Draft talk:Charlière

This article is an unnecessary fork of topics already covered, and should be deleted.

The lede tells us that Charlière is a name for manned gas balloons. Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia, and per WP:NOTDICT, has articles about subjects, not names used for subjects. And as far as I can tell, the term 'Charlière' is rarely if ever even used in English. Since we have an article covering the history of gas balloons, and an extensive biography of Jacques Charles, I can see no reason why we need this article at all.

Any significant new content in this article might possibly merit merging with one or other of the existing articles, if it were properly sourced. Unfortunately though, it clearly isn't. AndyTheGrump (talk) 16:41, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

Given the lack of response here, I have started a thread at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Aviation, drawing attention to this article. AndyTheGrump (talk) 04:20, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

Since you wrote the message, I have expanded the article (mostly with material from the Jacques Charles article) and added several sources. I will soon try and remove some of the details from the Jacques Charles article, so that the Jacques Charles article focuses more on the person (and is less cluttered with the details of the balloon) and this article focuses more on the balloon itself. I will do the same with other articles that mention the Charlière and add a few more things from the sources.

My motivation for creating this article was to discuss the first flight of the Charlière and the first manned flight of the Charlière. While both are already notable for being the first [un]manned flight of a gas balloon, the unmanned baloon (Le Globe) is particularly notable for how the peasants in the village of Gonesse reacted to it.

Ae-a (talk) 05:11, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

Sorry, but I still can't see why we need a separate article on the balloon. Jacques Charles was known for little else, and his experiments with balloons are best described in broader context. It is immediately noticeable that this article finds it necessary to stray off topic, to discuss the Globe rather than the Charlière, in order to do this. What exactly is achieved by splitting content in this manner? AndyTheGrump (talk) 05:20, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

I agree pretty much with AndyTheGrump. Unless there is significant material about the balloon which there is no room for in the parent article, it should not be forked. But there is another howler here. "Charlière" came principally to be the technical term for any hydrogen balloon (and hence other lifting gases, such as coal gas), while the equivalent for hot-air balloons was - and already you are ahead of me - the Montgolfière. The various sources on my bookshelf do not say what Charlier called his first manned balloon, or even if he named it at all. So any claim here that he did so certainly needs its source citing, and that has not been done. But, rather than summary deletion, this article should be made a redirect to Gas balloon. — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 09:02, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

At the moment, this is a work in progress, and at first, I'm trying to consolidate the description of the two balloon flights into one article (at the moment, they're spread out over several articles that repeat the same information). After that, I intend to add some more material from the cited sources which would describe the flights in more detail.

But there is a bit of confusion here because Charlière can sometimes refer to his first manned balloon (I think I read somewhere that that was called "La Charlière"), all balloons designed by Jacques Charles, or any gas balloon. Ae-a (talk) 17:08, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

This article is still a work in progress. My original intention was to have somewhere to describe the flight of "Le Globe" in great detail. Currently, the details are spread out over Jacques Charles, Robert brothers, History of ballooning, Gas balloon, Aeronautics (and a few other articles with a brief summary). The first three repeat a lot of the same information. I plan on harvesting the material from these articles and then summarizing the material in the original articles and using a main-article template to direct readers who want to read about the balloon flights in depth. Not only is there a lot of repetition, but the first two articles are biographies that will get cluttered if there's too many details about the balloon-flight itself. I also plan on adding some more material from the cited sources.

About going off-topic, maybe one compromise could be to broaden the intended scope of the article's title and to rename this article something like "The balloon flights of Jacques Charles", "Early hydrogen balloon flights" (I'm open to suggestions), and have separate sections for "Le Globe", "La Charlière" and possibly also a new section for "La Caroline" Ae-a (talk) 17:06, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

Several of the sources currently cited look questionable to me. For example 'Eccentric France' book is from a publisher of travel guides, and the 'Fiddlers Green' source is a website selling paper models. I'd have to suggest that the best sources on Jacques Charles and his balloons would more likely to be found in French sources: the French-language Wikipedia article on Charles seems to cite a few. [1] And my opinion on the need for separate articles on Charles' flights remains the same - they are his flights, and should be described in context, in his biography. If there is more detail available from proper high-quality sources, it can be added there. AndyTheGrump (talk) 17:30, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

Again, I agree with AndyTheGrump. The way ahead is not bad sources, vain hopes and inadequate "work in progress" (that last is what the Draft namespace is for, but even that can only buy you some time). No, the way ahead is to grow the parent article with citations to reliable sources. Only consider a split once that gets unwieldly. And please, Ae-a, do read that RS policy I just linked to for the second time, treat it with deep respect, and don't take a flyer on what your hope your fellow editors might put up with. We won't.

This discussion is going only one way. I intend shortly to turn this article into a redirect page. If you have anything here that you have added and is worth saving, you might like to add it to the parent article. Otherwise, you would have to go looking for it in the page history. — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 17:46, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

If you don't think the early flights of hydrogen balloons deserves it's own article, I'd be willing to instead move the content to a sub-section of another article. But is the Jacques Charles article really the right one? Seeing that he collaborated with the Robert brothers, one could argue that it would be equally at home there (currently, that article has almost the same content for the bit about the early balloon flights). Intuitively, History of ballooning would also be a good home for the content, but I'm concerned that adding that much detail to an article with a broad scope could make the article unwieldy. Ideally, I'd like there to be just one place on the English Wikipedia that you could link to with a description of the flight of "Le Globe" - even if it is just a sub-section of the Jacques Charles. The only thing I'm concerned about now is that currently, the content is mostly copied in the other articles I've mentioned, if someone else wants to add some information, they may put it in the other articles instead of the one we agree on and we'd end up with information spread across several different articles discussing the same thing. Although this could be solved if the other articles just contained a summary and used a Template:Main at the top of the subsection to indicate that there's more information on another page. Ae-a (talk) 21:51, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

Also, you might like to note that "la Charlière" commonly refers to the particular gas balloon within the context of the phrase, which is usually not the first manned one. On occasion it does reference the first one, but again not as a name but as the one currently under discussion. Suggesting that, capitalised as "La Charlière", it was also the name of that first balloon does require rock-solid verification. I have just had a not-so-fun time correcting all those instances that have been appearing in other Wikipedia articles. — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 18:04, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

I've removed anything from the article that suggests the first manned hydrogen balloon was named La Charliere, and also mentioned that it was not known if it had a name or not. However, the first sentence of the article still reads like a dictionary, so either the article needs to be renamed (my preferred option) or merged into another existing article as the both of you have suggested (I'd be willing to do that if we can agree on which article to merge into). Ae-a (talk) 04:44, 21 July 2023 (UTC)

It turns out that the problem with the sources comes from the original text in the Jacques Charles article which uses the same sources. All I did was copy and merge that text into this article. I also removed two 'facts' that came from the German article that contradicted what was said elsewhere. I'll check out the "reliable sources" article. However, a quick Googling of the text in the Fiddlers Green source shows that it in fact copied text from a book called Lady Icarus. I'll look at the other sources and also see if the French Wikipedia article has anything more reliable. Ae-a (talk) 22:04, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

Further investigation reveals that the other articles I've mentioned also use the same bad sources. So if we sort out the sources, those articles will be properly sourced too. Ae-a (talk) 04:53, 21 July 2023 (UTC)

Now that this article is being re-focused as a child of the gas balloon article, I have moved it to Draft namespace to allow it a little breathing space. It remains to be seen whether there is enough significant material to pull in and sustain it as a separate article. — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 07:26, 21 July 2023 (UTC)

Wouldn't redirecting to History of ballooning be better than gas balloon? This article is intended to discuss La Globe in the context of the history of ballooning and how it was perceived by the local peasants when it landed. Also, the Gas Balloon article also currently has a lot less text on La Globe and the first manned Hydrogen balloon than the History of ballooning article. Ae-a (talk) 13:45, 21 July 2023 (UTC)

Yes, you are probably right about that. I would have no objection. — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 14:14, 21 July 2023 (UTC)

No, Gas balloon is a direct synonym of Charlière. This article may be intended to be about La Globe, but that is a separate issue. — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 19:17, 22 July 2023 (UTC)