Talk:A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Forbes72 (talk · contribs) 01:45, 19 October 2020 (UTC)

Barely a month old, but it's already in pretty good shape. You've put some serious work into this, Footlessmouse. I'm happy to look this over in detail. 〈 Forbes₇₂ | Talk 〉 01:45, 19 October 2020 (UTC)

GA review – see WP:WIAGA for criteria

1. Is it well written?

   A. The prose is clear and concise, and the spelling and grammar are correct:

   Mostly clear, missing a few full names for scientists and wikilinks to technical terms with their own articles.
   -> Chapter 4 convers [sic] the... fix typo.
   -> still largely focuses on Descartes, Newton, Fermat, Hooke, and Huygens, among others. - Give the full name of the scientist (not just last name) and wikilink their page on the first mention of them in a section. It's OK to use just the last name on second mention within a section, though.
   -> Other examples: "Fitzgerald" "Dyson, in his 1954 review,", "In his 1954 Nature review, Hagedorn notes "
   -> Thomas Preston (scientist) - reformat to hide disambiguation
   -> Platonic and Aristotelian philosophies - add inline wikilinks
   -> old quantum theory - wikilink.
   -> Infobox - are the different page numbers for the different editions? Better to clarify inline (1st ed.) (2nd ed., vol. 1) (2nd ed., vol. 2) if you can. Ditto for publication date and publisher.

   B. It complies with the manual of style guidelines for lead sections, layout, words to watch, fiction, and list incorporation:

   A couple things to fix:
   -> Overview of Volume I, Reception of the first volume - Simplify section titles per MOS:NOBACKREF. The rest are similar.
   -> book established Whittaker as a leading historian of science, he was also widely recognized as a preeminent mathematician Try to make this more substantial: the combination of "leading", "widely recognized", and "preeminent" is getting into MOS:PUFF territory.
   ->Move

2. Is it verifiable with no original research?

   A. It contains a list of all references (sources of information), presented in accordance with the layout style guideline:

   The references themselves are excellent. However, the text is a bit cluttered with citation info.
   -> Citing Max Born (1956),[43] Gerald Holton (1960,[44] 1964,[45] 1968[46]), Charles Scribner (1964),[47] Stanley Goldberg (1967,[48] 1969[49]), Elie Zahar (1973),[50] Tetu Hirosige (1976),[51] Kenneth F. Schaffner (1976),[52] and Arthur I. Miller (1981). - No need for dates in the text, WP:HARV style refs are depreciated.
   -> More broadly, no need to list the publication place inline for any of the reviews - that's what the references are for.

   B. All in-line citations are from reliable sources, including those for direct quotations, statistics, published opinion, counter-intuitive or controversial statements that are challenged or likely to be challenged, and contentious material relating to living persons—science-based articles should follow the scientific citation guidelines:

   Well-referenced.

   C. It contains no original research:

   Article seems to follow from the sources nicely.

   D. It contains no copyright violations nor plagiarism:

   One sentence seems too close:
   -> set forth the relativity theory of Poincaré and Lorentz with some amplifications, and which attracted much attention",[42] and he credited Einstein only with being the first to publish the correct relativistic formulas for stellar aberration and the Doppler effect. is the same phrasing used at [1]. Should be rephrased. The rest seems fine.

3. Is it broad in its coverage?

   A. It addresses the main aspects of the topic:

   Quite comprehensive coverage from the number of sources.

   B. It stays focused on the topic without going into unnecessary detail (see summary style):

   Two things:
   -> the namesake of the Sparrow criterion in spectroscopy A parenthetical aside seems out of scope. Leaving a redlink is OK until somebody writes an article about him.
   -> At just under 88kb, the article is flirting with WP:TOOLONG territory. I can see a reasonable argument made to keep unified or split (probably by edition), but I'd like to hear your thoughts here.

4. Is it neutral?

   It represents viewpoints fairly and without editorial bias, giving due weight to each:

   The article is a little heavy on praise, as I mentioned in 1a WP:WTW section. But it's just surface style, the broader substance appears to be quite representative of the sources as far as I can tell. So no other concerns beyond that.

5. Is it stable?

   It does not change significantly from day to day because of an ongoing edit war or content dispute:

   A minor grammar fix recently, but otherwise pretty stable.

6. Is it illustrated, if possible, by images?

   A. Images are tagged with their copyright status, and valid fair use rationales are provided for non-free content:

   Only picture is a correctly tagged image of a book in the public domain.

   B. Images are relevant to the topic, and have suitable captions:

   The single image and caption are relevant, but a single picture is not enough. The images do not all have to be of the book itself, you can include some of the scientists/experiments/whatever you think is relevant. But surely you can find a few relevant illustrations to add.

7. Overall:

   Pass or Fail:

   The article is close. On substance, I think enough good content is there, but the issues mentioned above should be addressed. 〈 Forbes₇₂ | Talk 〉 02:58, 22 October 2020 (UTC)

Note Thank you for taking the time to review this! I have made changes to fix all of these problems, except for the one that begins "move", did you mean to put something else there? I ended up deleting a couple of problematic statements that did not seem particularly necessary for the article and so won't be missed. I added a portrait of Whittaker and a photo of Einstein. The readable prose size is 48 kB, so it is in between the categories of "Length alone does not justify division" and "May need to be divided (likelihood goes up with size)". So I wasn't sure. If more content were to be added, I would say it definitely should split. The books have enough notability that each is separately notable, but I am not sure if anything else needs to be said about it. I am not sure either way, there are good arguments for both sides on this one. The main argument to keep it together is that the first volume of second edition is basically same as first edition and many of the references talk about both. I am open to suggestions, it is certainly a future possibility. Please let me know if you there are any more issues. Thanks again for taking the time to review the article! Footlessmouse (talk) 04:37, 22 October 2020 (UTC)

• @Forbes72: I have made some additional edits fixing mistakes I saw and have reduced the number of times the word "praised" is used. I also ran it through Word for spelling and grammar to be safe. Let me know if there's anything else I can do to improve the page. Thanks again! Footlessmouse (talk) 23:38, 22 October 2020 (UTC)

• Looks good. I was taking some time to try to decisively tidy up the copyright status of the images, but it turns out to basically be a black hole of interacting copyright law from about a half dozen countries. Everything here appears be public domain, and is tagged as such, but while I was able to find more suitable tags on Poincaré, I guess we have to settle for the generic US public domain tags on Whittaker, Born, and Lorentz. (e.g. apparently Whittaker's portrait was one of the portraits involved in the National Portrait Gallery and Wikimedia Foundation copyright dispute, and wikimedia commons apparently doesn't have a generic UK public domain tag?) Even some pictures from featured articles [2] have the same over-generic tags, so I guess we just ignore the problem?

Anyway, back to the article itself. You're right, I've accidentally conflated the article size with the prose size, so the article probably isn't too long in its current form. The word move was a mistake, I was thinking about asking to move the Publication history/Release details to the end matter, but decided against it, since it seems more a matter of personal preference. I'm glad you've cut down on the praise somewhat. The article favors Whittaker's point of view a bit more than the consensus history, but the article is specifically about his book, so that emphasis not WP:UNDUE in this context. You've fixed the other issues I brought up, so I'm going to pass review. 〈 Forbes₇₂ | Talk 〉 02:40, 23 October 2020 (UTC)

@Forbes72: Thank you again for your careful review, I greatly appreciate the feedback and the promotion! I have changed the second paragraph of the lead to both add in a potential DYK statement and to make it clear that scientific consensus is not on Whittaker's side in the intro. Let me know if you have any concerns, given you just promoted it. Also, there is a drive going on at WP:WikiProject Good articles/GAN Backlog Drives/October 2020 you have to add your name and keep track of the articles you review there to take part (it's not automatic). I saw you were reviewing one before you started mine, so I thought I would let you know in case you didn't see it or didn't know it wasn't automatic. Footlessmouse (talk) 06:15, 23 October 2020 (UTC)

@Footlessmouse: That's about it, thanks. Probably needs some more polishing before WP:FAC, but the GA criteria are not so strict. As for the drive, I'm not personally interested in the review awards, but there's a pretty big backlog of GA reviews, so I agree that it's a good place to focus. Nice work with the article. 〈 Forbes₇₂ | Talk 〉 19:18, 23 October 2020 (UTC)