Talk:Johann Christoph Wichmannshausen

Anachronisms and other issues

The article contains some anachronisms, especially the box.

• There was a "German" "nationality" at the time, using the terms loosely, but not the kind one can associate with the tricolour flag of modern Germany.
• The merged University of Halle-Wittenberg did not exist until about a century after his death.
• I don't see any obvious reason to mention one particular student of his in a box like this.

These boxes often seem to contain these kinds of silly simplifications of a more complex reality, frequently missing the goal altogether. They usually seem to have no advantages, except for stuff like minerals and plants, where classification schemes and data are pretty clear. I would recommend removing the stupid box, if that is permitted.

• I am not sure the relationship between the respondent at a disputation and the presiding professor can be compared to the modern relationship between a PhD-student and his adviser.
• And I don't think the PhD even existed at the time, the highest degree in the Arts faculty being the M.A.

In the case of Wichmannshausen, the only available source, the ADB, indeed says that he was an M.A.: "Zum Magister der Philosophie promoviert machte er von 1688 bis 1692 vershiedene Reisen...".

ADB refers to Jöcher [presumably the four-volume Allgemeines Gelehrten-Lexicon from 1750-51] for bibliographical details. (The English Wikipedia seems to lack an entry for Christian Gottlieb Jöcher, I'll try to do something about that.) Pulling together titles from the a search of the KVK, the British Library and other resources, one can find more than a dozen of his publications, but some of these are posthumous and may be new editions with different titles. Pharamond 07:23, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

I changed the infobox to reflect the politics of the time a little more accurately, and to use the name of his university as it existed then. I didn't correct the degree yet. Is M.A. really the right name for Magister der Philosophie? One of my degrees is an M.Phil. which seems the more accurate abbreviation. The academic genealogy article discusses what you say about presiding professors not exactly equalling thesis advisors, but that's the way he's listed in the academic genealogies. Re why to list that one student: because he's the one on Gauss's academic genealogy. —David Eppstein 03:26, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

It can probably be translated as Master of Philosophy, but I don't actually think it makes a difference. The Faculty of Arts came to be known as the Faculty of Philosophy at German universities at some point in the late mediaeval or early modern period, and the highest degree was the master's degree. Whether it was called "magister artium liberalium", just "magister artium" or "magister philosophiae" (or some other variant) was probably a minor matter of convention. Pharamond 10:15, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Illustration?

The VD17 project has scanned title pages of all catalogued publications, including a few of Wichmannshausen's, one of which which could be used to illustrate this article. I assume these are in the public domain, but hesitate to upload them, as I'm not entirely certain. The upload page has so many scary messages. :) Pharamond 10:15, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

I don't want to scare you further, but the scanned images could be copyrighted. I know, for example, that Cornell University has insisted in the past that scanned images of original manuscripts (whose copyright has expired long ago) constitute an original work and are thus copyrighted. A brief Internet search shows this is a big can of worms. I guess if the project doesn't consider their scans to be copyrighted, then it's safe. --C S (Talk) 14:38, 23 February 2007 (UTC)