Talk:Antoine Hamilton/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Mike Christie (talk · contribs) 14:01, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

I'll review this. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 14:01, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

Images are appropriately licensed; Earwig shows no issues; sources are reliable.

• I'm not sure this is a GA issue, but I'm curious to know why the article is at "Antoine Hamilton" but we give "Anthony Hamilton" before "Antoine".
  • Antoine is the French form of Anthony. His birthname is Anthony, the French called him Antoine. The Wikipedia article was created on 13 November 2004 as "Antoine Hamilton" by an IP editor. He perhaps chose that name because Wikipedia already had several Anthony Hamiltons (there are four of them at present, e.g. "Anthony Hamilton (snooker player)"), whereas Antoine Hamilton is unique. I think Hamilton is not often called Antoine in the English literature. E.g. Encyclopedia Brittannica 11th edition calls him "Count Anthony Hamilton". One might rename the article to "Anthony Hamilton (writer)".

    I think the article is OK where it is, and I agree that if it were to be moved, Anthony Hamilton (writer) would make the most sense. It's not an issue for GA, so I'm striking the point. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 13:49, 21 April 2023 (UTC)

• "he fled with his family to France during the Interregnum": since "interregnum" is only linked to a generic article, I would suggest making this more specific -- perhaps "he fled with his family to France following the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland"
  • Good idea, changed in accordance.
• "later sided with James II against the Prince of Orange, which led him into another French exile". Doesn't this get repeated in the "As a soldier" paragraph, immediately following? Saying "sided with James II against the Prince of Orange" and then "he fought ... in the Irish Army in the Williamite War" sounds like two different events.
  • Changed in accordance
• "sister of James Butler, the future first duke of Ormond ... Ormond had granted Anthony's father in 1640 the manor": Butler was an earl, not a duke, in 1640; I think it would simplify things if we ignored his pending dukedom and described him here just as the Earl of Ormond. Without mentioning that it appears as if we're saying the Duke of Ormond granted the manor at a date when he was not a duke and so we should be referring to him just as "Butler". Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 14:55, 20 April 2023 (UTC)
  • If we omit the "future Duke", I fear, readers will not realise who he is. The 1st Duke of Ormond is the most famous of all the Ormonds.

    Then could we make it "James Butler, the Earl of (and future first duke of) Ormond"? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 13:49, 21 April 2023 (UTC)

    • Dear Mike, we are here in Hamilton's story still at his birth in 1644/45. James Butler succeeded as earl of Ormond in 1634, became marquess in 1642, and duke in 1661. So he was marquess at the time considered. I therefore changed to "James Butler, marquess (and future duke) of Ormond". Fine with you? Johannes Schade (talk) 08:43, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

      Perfect. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 23:41, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

• "Anthony was one of nine siblings, who are listed in his father's article." I think it would be neater to make this just "Anthony was one of nine siblings", and make a footnote that says "See Sir George Hamilton, 1st Baronet, of Donalong for a list of Anthony's siblings". Though I also think it would be OK to drop the second half of the sentence -- if a reader is interested it's not hard for them to figure out that the father's article, which you've already linked, is the place to go.
  • I would love to reformat this as a footnote as you suggest, but MOS:NOTE seems to forbid addressing the reader with "Note that" and I think they mean that in general it is not OK to addredss the reader in the imperative. I doubt that readers would by themselves go to the father's article to see his siblings. Originally I had a list of his siblings right there but then I thought one should not duplicate it and tried to refer or link to the father's article in some way. I have added similarly styled links in many articles when parents and children are both notable. It would be important to find a good solution for this problem. In the present case his siblings are quite important. His brothers James, George, and Richard as well as his sister Elizabeth are mentioned and have their own articles.

    "See" is an imperative, but this usage is so widespread that it's scarcely seen as one, and would be uncontroversial. If that's the only issue, though, there are other workarounds -- how about making the footnote say "Sir George Hamilton, 1st Baronet, of Donalong gives a list of Anthony's siblings"? Or placing the link to the father in a "See also" section, adding "gives a list of Anthony's siblings" after the link? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 13:49, 21 April 2023 (UTC)

• There are seven or eight unsourced sentences -- check the end of each paragraph for ones with no footnotes. Every paragraph should end with a citation unless that sentences only serves to introduce a quote which is itself cited.
  • Do you mean 7 or 8 consecutive unsourced sentences after the passage "in his father's article" or anywhere dispersed in the article? What a about the-sky-is-blue sentences? I thought that only FA requires that every non-blue statement must be cited, while GA requires citations only for statement that are controversial or likely to be challenged. I think the requirement for a citation at the end of each paragraph exists only in B-Class. Passing B is not a prerequisite for GA. Dear Mike I will of course try to find citations where you think they should be. I am just trying to find out what is really required and what I can demand when I am in the other role. As you know well, many GAs pass that have for lower citation densities than Antoine Hamilton.

    It's not the citation density that I'm concerned about; it's uncited statements. You're right that GA doesn't formally require citations for everything, but I've found that it's very difficult to find a statement that is so uncontroversial that nobody could demand a citation for it. Hence I default to asking for citations for almost every uncited sentence. I'm happy to look at individual sentences that you suggest don't need to be cited, but I've also found that the less controversial a statement is, the easier it tends to be to find a citation, so the path of least resistance has become "cite everything". Specifically, the sentences in the article I see without citations are:

    • "His mother's family, the Butlers, were Catholics except his uncle James, already mentioned."

    – I found a citation for this from Pierre Gustave Brunet (1853). Admittedly, it is quite old and foreign language, but a well known author.Johannes Schade (talk) 10:10, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

    • "and employed Anthony's father at various official administrative and military tasks."
    • "Hamilton and his mother probably had fled elsewhere before these events."
    • "Some time later they were joined by Anthony's younger brother Richard."

    – I found a citation for this in Richard's ODNB article.

    • "and Anthony seems to have returned to Ireland.

    – I found a citation that says "It is somewhat uncertain whether Anthony Hamilton continued to serve in the regiment ..."

    • "Antoine Hamilton is mainly known for a single book: the Mémoires du Comte de Grammont. After this followed some shorter works among which the four short stories: Le Bélier, Fleur d'Epine, Zénéyde, and Les quatre Facardins." (And I've just noticed the second sentence here is missing its verb.)
    • "apparently without Hamilton's knowledge. The first English translation is the one by Abel Boyer, which appeared in 1714. Walpole's translation is the classical one and used in many editions. It seem it has been published for the first time in 1773 at Strawberry Hill Press. Peter Quennell retranslated the Memoirs in 1930. It was published accompanied with extensive commentary by Cyril Hughes Hartmann."
    • "An 1849 omnibus entitled Fairy Tales and Romances contained English translations of all his fiction."

    Are some of these perhaps more logical deductions on your part rather than material that can be sourced? E.g "had probably fled" and "seems to have returned"? It can be hard to assemble a narrative like this constructed of disparate sources without this sort of connective tissue, but I think we have to be careful of OR; we're not allowed to interject our interpretations unless there is no other possible interpretation (in which case it is usually possible to cite a source for the deduction). Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 13:49, 21 April 2023 (UTC)

• "However, it is more likely that infant Anthony, his mother, and elder siblings were safely at Nenagh and that the Lady Hamilton spared at Roscrea was his grandaunt, the wife of George Hamilton of Greenlaw and Roscrea, not his mother." This seems on the face of it to be original research -- that is, no secondary source draws this conclusion. I think the most we can say is "... was spared at Roscrea, though there were two George Hamiltons and it is not clear which Carte is referring to". I certainly don't see how we can see the family were probably safe at Nenagh without a source.
  • All this comes from the source Manning 2001, cited as [17] and [26] and is resumed in the corresponding footquotes. On the other hand, Carte is quite clearly saying Antoine's mother was at Roscrea. He describes her as "sister of the marquis of Ormond". However, as Manning explains, Carte is in error: she "probably" was at Nenagh. The "probably" reflects the cautious formulations used by Manning. I probably should try to add some more citations from Manning.

    Yes, it sounds like Manning would cover this. By the way, your habit of adding quotes to the footnotes is very helpful to a reviewer; it's not necessary though, as I assume you know. In this case I'm working only from what you've quoted; if there's more from Manning, can you quote it here in support? No need to add it to the footquote unless you wish to. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 13:49, 21 April 2023 (UTC)

• "On 7 September, the couple had a son who died as an infant." I think this could be cut; it's not about Antoine at all and has no later relevance in the article.
  • You are right: done.
• "as well as their voyage to England, described below": this sort of thing is best avoided -- could we recast the paragraph chronologically to eliminate the need for this?
  • Rearranged as voyage first, Turenne's winter campaign afterwards. The two events overlap of course.
• "Finally arrived the new commander, Condé": I assume this should be "Finally the new commander, Condé, arrived".
  • Reformulated without inversion. I am running out of time for this evening. Dear Mike thank you very much for all your efforts. I enjoy discussing with you. Best regards, Johannes Schade (talk) 21:12, 20 April 2023 (UTC)
• "Anthony succeeded to his brother's doubtful French title of comte d'Hamilton": shouldn't this title, and its doubtfulness, have been mentioned before this? As written this comes out of the blue. And why is it doubtful?
• "The tone of the work, however, is now thought equivocal." It's not clear what he's equivocal about, or why we need "however": there is nothing that this sentence appears to be in opposition to. From the following sentences it seems this refers to the two courts.
• "even been said to share something with the anti-jacobite polemic": I would think "Jacobite" needs a capital "J".
  • Corrected to anti-Jacobite.
• Does any secondary source mention the opening sentence of the Mémoires as noteworthy? If not, what's the justification for including it?

-- Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 16:43, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

Hi, Johannes, just checking in to see how this is going. Let me know when you'd like me to take a look at your most recent edits to the article. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 10:44, 28 April 2023 (UTC)

Dear Mike, I struggle a bit to find the time and to find the missing citations. I found that Anthony's parents' marriage date is not 1629 as reported in Burke's Peerage but 1635 as Manning (2001) points out. Another case of the confusion between the two George Hamiltons. I also found that Ó Ciardha (2009) in Dictionary of Irish Biography (DIB) states that Anthony was "probably" born in Nenagh. He lists Manning as one of his sources. I very much appreciate all your comments and will contact you when I will have made some worthwhile progress. With many thanks and best regards, Johannes Schade (talk) 17:13, 28 April 2023 (UTC)

Second pass

Johannes, since you've made quite a few changes to the article I'm going to read through again from the top and will make notes here as I go.

• You might consider adding a sentence or two more to the lead -- the article is quite substantial, and the lead is very short.
  • I will leave this to the end.
• In the family tree, you have "Anthony Hamilton with parents and other selected relatives. and written genealogies of the Abercorns." The second half of this is odd -- is this meant to be a reference to what the sourcing is for the tree?
  • Yes, it was meant to provide references for the family tree, but this one was disfigured by a mistake. Surely, family trees need to be verifiable. I felt it would be too much to add citations on each tree node and just gave broad page ranges from genealogical texts. User:Surtsicna was at some time deleting unsourced family trees and especially Ahnentafels, and rightly so. The rule is however often broken; e.g. the FA William the Conqueror (6 July 2012) includes a family tree and an Ahnentafel, both uncited. One might also wonder whether making a graphical family tree from textual information is not OR.
• Footnote [d] says "Anthony's father's article has more detail about these attempts to become a baronet." Looking through that article it appears the situation is too complicated to summarize easily, but if we're going to mention it I think we have to provide a source -- we can't treat the other Wikipedia article as a source in itself. Can we extract whatever source is used in the article on George, and cite that here?
  • Done. I added two citations, directly to the text, before the note as "... has more detail ..." cannot really be supported by a citation.
• Similarly for footnote [e]; we need to cite that George had nine children if we're going to mention it here. Fortunately it's easy to cite the six sons: this citation from George's page does it. For the daughters, if there's no citation that covers all three, I'd just copy over the individual citations for the three of them from George's page.
  • Done. I added two citations one for the 6 brothers and one for the 3 sisters.
• Footnote 5 gives us "He was probably born at Roscrea, co. Tipperary, in 1644 or 1645." This is used to support "Anthony was probably born there [Nenagh], but Roscrea is often given in error." I think we need two changes here: we need something that supports that he was probably born at Nenagh, and we also need to support "often given in error". The cite given is an example of the error, but if we don't have other examples to hand I would change this to "but Roscrea is sometimes given as his birthplace" or some similar wording.
  • Done. Repeated the citation from Ó Ciardha supporting Nenagh and added citations supporting Roscrea, there are 6 of them now.
• "but Anthony, his mother, and his siblings were not affected, despite what Carte (1736) or Sergeant (1913) say": this is cited to Carte and Sergeant. Those cites can support what Carte and Sergeant say, but they can't support the fact that the family was in fact unaffected -- we need another source for that. Ideally the other source would either mention Carte and Sergeant as being in error, but if not then we need a reason to believe that the new source is correct and that Sergeant and Carte are wrong.
  • Discovered that Manning says Lady Hamilton left for Dublin in May 1646. Added that and adjusted in consequence.

    OK, but now we have "where his aunt (not his mother despite what Carte (1736) or Sergeant (1913) say.[33][45]) was spared." The two footnotes are to Carte and Sergeant, which is fine, but we need a citation for "his mother was spared" too. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 11:23, 3 June 2023 (UTC)

    • I added another citation from Manning saying that the lady at Roscrea was likely his aunt, not his mother.
• "The Jacobite rising of 1715, which tried to replace George I with James Francis Edward, failed." This is unsourced.
  • Deleted. I wanted a citation that says he played no role in the "fifteen", but could not find one.

That takes me down to the Works section; I'll pick this up again tonight or tomorrow. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 20:04, 1 June 2023 (UTC) That is it for the biographicqal part. Thanks for still being with me. Best regards, Johannes Schade (talk) 16:48, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

• There is an unsourced row in the table of events: "Took service in the Irish army", in 1685.
  • I added two citations. It could be that this is WP:SYNTH
• The list of works includes external links to read those works. This is fine for GA, so there's nothing you need to do, but just so you're aware, these are in conflict with guideline on external links. (That guideline is not part of the GA criteria, which is why there's no change needed.) As a result someone is likely to come along and change this; the simplest way to change it would be to convert each one to a web citation and include the external link in the citation. These external links are effectively citations that source the fact that he wrote these, so these are sourced; if we were to just remove the external links they would no longer by sourced.
  • I find this weird. I always thought that linking to external websites except for under the section dedicated to that purpose was forbidden because it gives the impression that Wikipedia supports or recommends the linked sites and because of link rot. But linking to books in a major digital library is quite a different story. I do not see why Wikipedia would want to forbid this. I suspoect that digital libraries were not yet important enough to be excepted when that rule was made.

    The links are very useful as you say, and I agree we should have them -- the only issue is where they are placed. They usually shouldn't be in the body of the article, as you currently have them. One option is to put them in the citation, so they show up in the footnote section. Right now you have the external links functioning as citations, which is fine for GA, but if each of those links were formatted as a {{cite book}} citation there's a parameter for a URL that would let you put in the link. Anyway, nothing needs to be done for this review. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 09:53, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

• Suggest linking Pierre Marteau.
  • Done
• There are a few uncited sentences in the works section:
  • "Hamilton's brother James, an important character of the second part, had died in 1673."
    • Done, also added George who is a similar case
  • "The first English translation, by Abel Boyer, followed very quickly in 1714. Walpole's translation is the classical one and used in many editions. It seem it has been published for the first time in 1773 at Strawberry Hill Press. Peter Quennell retranslated the Memoirs in 1930. It was published accompanied with extensive commentary by Cyril Hughes Hartmann. New editions have been published continuously and over the years and there are over 80 of them to date. This work made Hamilton one of the classical writers of France."
  • "By highlighting the brilliance of the London Restoration court, the book threw into relief the lacklustre nature of the exiled Stuart court."
  • "In imitation and parody of the oriental tales that Antoine Galland's translation of Thousand and One Nights, published from 1704 to 1717, had brought into fashion, Hamilton wrote three ironic and extravagant short stories Fleur d'Epine, Zénéyde and Les quatre Facardins; the last two left incomplete."
  • "L'Enchanteur Faustus was published much later. An 1849 omnibus entitled Fairy Tales and Romances contained English translations of all his fiction."

That's everything from a second pass. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 10:28, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

Hi, Johannes, I've struck a couple more items; just the short list of uncited sentences above left now. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 10:11, 5 June 2023 (UTC)

Johannes, just checking in. I've struck a couple more that I see you've taken care of. Looks like just the two points left above. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 10:01, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

Johannes, one of the above still needs a citation. I see you're working intermittently on the article. It's been over two months now, and I think it's time to close this. If you don't want to address this citation, I can fail the article and you can renominate it when you've worked on it further; or if you do want to add a citation or remove the sentence, I can promote it. Let me know. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 04:17, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

Dear Mike Christie. Please fail it. I have worked with very few exceptions every day on this article, as well as on the articles of his siblings and his father, trying to decide what should go where and how far overlaps can be reduced. I put in {{Citation needed}}s where citations are still needed. There are six of them. Looking more in detail, there should probably also be a couple of {{Failed verification}}s where what the source says come close to what the text says but does not verify it completely and a different of additional citation is needed. There are places where I use more than one citation and those should be checked for [WP:SYHTH]. I have used a lot of old and foreign language citation (see here for discussion on the age of sources) I think we are both now tired of this and need a break. Thank you very much for all your efforts and: You made this article better. I hope to meet you again, Johannes Schade (talk) 10:44, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

OK, I'll go ahead and fail it. (I hadn't noticed that you'd added more tags, but I'd have seen them when going through prior to promoting, so I think you're right this is the best answer.) There's no doubt the process has improved the article, and I look forward to seeing it back at GAN in the future. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 15:35, 30 June 2023 (UTC)