Talk:Experiments and Observations on Electricity

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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This review is transcluded from Talk:Experiments and Observations on Electricity/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Spinningspark (talk · contribs) 17:28, 12 February 2017 (UTC)

The main issue that I have with this article is that there is no detailed summary of the book's contents. There is even a teaser in the article that it contained "additional scientific material not associated with electricity" which is just going to beg the question for readers, what was that material about?

Some other detailed comments;

• The lead says it is "a book authored by Benjamin Franklin, from letters sent to Peter Collinson". This is slightly confusing. I think you need to be clearer that Collinson produced the book from letters sent to him. Remember, WP:LEAD requires that the lead stands by itself. It should be understood without the need for the user to read the rest of the article.
• Wikilink "half a crown" to Half crown (British coin)
• "This was the prelude to his famous lightning rod". The word "famous" is explicitly deprecated in WP:WTW. It would be better to say something factual instead. Did Franklin invent the lightning rod? Did he make one, or only suggest it and leave it to others to make?
• "electricity principle theories" is ungrammatical. I am also not sure what that is trying to say. Did Franklin discover any important physical laws or put forward new theories of the nature of electricity? If so, some idea of what these were would benefit the article.
• "All editions of the book were yet being printed in Europe" the words "yet being" is a strange construction to my ear and appears to be superfluous. Would it change the meaning to remove those words?
• The external link should say were it is going to take the reader, ie to gbooks.
• There are other editions of the book available online which could be added to the external links. Internet archive has the original 1751 edition. Project Gutenberg has the 1756 French edition. I have not done a thorough search, you might find it worthwile to search both those sites for other editions.
• I note that the French edition contains material written to recipients other than Collinson. For instance letter XVI is to D'Alibard and letter IX is to Kinnersley. I assume that this applies also to English editions, but the Wikipedia article would lead the reader to believe that it was all material sent to Collinson. SpinningSpark 17:28, 12 February 2017 (UTC)

One more suggestion, which is not a GA requirement. You could add the OCLC numbers from Worldcat to the various editions. The template {{OCLC}} can be used for this. The OCLC catalogue numbers perform the same function as ISBN for old publications that predate ISBN: they help the reader locate copies in libraries. SpinningSpark 18:36, 12 February 2017 (UTC)

You might find it instructive to look at a few Featured Article book articles. Here's some examples,

• Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches
• Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark
• Fuck: Word Taboo and Protecting Our First Amendment Liberties
• Freedom for the Thought That We Hate

Featured articles are considered Wikipedia's finest works and are the best place to look for inspiration when improving articles. You will see that they generally include extensive sections for contents, themes, reception, and for a historical book, legacy. I'm not saying you should bring the article to FA standard at this stage, but the article should be aiming to get that sort of structure established at least. GA criterion 3a requires that the article "addresses the main aspects of the topic" and having the general headings expected of a FA goes a long way to showing that. SpinningSpark 19:35, 12 February 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for review and pointers. I have some real world problems I have to attend to, so it may take me a few weeks before I can make these improvements. --Doug Coldwell (talk) 12:23, 13 February 2017 (UTC)

Ok, I'll put it on hold. But bear in mind that reviews cannot be held open indefinitely. I'm happy for the process to take a long time as long as there is active progress. So let's say we're looking for some activity to resume by Monday 6 March. SpinningSpark 17:00, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

Fair enough! --Doug Coldwell (talk) 20:22, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

@Spinningspark: Several improvements made per GA nomination review suggestions. Ready for re-review.--Doug Coldwell (talk) 15:22, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

I cannot easily tell what has been changed in the article from the diffs, so I think a completely new review will have to be done on the entire article. I don't have time to do that today, but here are my initial impressions. I am confused by the new layout; there is now a contents section, but it mostly seems to have incorporated the previous editions section. Why is this not two separate sections? I'm still not getting a clear idea of the technical contents of the book. Besides the lightning rod, there does not seem to be any description of the nature of the experiments or their purpose. The image galleries are a bit of a mess. I wouldn't fail a GA article because of this issue, but it doesn't look good. I'm not sure that putting the gallery in the middle of the section really works. The images are too large, interrupting the flow of the article, and on a narrow screen or window they wrap badly, leaving a large white space in the centre. Also, resizing images by number of pixels is deprecated. Consider how bad that is going to be on a mobile phone or tablet. It also overrides the image size preference users might have set. The recommended way to resize an image is via the "upright" parameter which will resize relative to the default or user set preference. SpinningSpark 20:43, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

@Spinningspark: Several improvements made per GA nomination review suggestions. Ready for re-review.--Doug Coldwell (talk) 20:27, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

@Spinningspark: I have all the books on my desk now that were used for upgrading the article to Good Article status. These are the March 2017 Mel books as shown in the Michigan eLibrary article. All the pictures in the article on MeL are mine of books I used for various articles over time (DYKs & GAs). I'm used to having others use The six good article criteria for reviewing my articles I had submitted for GA nomination. If you can follow this format, I will be glad to respond to any issues - as I have all the ILL books on hand now. Thanks.--Doug Coldwell (talk) 20:52, 4 March 2017 (UTC)

@Spinningspark: Here is reference #12 of Cohen 1956 page 478. Let me know if you need any others.--Doug Coldwell (talk) 22:48, 4 March 2017 (UTC)

This undoubtedly has the potential to be a GA and you have clearly put a great deal of work into this, but it is still not really moving in the direction that I think it needs to go. A book article should have an extensive description of the contents of the book. Although you now have a contents section, I am still getting very little idea of what is in the book other than the work on lightning and lightning protection. If that is all that is in there of significance, the article should explicitly say that, but I don't think that that is actually true. For instance, the capacitor article tells me that Franklin proposed that the electric charge stored in the Leyden jar exists on the glass of the jar rather than in the water inside the jar. This is an important discovery in the development of capacitors and I presume that this can be found in Franklin's book as this was Franklin's only publication. The same article (and the battery (electricity) article) claims that Franklin was the first to use the term battery in this context. That is also worthy of note if the origin is in this book. This is an unusual case, book articles usually have the opposite problem being top-heavy with contents (plot summary) and little on the importance of the book to the world at large. The same comment goes for the editions section. We are told that additional material has been added to each edition, but very little on what the contents of this material is (other than issues around the lightning rod).

Much of the material in the contents and editions sections is not actually about the contents, but rather about the later importance of the material. This would be better moved to a separate legacy section making the article clearer. The Awards section, which is very short, could also be incorporated into it.

For the reasons above, I still don't feel this is ready for a detailed review. There are number of details I could comment on after a quick pass, but really the basic structure and contents needs to be sorted before it is worth doing that kind of detailed review. In any case, I won't be organising my review under the GA criteria headings. I know some reviewers do this, but I find it more beneficial to review the article sentence by sentence against all the criteria at once.

All in all, I think it would be best to fail this now (fails criteria 3a "addresses the main aspects of the topic") and allow the article to be improved at your own pace. I am very willing to review the article again when you resubmit it. I will do this straight away so you don't have to wait in the queue again. Just drop a note on my talk page when you want this. Or you may prefer to wait for another reviewer. SpinningSpark 22:29, 5 March 2017 (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.

GA2 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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This review is transcluded from Talk:Experiments and Observations on Electricity/GA2. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Spinningspark (talk · contribs) 17:51, 12 March 2017 (UTC)

I see that a lot of work has been done since the last review and that sections have been added as I suggested. However, there are still some structural issues which should be fixed before proceeding with a full review. There is now a "legacy" section, but it opens with introducing more editions rather than have them in the editions section. The "editions" section almost immediately digresses into a description of repetitions of the lightning rod experiments by others. It opens with a French translation, but fails to say anything about the first edition. The contents section digresses into discussions which might be better in the background section. Either the end of the background section, or the beginning of the contents, should explain that the book consists of a collection of Franklin's letters. Not having this context makes the cotents section very confusing. I know that information is in the lead, but the lead is supposed to be a summary of things already in the article, not introduce new information.

I think what you need to do before I go ahead with a detailed review is go carefully through the entire article to ensure that all information is in an appropriate section and that it makes sense to the reader in the order given. Take my comments above as examples only of things that might need improving; there may well be other things that need looking at. I appreciate that digressions are sometimes necessary for a proper explanation, but the current state of the article is definitely a little confused.

You wrote on my talk page "There doesn't seem to be specifically what technical information was added on each new English addition = just that so many of Franklin's letters were added to enlarge the edition." I take it that this was in response to my comment that some description of the expanded contents should be given. But we have online access to at least some of the editions, so we can directly see what has been added without requiring a description by other sources.

The lead is a little short. The article is not very long, so a long lead would not be expected, but it is still short compared to the length of the article. It could at least be expanded to two paragraphs. It currently says nothing about lightning research for instance, which is a substantial part of the article contents. Some specific publication dates could also be added.

Some of the claims in the lead seem a little overexuberant. "...it was unique. In-depth study of the principles of electricity was a new field and no other book had this kind of information" and "It provided a basis for all future research on electricity that took place in the science community worldwide". Certainly, Franklin's work was very important, but it was definitely not a new field. William Gilbert (astronomer) had done some work on electricity in the 16th century for instance. The claim that it was the basis of all future research worldwide is also extraordinary. Franklin may have inspired the research of those immediately following him, but claiming that the work of James Clerk Maxwell or Nikola Tesla is directly based on Franklin is pushing the boundaries of reality. I am having difficulty pinning down where exactly these claims are sourced to. Partly, it seems to be sourced to Joseph Priestly. The article says that "Priestly writes..." but the following text is not in quotation marks and I cannot find it in Priestley's book. Presumably, this represents something Cohen said about what Priestly said. Can you please quote here the exact text in Priestly/Cohen that these claims are based on? In any event, I think the article needs toning down to something a bit more factual. SpinningSpark 17:51, 12 March 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for GA2 review. There is much to work on here, so will be giving it thought and research for the next few days. I should have a start on improvements to the article by the end of the week. --Doug Coldwell (talk) 20:13, 12 March 2017 (UTC)

@Spinningspark: I have done some copy editing and expanded the lead. I am doing research and will be working on the article later on in the week. Will let you know when done.--14:19, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

Fine. The stage we need to be at before a detailed review can be started is that the structure is basically stable. That is, there is no need for large chunks to be moved around or added. SpinningSpark 16:28, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

O.K. I am 90% done now with the major improvements. Just doing some final tweaks now for polishing. Should be done Friday 3/17/2017 and will notify you the status of where I am on that day.--Doug Coldwell (talk) 19:34, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

• Note A. - Cohen says, Priestley declares....... (page images)

Cohen (1941) page 139

Cohen (1941) page 140

--Doug Coldwell (talk) 19:45, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

@Spinningspark: I am ready now for a re-review. In the process of providing references I know I can not do original research and MUST always use secondary sources. That’s why I have used professor I. Bernard Cohen as one of my main sources. He has written several different books over decades that talk of Franklin’s book. The most information is from his 1956 book "Franklin and Newton" in Chapters 9 and 10 pages 365-480. Another good historian that wrote on this book and Ben Franklin in general was Leo Lemay and I used him also for many references. Another of my use of secondary sources has been the National Historical Publications and Records Commission of the US National Archives using their Founders Online.com website.--Doug Coldwell (talk) 18:00, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

Sorry for taking so long to get back to this, I'm looking through it now. SpinningSpark 18:11, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

Start of new review

Background

• "... after these lecture demonstrations." This is said in the context of magic shows. So is magic being discussed, or lectures, or both? Basically, it is unclear if the same event is still being discussed. = Copy edited accordingly.--Doug Coldwell (talk) 14:21, 14 April 2017 (UTC)
• "thru". I'm not the best person to comment on American spelling, but I believe that the spelling thru is considered informal. Thus, it is not suitable to use in an encyclopaedia article. See the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 181#August 19 thru July 7. It is also not consistent with the rest of the article - through is used later. = Copy edited accordingly.--Doug Coldwell (talk) 14:21, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

Contents

• Citing Collinson's page as the main article for this section does not make much sense to me.
• The contents section is still not a comprehensive description of the contents of the book. The first few paragraphs are talking about how the book came about. This would be better as a separate section preceding the contents section. The contents section itself should open with something like "the book consists of x letters" or whatever. It should say how they are organised (by subject, by date, in chapters, or generally not organised at all). It should give some idea of how much of the book is given over to various subjects; lightning, electricity generation, storage etc., as well as highlighting important experiments. When I skimmed through this last month, I thought this issue had been addressed, but it really hasn't, and this is the big issue that I have with this article. Without a decent contents section, we really just have an article on the life and works of Franklin; material that would be better on Franklin's own page.

• I still have some reviewing to do, but I'm going to stop there to let you digest that last comment. It is the main thing holding up a promotion to GA. It is something that can be overcome, and on the plus side, the evolution of the book is now much clearer. I feel much happier with the article because of that. SpinningSpark 13:24, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

• Thanks for new review. I am thinking on the parts you mentioned and will get to them as soon as I can.--Doug Coldwell (talk) 22:14, 13 April 2017 (UTC)
• I'm reading through the article now in relation to your comments. Will work on the upgrading in the near future.--Doug Coldwell (talk) 14:21, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

• Doug, please don't use tick marks or other graphics in your responses. I like to mark the status of items myself with a graphic after I have reviewed the change. Adding tick marks confuses that process. SpinningSpark 16:16, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

Doug, are you still working on this, or would you like me to complete the review now? SpinningSpark 13:59, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

@Spinningspark: Yes = could you complete the review now. Thanks.--Doug Coldwell (talk) 14:37, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

Full review

Background

• "He considered his findings to be non-speculative, as something anyone could repeat or prove themselves if they wanted to." I'm not sure that I get what this sentence is doing. This is the nature of all scientific research. In the modern view, if it is not repeatable, it is not scientific. Perhaps it is making a comparison with drawing conclusions through the power of pure reason, as the ancient Greek philosophers would do, and disdaining the practicalities of experimentation? Whatever the reason, it needs clarifying what point it is making.

• Rewrote for clarification.--Doug Coldwell (talk) 11:11, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

I still think that reads like you are talking down to your readers, but I won't make it an issue for GA. SpinningSpark 17:44, 3 June 2017 (UTC)

• "grounded". This could more usefully be wikilinked to Ground (electricity) rather than put in italics.

• Copy edited and wikilinked to ground (electricity) for clarification.--Doug Coldwell (talk) 11:47, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

• "the expensive price of two shillings and sixpence British money." There is a template that can convert this to modern prices. You could format it something like this: (equivalent to £18 in 2015)

• Couldn't figure out the template. Asked Help Desk and they didn't know either. Can you add the correct conversion template -or- give it to me here and I will add to article. Thanks.--Doug Coldwell (talk) 13:46, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

The code you need is actually in my post above if you look in edit mode. Here it is again in text - ({{Inflation|UK|.125|1751|2015|fmt=eq|cursign=£}}). The answer you got on the help desk was right for the question you asked; the template does not convert currency, and in any case a conversion to dollars is not possible because US$ did not exist in 1751! Just leave it in British currency. SpinningSpark 14:27, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for help on this - I was stumped and I missed it in edit mode (will look there from now on as an additional place).--Doug Coldwell (talk) 15:12, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

References

• Benjamin Franklin: Live Wire. There are two authors of this book. You are only showing one.

• Added second author to source and corrected inline refs accordingly.--Doug Coldwell (talk) 12:57, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

• "He referred to Spencer as Dr. Spence from Scotland". The reference page cited is p.40 but the identification of Spence as Spencer is not given until p.42.

• Corrected to page 42.--Doug Coldwell (talk) 14:04, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

Contents

• "element of species of matter". Should that read "element, or species, of matter"? It seems ungrammatical as it is.

• copy edited --Doug Coldwell (talk) 09:57, 3 June 2017 (UTC)

• "He came to the conclusion that all objects have an equal balance of element objects." The meaning is not very clear. What does Franklin means here by "element" or "element objects"? Is it classical elements, or is it more along the lines of "atoms" (elemental particles) of electricity, or something else? Does the source use the phrase "element object"? Much of the rest of the paragraph needs clarifying, but that can only be done after bottoming out the basic terminology.

• copy edited paragraph for clarifying terminology.--Doug Coldwell (talk) 10:56, 3 June 2017 (UTC)

• I don't think you can use the term atoms unless Franklin or his commentators are using it, and then it would need to be clearly distinguished from the modern meaning. I know I used the term in my post, so sorry if that has misled you. I did not intend for you to write the article like that. If you want, I can help you rewrite that section. SpinningSpark 17:44, 3 June 2017 (UTC)
• @Spinningspark: Thinking on this one. Yes, would appreciate any help and/or suggestions.--Doug Coldwell (talk) 11:37, 4 June 2017 (UTC)

Ok, I have rewritten it. I've also added something on Franklin's failure to recognise the existence of negative charges. His observations on this only make sense once this is understood. Feel free to fix anything I have got wrong. SpinningSpark 18:08, 5 June 2017 (UTC)

• "following the military term idea of an assembly". This is an odd way of putting it and not quite grammatical. The military term battery refers to a group of cannons. Why not say that directly?

• copy edited. --Doug Coldwell (talk) 11:33, 3 June 2017 (UTC)

• "The fourth English edition, published in 1769, was personally supervised by Franklin" This is the second time this has been said. I suggest removing the first mention, ie the sentence "Franklin personally supervised this publication and made corrections so that the information published in earlier editions would be correct in this edition."

• removed first mention.--Doug Coldwell (talk) 10:43, 4 June 2017 (UTC)

• "(i.e. Letter V then became Letter VI)." This seems superfluous, and the unexplained change to Roman numerals is confusing.

• removed - Letter V then became Letter VI. --Doug Coldwell (talk) 10:50, 4 June 2017 (UTC)

• The caption of the image says the fourth edition was 496 pages while the text says that is 469.

• corrected text to 496 per source. --Doug Coldwell (talk) 10:59, 4 June 2017 (UTC)

Editions

• "This idea of electricity being attracted to points was suggested to Franklin early in 1750 by Hopkinson." The preceding sentence says that the book claims lightning is attracted to points. The following sentence says that it was Franklin that made the connection that lightning was electricity and that this idea could be applied to lightning. However, the words "This idea..." imply that Hopkinson knew lightning was electricity (since that is what is implied by the first sentence). If it was not Hopkinson that made the connection, then you might want to change "This idea..." to "The idea...".

• changed "This idea" of electricity being... -> "The idea" of electricity being... --Doug Coldwell (talk) 11:12, 4 June 2017 (UTC)

• "Spital square". The page Spital Square exists (it redirects to Spitalfields). If this is the same place, it should be wikilinked.

• wikified Spital Square --Doug Coldwell (talk) 11:18, 4 June 2017 (UTC)

• Most of the passage on lightning rods, except for the first sentence, has very little to do with editions. It belongs in other sections, or perhaps a new "Reception in France" subsection.

• "Reception in France" subsection. --Doug Coldwell (talk) 11:37, 4 June 2017 (UTC)

Legacy

• "...as Galvani, Volta, Coulomb, and Ampere were." This reads like name dropping. It does not really add anything.

• dropped Galvani, Volta, Coulomb, and Ampere. --Doug Coldwell (talk) 11:37, 4 June 2017 (UTC)

See also

• Franklin's electrostatic machine is already linked in the text so should not appear in See also. It should also not be listed as the "Main article" in the "Background" section. While it is relevant (and is linked in the text) it is far from the main subject of the section.

• removed "main|Franklin's electrostatic machine" + in "See also" section.--Doug Coldwell (talk) 11:45, 4 June 2017 (UTC)

Notes

• "There is hardly any European into which they have not been translated..." The word language appears to be missing there, but I cannot see the original quote.

• + language. --Doug Coldwell (talk) 11:37, 4 June 2017 (UTC)

@Doug Coldwell: I have now completed my review. As before, you may leave a comment under each item if you wish, but please do not strikethrough or add graphic icons. SpinningSpark 15:52, 1 June 2017 (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.

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Copyright contributor investigation and Good article reassessment

This article is part of Wikipedia:Contributor copyright investigations/20210315 and the Good article (GA) drive to reassess and potentially delist over 200 GAs that might contain copyright and other problems. An AN discussion closed with consensus to delist this group of articles en masse, unless a reviewer opens an independent review and can vouch for/verify content of all sources. Please review Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/February 2023 for further information about the GA status of this article, the timeline and process for delisting, and suggestions for improvements. Questions or comments can be made at the project talk page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 09:36, 9 February 2023 (UTC)

Rewrite begun

The topic is notable, so I have started a replacement stub here. XOR'easter (talk) 12:59, 14 March 2023 (UTC)