, used in the article, and clear at 100px.
Freely licensed: Used in article: Clear at 100px:

QPQ: Done.

Overall: good to go. All additions properly sourced, removed unreliable content, article remains neutral, copyright-free. Bogger (talk) 10:40, 1 October 2025 (UTC)

Problems

I came here from the WP:CGR page, where I saw that this article had been nominated for DYK. I have no experience with DYK and I don't know what the standards for article quality are, but I have to say that my impressions of this one are mostly negative. It was nominated for DYK only three days after its creation, and it still bears the the signs of hasty writing and inadequate proofreading, including typos and ungrammatical sentences. One of these has since been corrected by another editor ("was discovered int he Regio VII, Insula 2.6"), but others remain: "The Fresco itself derives form the Insula VI region"; "The motif shows that such commissioned portraits that were trendy at the time" (what is the second "that" doing here?); "while the neighboring Insula VII, the site of many fresco finds belonged to that of the Irace family" (what does "that" refer to?); "it is also an example of sloppier and more invasive techniques of excavation that has left damage on the original site".

The sources are popular articles (1, 3), personal blogs (2), a self-published web site run by two people who are not authorities in the field (5, 6), and a completely anonymous tourist site (7). No peer-reviewed academic sources are cited; the closest thing is the website of the Berkshire Archaeological Society (4), which does not mention the "Sappho Fresco" at all, and is used only to provide an estimate of the percentage of the Roman population that was literate. Even these sources are not always properly credited to their authors (the author of the Panorama de l'art article is Sandrine Bernardeau, unmentioned in the citation), and they are not always accurately reported. I haven't checked all the citations, but of the handful I checked three failed verification:

1. it is considered a masterpiece of Roman art. The source cited (Iacobelli) says nothing about this being a masterpiece of Roman art.

2. The motif shows that such commissioned portraits that were trendy at the time, and that literacy and academia were prevalent. The source (Bernardeau) says that portraits of people holding writing implements indicate that writing was a skill mastered by "an important part of the upper-class population", including women. It does not say that literacy was "prevalent" (= general and widespread), and the previous paragraph of the article cites a different source suggesting that the Roman literacy rate was only about 15% (definitely not "prevalent"). Bernardeau says nothing at all about "academia", a word that, at least in its modern sense, is anachronistic in this context. The ability to read and write does not make someone an academic, either today or in antiquity.

3. it is also an example of sloppier and more invasive techniques of excavation that has left damage on the original site. The first source (Bernardeau) says nothing about excavation techniques; she says only that the post-excavation practice of removing portions of paintings from walls in order to display them in museums is "condemned today". The second source (pompeiiinpictures) points out that the excavators of the 18th century were chiefly interested in finding works of art and that the locations of finds were not carefully recorded, which makes it hard to identify the original contexts of many objects now in museums and to place the relevant buildings accurately on modern plans of the site. There's no question that the aims and methods of the 18th-century excavators were not the same as those of modern archaeologists, but the adjectives "sloppy" and "invasive" do not appear in either source and should not be inserted here in wikivoice.

–Crawdad Blues (talk) 23:42, 8 September 2025 (UTC)

Point taken, I have identified a new source via JSTOR that may prove more amenable towards addressing the issues you have raised. I will swap them out, and recontextualize and make some adjustments accordingly. NeverBeGameOver (talk) 15:53, 9 September 2025 (UTC)

Hey @Crawdad Blues: I came here from DYK and I agree this page needs work. DYKs are meant to be new pages, but sources are always big concern. The edits you recommend are good, especailly the wikivoice concerns.

And at @NeverBeGameOver: the new JSTOR source is great!

Though I hate to delete information, pompeiiinpictures is not a reliable source. I think pompeiiinpictures is a place you might use as a starting point as a researcher, but should probably be deleted from this Wikipedia as a reliable source. Let me know thoughts on this point. I've edited the page to try and focus on relevant, sourced info in the mean time. Hope it helps! – SquawkGuard (talk) 02:24, 22 September 2025 (UTC)