Talk:Edmund Stone/GA1

GA Review

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Reviewer: Vaticidalprophet (talk · contribs) 19:43, 2 July 2023 (UTC)

Picking this up -- ping if I'm not back in a week. Vaticidalprophet 19:43, 2 July 2023 (UTC)

@Vaticidalprophet you aren't back in a week DimensionalFusion (talk) 10:00, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

Yes I was, DimensionalFusion. You can see from the rest of the review that I made comments shortly after this, and that I'm waiting on the nominator's edits at the moment. GAN is a two-party process, and that was specifically a request for the nominator to ping me if I didn't start the review, not for any drive-by editor to do so without taking a look at the GAN page and article history. Vaticidalprophet 15:18, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

@Vaticidalprophet I looked at the page history and I saw it hadn't been edited since the 3rd of July DimensionalFusion (talk) 15:20, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

Yes, because the nominator is planning to make significant edits, and comments made before those will likely be invalidated by them. That's why I'm waiting on the nominator's edits, like I said I was doing in this review. Please don't step into reviews you aren't involved with to make assumptions about them unless you've been explicitly asked to. Vaticidalprophet 15:23, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

Hey sorry. I have been distracted (off wiki, but also my head has been a bit occupied by the draft User:Jacobolus/Lexell) and didn't get to writing these extra paragraphs about Stone as fast as intended. Wasn't trying to leave you hanging, Vaticidalprophet. –jacobolus (t) 15:58, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

No worries! I'm willing to wait quite a bit -- I was mostly frustrated because of the drive-by ping for a review that had already started. I have the article watchlisted, so should be able to spot and respond to changes. Vaticidalprophet 16:21, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

This article is remarkably short for a biographical GA, though I understand the matter of sourcing historical figures can be complex. Still, there are points where I have queries about expansion:

• Could the footnote currently in ref 3 be incorporated into the text? It's relevant enough information to be in the body, considering it deals with the subject's age and with issues of some sources; it's quite similar in relevance to the "the letter contradicts Stone's own statements of his education" already in the body. As well, the way the footnote is currently set up (in the same numbering system as the refs) makes it likely readers will miss its relevance, encouraging things like good-faith detrimental edits to 'correct' all the differing birthdates.
• I wonder about the information in ref 7 similarly.
• The ODNB entry describes the not-as-new-as-he-thought cubic plane curves were his only original contribution to see print (excluding, one supposes, the planet book), which may be worth explicitly noting.
• Do any secondary sources try to make sense of the contradiction between the letter and Stone's self-description?
• The "book questioning the spherical shape of the Earth" is intriguing. Are there any sources describing why this was thought to be a sign of dementia (aside from obviously 'being bizarre'), or is anything from the cited contemporary review worth incorporating?

Vaticidalprophet 07:11, 3 July 2023 (UTC)

The main issue I ran into is that not too much is really known, with most of the secondary sources I could find consisting of some combination of (1) quotations/paraphrases of the letter from the Chevalier Ramsay, (2) partial lists Stone's translations, (3) wistful quotation of Smollet's 1760 review criticizing Stone's lack of support in his old age. The best sources are probably the papers by Blanco Abellán, but there's a lot of speculation in there too because she was also working from limited evidence.

I couldn't find much analysis of the credibility of Ramsay's letter. It seems like an obviously somewhat embellished/exaggerated story (which is why I thought it worth including directly so readers could judge for themselves), but Ramsay's romantic story of the self-taught servant becoming a man of science in a rigidly classist society tickled the imagination and was clearly a substantial part of the reason Stone was included in many later collections of biographies, more than interest in Stone's work per se. There are further similar derivative biographies beyond those listed here, e.g. in collections of short readings intended for boys, pitching Stone's story as a moral lesson ("study hard if you want to succeed"), but I can't find any secondary sources analyzing meta-observations about this, and I don't want to stray into original research.

My own impression is that Stone was something of a trophy for his patron the Duke, given some monetary support (especially publication funding) and help making personal connections in the London scientific/publishing world as a way for the Duke advance science or perhaps equally importantly to demonstrate his interest in intellectual pursuits. Stone was shown off to visitors such as the Chevalier Ramsay, with the Duke repeating the story about Newton's book in the grass. My impression is that Stone remained somewhat an outsider to the London scientific community: made a member of the Royal Society as a favor to the Duke, but never really integrated there. But I'm speculating.

Stone's translation work was valuable, but he didn't really ever do serious independent research (the one published paper being a relatively trivial bit of already-found material). His mathematical dictionary was at least partially plagiarized, but it's hard to judge from the available secondary sources if any parts were really original, vs. just a compilation of material found elsewhere and translated. I would guess such plagiarism to be relatively common at the time, and I'm not sure to what extent it would be considered a big deal. It's also not clear to me how many other people were involved in the production of such book projects, or how the work was undertaken.

I considered putting the note about the age mixup (Ref #3: whether Stone was 18 vs. 28 years old when discovered by the Duke) directly into the text, but I'm a bit concerned that calling out errors in secondary sources in the article body starts to feel like "original researcH", especially as there aren't any sources explicitly describing the issue. It seems to be a pervasively repeated mistake which was never really noticed/corrected before now, though the source letter (reprinted both in the Journal de Trévoux and also in Analise des infiniment petits with Stone's portion translated back into French) is not at all ambiguous.

I unfortunately couldn't find a scan of the book about the shape of the earth, so it's hard to judge its content for myself or tell whether the review was fair. It's not clear to me if the non-sphericity was intended literally vs. employed as a rhetorical device to make some other point. Chalmers (ed.): "We have not seen this production, but from the account given of it in the Monthly Review, it must have been written either by a Mr. Edmund Stone of far inferior abilities and good sense to our author, or by our author in his dotage"; Carlyle: "If his last work [..] were intended to be more than an extravaganza, it is proof that his mind was failing. It consists of a series of propositions attacking the accuracy of the conclusions of astronomers concerning the shape of the earth and other matters of a similar kind."

I think the parts that could most easily be expanded are description/analysis of the translations of Bion and l'Hospital's books. I'm not sure what the best way to organize that would be though. Any suggestions? Would it be worth adding an extra section about each one after the main biography section?

–jacobolus (t) 09:37, 3 July 2023 (UTC)

I think the footnotes would be no more OR were they incorporated into the text than they are as footnotes -- I've seen similar statements in other quality-assessed articles, including FAs, simply for the problem (as you note) that historical coverage can be so difficult to tease out reality from. They're also about as much OR (i.e. not much) as the existing article-body statement about the contradiction between the letter and Stone's self-description. I think it'd be worth incorporating the reviews of the earth-shape book; if anything, quoting those statements seems to describe them better than simplifying them to 'dementia', which Chalmers at least equivocates between that and false attribution.

Regarding the letter, I also agree incorporating it is useful (and a justifiable IAR from 'this content should be on Wikisource rather than Wikipedia', given its centrality to the article); however, I have some pessimism about how many readers would scroll that far. It may be worth highlighting a couple more elements in the body itself, alongside the existing presence in the appendix. Noting that Stone's supposed narrative was so popular as to be e.g. reproduced in such publications would also be a worthwhile addition.

Further analysis of his translations is reasonably justified. It might be worth modifying the current "Works" section to be subsectioned into such an analysis as the first portion and his full publication list (its current contents) as the second. Vaticidalprophet 10:00, 3 July 2023 (UTC)

Within the next few days I'll try to sit down and properly incorporate your feedback here. Thanks! (And keep it coming if you have more ideas.)

I'll try writing a paragraph or two each about the content/publication/influence of the two or three most important books, and possibly also splitting the bio section into a few subsections including e.g. more speculations (from secondary sources) about how he made a living etc.

pessimism about how many readers would scroll that far – Hm. Maybe worth sticking a "(see § Appendix: Letter from Ramsay below)" directly inline in the article.

There's a lot that could be said about the general context of mathematics in 18th century England, the importance of translation to international distribution of mathematical knowledge, politics the Duke was involved with, the nature and use of mathematical instruments, etc., that might be helpful to readers interested in Stone, but (a) I am not enough of an expert to necessarily make a fair summary about those, and (b) I feel like it gets pretty easily out of scope. –jacobolus (t) 17:00, 3 July 2023 (UTC)

Looking forward to seeing it! Regarding the cross-section link to the appendix -- I wonder if that would work on mobile, where statistically more than half of readers are, and where sections are collapsed by default. I'll test it on my phone if you add it. Vaticidalprophet 17:05, 3 July 2023 (UTC)

Jacobolus, just a ping about this real quick -- I'm definitely happy to wait, just curious if you plan to jump back into this soon. Vaticidalprophet 14:34, 31 July 2023 (UTC)

Sorry. I tried to get into it a couple times but wasn't entirely sure what to be writing then got distracted. I'll try to focus on it soon if I can. –jacobolus (t) 05:30, 2 August 2023 (UTC)

Status query

Vaticidalprophet, jacobolus, where does this review stand? It looks like jacobolus has been busy on Wikipedia since last posting here nearly a month ago, with over 700 edits to other articles. Is there a way to get this nomination moving again? BlueMoonset (talk) 22:47, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

Sorry. I haven't been entirely sure what to write in whatever parts should be expanded so I kind of put it out of mind while I worked mainly on Lexell's theorem (which I finally "published" to main namespace... it should be in decent shape now).

I think the areas to focus on are some explanations of the importance/influence of specific works Stone translated. There are at least a couple relevant sources. –jacobolus (t) 23:02, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

@Vaticidalprophet and Jacobolus: ... status update? Don't see much activity here or on the article. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 01:53, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

I was planning to post here and ask Jacobolus if he wanted it closed/to renominate at some point, yes. I don't intend on closing it if he doesn't want to, though I also don't see the review finishing any other way now. Vaticidalprophet 02:33, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

Sorry, I never quite figured out how to get started on making significant substantive additions, since there isn't really a lot of relevant secondary literature. Should probably just withdraw/close the nomination. –jacobolus (t) 04:22, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.