Talk:Molly dance/GA1

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GA review

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Nominator: Caeciliusinhorto (talk · contribs) 19:03, 10 March 2026 (UTC)

Reviewer: LunaEatsTuna (talk · contribs) 22:43, 10 April 2026 (UTC)


I will review this within a week or two! ❧ LunaEatsTuna (talk), proudly editing since 2018 (and just editing since 2017) – posted at 22:43, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

Copyvio check

No copyright concerns.

Prose
History
  • I think it would do a lot of good / give readers some context to have even a brief paragraph mentioning what Morris dancing is and a very brief history of it leading into this genre of Morris dance, like a background section.
  • Optional, but you could say “(the first Monday after 6 January)” to be a little clearer as dates are often confusing.
    • Do you mean to add this explanation to the lead, or to change the explanation in the body text (currently "the Monday after 6 January")? Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 11:18, 13 April 2026 (UTC)
  • The article frequently mentions collecting and collectors of folk dances; what does this mean exactly? I presume it means they document them, and this word usage is fully valid, but I might suggest optionally changing it to something else to be a little clearer.
    • Yes, you are understanding it right. "collect" is the word conventionally used in scholarship and in my experience among folk dance people. I don't like "documented" to describe Needham & Peck's activities as to me it implies that they saw the dances being performed and recorded that; rather they recorded the dances as they were described to them by former dancers. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 11:18, 13 April 2026 (UTC)
  • “dancer from Girton and a concertina player from Histon, near Cambridge” – specify “… from Histon, both near Cambridge”.
  • I would wikilink the instruments and instrumentalists: concertina, accordion, fiddler and percussionist.
    • "Percussion" is a sufficiently broad category that I'm not sure it's worth linking, but I've linked the others. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 11:18, 13 April 2026 (UTC)
Traditions
  • “Traditionally Molly dancing” – add a comma after traditionally.
  • “Along with the dancers, Molly teams were accompanied by various other men who performed specific roles, including an umbrella man, to protect the musician from the weather, a sweeper who carried a broom and would clear a space for the dancers, and the man responsible for the money box” – because this part is quite long, I might use ; for this section as opposed to commas.
Revival
  • “Molly dancing was revived in the late 1970s, when teams began to once again perform the preserved dances” – does it mention where in the UK this was?
    • Initially Cambridgeshire – discussed more fully in the next paragraph. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 11:18, 13 April 2026 (UTC)
  • “Cotswold-style morris dancing” – wikilink to the styles section of the morris dancing page. Alternatively, you could briefly talk about this in my proposed background section.
  • You can wikilink Kent, even though it is a strange place.
  • The sentence starting “Their first performance, in December 1977” I think does not really need a semi-colon since this and the next clause are not directly connected but rather connected to the previous sentence; thus, a full stop after mummers' play would be much better here IMO.
  • “By the year 2000” > you can do “by 2000”.
    • Normally I'd be all for the extra concision, but something about "By 2000" specifically reads awkwardly to me. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 11:18, 13 April 2026 (UTC)
Spotchecks

Passes. I decided to check Bradtke as he is cited the most and all sources I checked passed: refs 5, 7, 21, 25 and 32.

Thank you for the great article! I have never read anything dance-related on Wikipedia before, but I thoroughly enjoyed this. ❧ LunaEatsTuna (talk), proudly editing since 2018 (and just editing since 2017) – posted at 02:34, 12 April 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for your review! I've followed most of your suggestions (see replies inline). I'm still thinking about your question about the broader context of morris dancing – the difficulty is that molly dancing is entirely undocumented before the 1820s, and though it is treated as a form of morris dance today its historical connection to other kinds of morris dance is at best uncertain. Needham and Peck thought that the east anglian display dance tradition might have been some form of hilt-and-point sword dance – and indeed there are some medieval records from relatively-nearby Norfolk which suggest that they did sword dance – but this is speculation at best (and at any rate how that would have connected to the surviving sword-dance traditions in Yorkshire and Northumberland, and how they connect to other English display dances, is still as far as I know pretty mysterious.)
I think the most helpful context to add would be something pretty broad about English display dance, but I will have to have a think about exactly what... Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 11:18, 13 April 2026 (UTC)

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