Talk:Augustin-Jean Fresnel/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Mike Christie (talk · contribs) 19:43, 7 June 2020 (UTC)

I'll review this. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 19:43, 7 June 2020 (UTC)

An extraordinary article. I have a couple of very minor quibbles:

• the apparent implication that the aether was an elastic solid (!): I like it, but I think we have to drop the exclamation point as editorializing, which we're not supposed to do. If you can source an adjective for "implication" such as "remarkable" or "extraordinary", that would be fine, though I don't think it's necessary as you go into the details immediately following this.
• but its latest assumption was expensive on credulity: do you perhaps mean "credibility"? I can make sense of the sentence either way but I think the latter would be more natural.

The good article criteria specify that compliance with the scientific citation guidelines is sufficient to pass, and this article does comply. However, there are a handful of paragraphs that do not finish with a citation, and I'd encourage you to look through them and see if any can easily be cited.

There's no question that this article meets, and easily exceeds, the good article criteria, and I will be promoting it as soon as I've finished writing this note. I want to add a couple of thoughts. First, I can see from the talk page discussion that the question of length has been raised. I agree with Reidgreg's opinion that it should be split, per summary style; and I can see that another GA reviewer might well have decided to fail it on the grounds of length, using 3 (b) as the reason to fail it. I've decided to ignore the problem on the grounds that the encyclopedia is better off with this as a GA. Having said that, I think splitting out sub-articles such as Fresnel's contributions to optics would make this more readable. Gavin, I see that in your response to Reidgreg you mention some scientific articles that you would like to create: what's your feeling about biographical sub-articles? I agree with your comment that it would make no sense to cut too much scientific material from the article; Fresnel's achievements make no sense without the scientific context, including the history of the problems he solved and the mathematics of the solutions. But there's no reason that we can't tell the story you tell here in more than one article.

My own background, in mathematics, with a little physics, enabled me to read the article and understand the topics, but not in enough detail to critique the scientific aspects of the article. In a GA review one sometimes has to take things on faith, and here I'm doing just that. But imagine another reader, with less mathematical background, who would like to get a sense of the importance of Fresnel's achievements. This article won't do that for them; they won't be able to penetrate it and will have to skim. If you move some material to subsidiary articles (which might allow expansion of the text, rather than cutting) you can provide summaries here that are more conceptual than mathematical, and which will be more easily read by lay readers.

If you were to do that there seems little doubt to me that you could the article (and perhaps the sub-articles) to featured status, which would probably lead to the article being on the front page of Wikipedia for a day, if you're motivated by that. I don't think the article in its current state could be featured; the length would be an insurmountable obstacle.

Anyway, whatever you decide to do with it, congratulations on a very fine article -- clear, concise writing, good organization, and a fascinating topic. I've read a fair number of biographical articles about 18th and 19th century mathematicians and physicists, but had never read about Fresnel: I found this a very engaging and interesting read. Thank you for the work you've put into it. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 02:18, 8 June 2020 (UTC)

@Mike Christie: [Coming back to this after the interruption...] Thank you.

I have removed my own exclamation mark and left the "editorializing" to Thomas Young, quoted in the reference. I leave others to judge whether the word "credulity" now makes more sense.

As time permits, I shall check for paragraphs that don't end in citations, to see whether this is a sign of more editorializing that should be removed or relegated.

I suppose would be feasible (although I can't seem to find a good precedent...) to edit this article into a parent article, retaining the present title, and a sub-article with a title like "Contributions of Augustin-Jean Fresnel to physical optics" (leaving the lighthouse work in the parent article). An argument in favor would be that the parent article could give, as you say, "a sense of the importance of Fresnel's achievements" while being "more conceptual", "more easily read", and shorter. OTOH, an argument in favor of expanding the "History" sections of scientific articles is that it more clearly legitimizes the mentioning of other characters. In the long term, one could perhaps do both. (In the short-to-medium term, I am immersed in other projects.) — Gavin R Putland (talk) 06:52, 9 June 2020 (UTC).

Currently the size guideline says that articles over 100kb of readable prose (as opposed to raw wikitext) "almost certainly" should be split. This article is 109kb, so I think eventually, perhaps years from now, other editors with the time and energy to work on this will want to split it, if you decide not to. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 09:15, 9 June 2020 (UTC)