Talk:John von Neumann

GA Reassessment

John von Neumann

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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Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • Watch article reassessment page • Most recent review

Result: Much of this review focused on whether the article is TOOBIG. However, the article has been significantly cut—by almost 100k bytes—since the start of this review. Other than vague concerns about additional cruft and hagiography, nobody has identified any specific issues with the article under the summary style guideline. As such, there is no consensus to delist. voorts (talk/contributions) 03:03, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

Fails criteria 1a (concision) and 3b (excessive detail). It appears that this article attempts to compile everything ever written about the man, and it may be one of the longest articles on Wikipedia by word count. A few hundred more words, and this article will be longer than The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. Significant trimming and summarization are required. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 07:19, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

compile everything ever written about the man – This is either a joke or you have no idea how much has been written about Von Neumann. This article seems excellent and it would be a crying shame to dramatically chop it apart just for the sake of jumping through artificial bureaucratic hoops. The biographical section is of appropriate length, and the technical sections are an extremely compressed summary of Von Neumann's work.... it's just that the man single handedly invented like 10 different brand new fields of study and his work output was incredible by the standards of ordinary humans. It's wonderful that Wikipedia dives into at least a tiny bit of detail about these instead of hand waving them away. Let the bureaucrats take away the little green badge if they must, but if any busybodies try "significant trimming and summarization" on this basis without first getting complete support from whichever dedicated authors originally wrote this article, I would recommend vigorously fighting such changes. (Disclaimer: I have never tried to look at this article before today, but am a big fan of Von Neumann.) –jacobolus (t) 07:29, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

Astronomy is a good article, and it only needs 6,524 words to adequately summarize the entire millennia-old field. That's about a quarter of what's written here for one man. Wikipedia isn't a dumping ground for any mildly interesting thing that can be said about a subject. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 07:57, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

God knows how. That article has substantial unreferenced sections. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 10:00, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

Astronomy is an acceptable but not amazing article which largely outsources specific detail to separate sub-articles. This is fine for something as broad in scope as a whole field of study, but wouldn't really be helpful or appropriate for a biography in my opinion. (What counts as a "good article" here mainly comes down to who wants to jump through hoops and tick boxes, rather than which article is best written or most useful to readers.) –jacobolus (t) 16:34, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

As someone who helped out with Astronomy keeping its GA status, I agree with jacobolus that it's not a very meaningful comparison. XOR'easter (talk) 21:46, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

• Speedy close. No valid reason given for nomination of a fully sourced article on one of the most important scientists of all time. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 09:33, 23 September 2023 (UTC)
• I tend to agree with the above. Von Neumann remains a towering figure in mathematics, physics, economics, and computer science, and his contributions to each of these are appropriately and briefly summarized in the article (briefly because fully explaining them would probably take several books). The comment above that "the man single handedly invented like 10 different brand new fields of study" is accurate. —David Eppstein (talk) 10:27, 23 September 2023 (UTC)
• Delist unless adequately trimmed. Hawkeye7, the nomination does not mention sourcing but instead GA criterion 3b), which requires, among other things, that the article meet WP:TOOBIG. Do you consider this an invalid reason? If you do, you may want to start an RfC at WT:GAN to change the GA criteria. jacobolus I do not doubt that huge amounts of information have been written about von Neumann, but I think it is probably less that that written about Apollo 11. Hawkeye7 above wrote that article, and it is only 42% the size of this one. I note that this article devotes more than 750 words to detailing the events of one meeting on July 28 1955, which could easily be summarized in four sentences, while Apollo 11 takes only 500 to summarize the entire launch and journey to lunar orbit of the most significant journey in history. Looking at this data, would I be right in saying that either the Apollo 11 article is not broad enough, or that John von Neumann is too long? ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 16:30, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

  I'll agree with you that the section John von Neumann § Defense work could be tightened a bit, with an eye to forming and following a clear narrative and leaving aside tangential details. The sections on Personality, Recognition, and Legacy could also possibly be reorganized and condensed a bit to be clearer. It's plausible that a general copyedit tightening other sections could moderately shorten them while still clearly conveying the same information. But I don't think anything which might be characterized as "significant trimming and summarization" is justified here. The technical sections about mathematics, computer science, economics, physics should if anything be expanded. As for GA criteria, I don't really care too much about which articles get green checkmarks, and am happy to leave those decisions to someone who does. –jacobolus (t) 16:47, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

  AirshipJungleman29: are you really treating an expensive road trip as equivalent to founding multiple entire fields of scientific endeavor in their depth of material to be covered? Really? What is someone with such an extreme anti-intellectual point of view doing editing Wikipedia? —David Eppstein (talk) 17:43, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

  And indeed, that road trip would have been impossible without more than a few of the fields von N pioneered -- the stored-program computer and various numerical techniques, just for starters. What qualifies as "concise" versus "unnecessary detail" is relative to the topic, and this topic is a huge one. All articles grow and accumulate a bit of bloat here and there. The nominator would have been well advised to invest his time attending to that task, instead of asking numerous other editors to waste their time debating the GA designation. EEng 20:20, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

  I didn't ask anyone to debate anything. This is an open and shut case of WP:TOOBIG. If you have an issue with how the GA process works, raise it at the appropriate forum. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 20:28, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

  Thanks for reminding me: I had meant to say that this nomination reminds me of the mindless stupidity of the rigid numerical limits found in TOOBIG. Slipped my mind. EEng 21:37, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

  David Eppstein I'm editing Wikipedia, actually; I wasn't aware that soapboxing about anti-intellectualism was a necessity to work on the project, but I'll be sure to do so going forward. If you want me to provide examples of individuals who may meet your criteria for significance and my criteria for concision, how about Leonardo da Vinci , Albert Einstein , Isaac Newton , Charles Darwin or Adolf Hitler who you'll probably dismiss as someone who wasn't involved in founding scientific research. Or perhaps you feel that no individual who ever lived is more significant than von Neumann—in that case how about Evolution , Earth , Sea , Logic , Knowledge ? None of these articles are even half the length of Von Neumann's massive article, but they still manage to summarize their esteemed and heavily researched topics exceedingly well! Even Jesus is just a few words more than 50% of the length—but then again, he didn't make much scientific progress, so any true intellectual would ignore him. Right? ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 18:56, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

  Von Neumann was way smarter than Jesus, and produced an incalculably larger and more varied body of work. EEng 21:42, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

  Absolutely correct. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 21:51, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

  These are high-level articles whose main purpose is providing a guide to the information contained in their many subarticles. Albert Einstein is the best comparison, although neither his interests nor his influence was as diverse as those of von Neumann. If you look at it closely you see that there are a series of subarticles - Einstein family, Political views of Albert Einstein, Religious and philosophical views of Albert Einstein, Annus mirabilis papers, Einstein's unsuccessful investigations etc - that contain thousands of words. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 20:21, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

  That's what we're trying to tell you! All of our information about Albert Einstein isn't cluttered into Albert Einstein because that would create an article so long that it becomes useless as a reference work. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 20:29, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

  +1. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 20:55, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

  Information is easier to find when it is in the one article. It becomes problematic when WP:UNDUE issues arise. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 21:26, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

  I completely agree with Hawkeye here - moving relevant info into subarticles is a horrible way to maintain an encyclopedia. Instead of someone's views on something it's much more usable to reader-friendly to have a section on that. And TOOBIG should just be archived, it's not a dial-up times anymore, you can load big articles with no problem. Artem.G (talk) 08:53, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

  I agree that dial-up is irrelevant. The question is more how much time it should take to read an article from top to bottom. I don't think it should take several hours. I don't want to read an article about War and Peace that is longer than War and Peace. So I believe that excessive length is bad, and harmful to our mission. —Kusma (talk) 16:57, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

  Perhaps I am biased from having to clean up the same oversimplified dreck in one article after another thanks to needless fragmentation, but I tend to agree with Hawkeye7 and Artem.G here. Maintenance is harder when the material is in too many pieces. XOR'easter (talk) 16:23, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

  The length of the von Neumann article is not primarily in the scientific contributions. They account for only about 1/3 of the total byte count. So this focus on gutting that part of the article is misguided. It will not help readers and it will not satisfy bean counters. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:00, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

  I fail to see how anyone in this discussion was focusing on scientific contributions David Eppstein. Then again, I am a rabid anti-intellectual, so perhaps I am missing something. In any case, how about we discuss how the article as a whole can be trimmed in adherence to summary style, as Hawkeye7 kindly outlined above using Albert Einstein as an example. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 21:09, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

  You should start by writing a single article about e.g. "Von Neumann's contributions to X", and then we can have a concrete proposal for a section to replace by a shorter summary with a link out to a "main" article for that section.

  Instead though this is just a vacuous complaint of "I don't like this so someone else should fix it." –jacobolus (t) 23:17, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

  That is what Gar is for, raising specific concerns about an article's congruence with the GA criteria that an editor does not have the knowledge, time, or ability to take on the work themselves. (t · c) buidhe 23:39, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

  If making lazy complaints that pointlessly waste a lot of valuable editors' time that could be much better spent improving the encyclopedia is "what GAR is for", maybe GAR should be abolished. Seems like a huge negative for the Wikipedia project. –jacobolus (t) 23:48, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

  Nearly everyone involved in this discussion has written multiple Featured Articles jacobolus. You'll forgive us for having the temerity to waste our time on pointless complaining; I think we've earned the right. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 00:29, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

  What you are saying is that you think the time of the people involved in this discussion is extremely valuable.... which proves my point. –jacobolus (t) 00:45, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

  Your point, jacobolus, seems to be that you get to choose what extremely valuable editors get to focus on. I say that we get to choose. After all, you are choosing to "waste your time" in this discussion, aren't you? Why aren't you "improving" Wikipedia? I thought you "don't really care too much about which articles get green checkmarks", which is after all the entire point of this discussion you are currently "wasting your time" with. What gives, man?

  Anyway, this has spiralled. I'll be WP:DROPTHESTICKing and not participating in this discussion any more. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 00:56, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

  I'm done with this discussion after this, but let me try to be a bit more productively substantive on my way out the door: this GAR submission is the most unhelpful frame and content for a peer review that I can even imagine. The criticism is vague, non-specific, emotionally charged, and negative. Its outcome is structured as a threat: satisfy me or I'll take away your prize. It doesn't suggest specific actions to take and it puts the burden on readers to make up their own interpretation of what the critic is bothered by / imagining as a plausible fix. Instead of starting a concrete or substantive discussion about the content of the article, it instead is almost perfectly set up to launch a completely off topic and emotionally charged meta discussion. It sucks not only time but also (perhaps more importantly) emotional energy away from productive work on the encyclopedia. As I said before, I don't care about the checkmarks, to the point I think it would be entirely worth sacrificing the checkmark instead of making the "significant" changes demanded to keep one. –jacobolus (t) 00:59, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

  Jacobolus, the vast, vast majority of GARs go smoothly or at least cordially. You're the only person I've ever seen go off like this about a GAR. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 01:12, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

  You're about to see your second person. This is a goddam fucking waste of time. GAR should be reserved for articles that somehow become hopeless cases. What the nominator should have done is identify ways to address one or two of the problems he perceives, and either get to work on those problems himself, or raise them on the article talk page. Did I mention that framing a perceived need for article improvement as a GAR debate is a goddam fucking waste of time? EEng 04:18, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

  Do you always interact with your fellow editors with such an egregious disregard for conduct policies? Also, Wikipedia:Don't demand that editors solve the problems they identify. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 04:22, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

  Calling a waste of time a waste of time doesn't violate any policies. As for demanding, you seem to have missed either get to work on the problems ... or raise them on the article talk page. I've put the second disjunct in italics to help you focus. Read more attentively next time. EEng 17:02, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

  Fair enough. I'll be out of your hair and you can get back to your regularly scheduled delisting then. If anyone starts in on "significant trimming and summarization" without the support of the primary authors of the page, I'll be happy to come argue on the side of any page authors who don't want their work chopped up. –jacobolus (t) 01:17, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

  Albert Einstein is only a Good article, not a Featured article. To my eye, it suffers from having too many choppy subsections and could use moderate expansion here and there. I'd be happier if it resembled John von Neumann more, rather than vice versa. XOR'easter (talk) 21:39, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

  @David Eppstein, that comment about Airship is beneath you. I hope you will retract it. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 19:26, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

• Keep listed The article already is in summary style, presenting a comparatively concise overview of a subject that could otherwise expand to a door-stopper biography and several textbooks. XOR'easter (talk) 21:49, 23 September 2023 (UTC)
• @GAR coordinators: can someone please step in here? There are editors here exempting themselves from both content and conduct P&G. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 21:45, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

  I agree. Comments that just say keep without a credible argument how the article is in concert with the criteria as agreed by consensus should be ignored. (t · c) buidhe 23:41, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

• The article has ballooned from under 10k words at the time of the last GA nomination to over 25k words. Especially the Career and Private Life/Defense work/Personality/Recognition/Legacy sections are bloated (too many quotes and too much content about other people) and should be summarised and moved to subarticles. The scientific parts could also use a little trimming, but generally are of mostly appropriate length given both the breadth and importance of von Neumann's contributions. Overall, the article is in worse shape than when it passed GA. I do not think it needs to be delisted right now, but it is absolutely fine to discuss how to get the article back to something that can be fully digested in a more reasonable amount of time. Could we dial back on the "keep!"/"delist!" votes and discuss how to fix the problems that have crept into this article over the last seven years? —Kusma (talk) 21:49, 23 September 2023 (UTC)

  @Kusma: While the article has gotten longer since the GA nom, the real problems have come since February 2022, when the article stood at 166k bytes. See my comment below proposing a revert to that version. Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 06:05, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

  The scientific parts face the difficult challenge of providing enough context to frame von Neumann's work without losing focus. On the rest however I agree you have identified key points, and the abundance of quotes and other content creates a somewhat hagiographic feel. This comes through from the lead, which has many added quotes and accolades not present in the 2016 version (or the article body), as well as some odd wording changes (why did "150 papers" turn into "over 150 papers", is there no exact number?). At one point there are three thick paragraphs on a single meeting with the President. The personality section in particular needs a significant overhaul, it is full of the oddly trivial ("He often liked to discuss the future in world events and politics and compare them with events in the past", "he did join in on class pranks", "he would go home and sleep on it and come back later with a solution") and the strangely boastful ("once on a trip to Mexico he tried to create his own "neo-Castilian" mix of English and Spanish", "he could of course read in the original language", "Von Neumann was asked to write an essay for the layman describing what mathematics is"). CMD (talk) 03:17, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

  @Chipmunkdavis: What if we cut the personality section? It doesn't appear in the GA version or before 2022, and it would save nearly 2,800 words. Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 06:10, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

  Do you hear yourself? This is text in cyberspace, not an overweight suitcase 5 minutes before the taxi is scheduled to take us to the airport. EEng 16:49, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

  @EEng: Are we reading the same article and same personality section? The one that's chock-full of florid quotes, discursive asides, and random anecdotes? For example, I don't feel like I'm getting a better understanding of von Neumann's personality from the list of languages he could speak. Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 03:46, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

  We are reading the same material. I'm sure there are plenty of places reductions could and should be made, and that might possibly be especially true of the personality material. But that needs to be done through actual consideration of the material, not via anything like the reasoning you're expressing. EEng 04:34, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

  What if we flipped that on its head and carefully considered the additions since 2022 that doubled this article's size? What was wrong with the GA at that point in time? Ed ^{[talk] [OMT]} 04:55, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

  For one thing, the discussion of the areas of mathematics where von Neumann was weak (e.g., topology and number theory) didn't exist at that point. XOR'easter (talk) 16:02, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

• I suspect a great deal of it could be cut/summarized, but I am not going to suggest it should be cut entirely (and/or combined into private life?) without checking on the weight the various sources give it. (I'm not a fan of defining improvement completely by word count, the word count is more a signal that attention is needed rather than a purely quantitative end in itself.) CMD (talk) 10:09, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

• I have never before seen an article so long that the DYK tool refuses to open on it. That's my go-to method for determining prose size, and this tells me it is extremely long. Believe it or not, it is not "an extreme anti-intellectual point of view" to recognize that the article is too long for an encyclopedia. There are numerous sub-articles on the various subjects Neumann pioneered, and relevant content can be moved there to cut down on the excessive length of the main article. Nobody is denying the subject's importance to science.
  The good article criteria are meaningless if nobody is enforcing them and ensuring older articles remain up to standards, so I find the idea that GAR should be abolished to be rather ridiculous. And on top of that we have the classic attacks ("bean counters", "bureaucrats", "busybodies", etc) levied against anyone who dares challenge articles written by certain editors. Apparently AGF goes right out the window when someone raises concerns about certain editors' work. We do not accuse fellow editors in good standing of having an "extreme anti-intellectual point of view". That is a blatant personal attack, and seeing it come from an administrator is doubly concerning. This sort of response to someone bringing an article to GAR in good faith has a chilling effect on the entire GAR process. I don't care how many shiny stars you have next to your name, policies and guidelines apply sitewide. They apply to me, to you, and to everyone else. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 02:45, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

Arbitrary break

• I've taken a stab at removing some of the excess detail from the article and removed about a thousand words. Unfortunately, there is still a long way to go and I don't have the knowledge of mathematics to do it. (I might suggest starting by looking at the "Honors and awards", "Consultancies", and "Personalities" sections, along with examining all of the quotes in the article to determine if they are crucial information or not?) Over 24,000 words and over 300,000 bytes isn't close to the guidelines at WP:TOOBIG that apply to any article on Wikipedia, let alone GAs. WP:VNOT is also a good thing to keep in mind. This is a biographical article about a subject—not the biography itself! Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 04:22, 24 September 2023 (UTC)
  • The primary reason this article doubled in size from 166k bytes to over 315k earlier today is due to one editor's additions starting in March 2022. Is it possible to revert to something approximating the 2016 GA-approved version (under 10,000 words, the guidance given at WP:TOOBIG), or the February 2022 version (12,599 words, still a bit large but would be good enough for me) prior to the extreme details being added? Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 04:53, 24 September 2023 (UTC)
    • I urge you to aim for "how can I make this section as good as it can be" rather than "how can I cut as much material as possible" during this effort. Some seems fine, but on balance the changes so far seem like a net negative change to me. –jacobolus (t) 05:12, 24 September 2023 (UTC)
      • @Jacobolus: The aim here ought to be "as good as it can be ... in a readable length". Per WP:VNOT: "While information must be verifiable for inclusion in an article, not all verifiable information must be included. Consensus may determine that certain information does not improve an article. Such information should be omitted or presented instead in a different article"
      • I'm not an expert on von Neumann and make no claims to perfection... but as it stands the article is nearly 2.5 times the length it should be, and so unfortunately radical cuts are needed. What I removed or combined was primarily excess detail and excessive use of decorative quotations. For example, what did these quotes add to the article that we couldn't say in our own words in a single sentence?
      • If you believe all of this info should be kept on Wikipedia, I would urge you to propose appropriate child articles. Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 06:02, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

        There's no a priori way to decide what counts as «necessary detail in which an article is founded that should not be handwaved away or trivialized» vs. «excess detail distracting the reader from the intended narrative». Deciding how much detail is necessary to fairly and accurately describe something is a judgment call and reasonable people can disagree about it. Those will likely need to be individually litigated with the previous page authors on a paragraph by paragraph basis. I am also not an expert and don't really have the bandwidth to wade into a point by point about it, but I personally think your changes here are a bit mis-calibrated. unfortunately radical cuts are needed – I would urge you to abandon this as your starting point; as a fundamental criterion it is vanishihngly unlikely to lead to the best outcome, not only because it leads you to read the article in a motivated rather than dispassionate way while editing, but also because it frames any discussion about the changes as an unavoidable conflict rather than a truth- and consensus-seeking conversation. To make this more concretely productive, rather than "perform sufficiently radical cuts", some alternative goals might be: "the organization should be clear to readers without miscellaneous topics mashed together incoherently", "the same material should not be split apart and repeated several times", "the article should fairly characterize the subject's prowess without fawning over him", "the level of detail in each section should be reasonably consistent with the topic's importance to the subject's life and impact", "the article should try to show readers through concrete claims rather than telling them what to think", etc. Some of these goals might lead to cutting, combining, or reorganizing sections; summarizing material and leaving detailed discussion to the cited sources; replacing quotations with paraphrases, or the like. But the goals should be structured with reader benefit in mind, rather than just some absolute word count target. –jacobolus (t) 07:17, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

        There is a point when an article becomes objectively too long for an encyclopaedia. A 500 page book-length biography is out of place in an encyclopaedia, and certainly requires radical treatment to be summarised to a more digestible length. The article at hand is currently twice as long as other articles that are exceptionally long due to their subject matter. It can be very helpful to think in terms of radical cuts ("what content can be moved to a subarticle?", "how can I condense this by a factor of three?") to force yourself to actually perform the re-organisation you suggest. This needs to be an article about a forest, not about its individual trees, and the question at hand is not "does this require reorganisation and rewriting to get to a more reasonable length?" but "how should this be reorganised in order to get to a reasonable length?" I don't know what the best length for this article is, but I'd be very surprised if it isn't a lot closer to 10k words than to 20k words. —Kusma (talk) 09:30, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

        It can be very helpful to think in terms of radical cuts ("what content can be moved to a subarticle?", "how can I condense this by a factor of three?") to force yourself to actually perform the re-organisation you suggest. Maybe this has helped someone, but I have never in decades of scientific writing found the pursuit of an arbitrary ratio to be useful. Killing darlings just for the sake of it is merely being bloodthirsty. XOR'easter (talk) 16:19, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

        You should not be doing any scientific writing on Wikipedia, and you certainly should not being doing any literary writing, which is what that linked article is discussing. We're writing a reference work, the point of which is that it's easy to find the main points about a given subject without being bogged down with detail the way you would with a book. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 16:25, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

        I just threw that link in for the sake of anyone who hadn't heard the expression "kill your darlings"... And I don't really follow the rest of what you're saying here. Scientific writing isn't just books, and well-written books aren't bogged down with detail anyway. My point is that this all just sounds like cutting for the sake of cutting, before any informed judgments are made. But if that's what green checkmarks and gold stars are really about, well, OK: no more GAR's or FA saves for me. XOR'easter (talk) 16:32, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

    A direct revert isn't necessarily the best way to approach this. Sure, it would quickly fix the length issue, so if pressed for time that would be a reasonable first response, but there was a lot of good and well-cited information added that could reasonably be split off into subarticles. "Honors and awards" and "Works" for example could be replaced by one-paragraph summaries with a {{main}} pointing to the child article. I'm still pondering whether the "Personality" section could be treated likewise. "Consultancies" are certainly excessive detail that should not be in the main article. Perhaps a "Defense work of John von Neumann" subarticle is a good place to put it and some of the other detail. —Kusma (talk) 07:00, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

    If anyone blindly reverts to some long-ago version, absent extensive discussion and consensus on the talk page, I'll simply revert back. To be clear, I believe the article would be improved if it were anywhere from 10% to 60% shorter (with most or all dropped material moved into subarticles and so on), but this is best done by skilled editors over 3 to 12 months, not butchers showing up with knives because they can't sleep at night knowing that ridiculous table in TOOBIG is being "violated". EEng 07:32, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

    The butchers with knives are trying to help the reader not choke on a whole flank of beef by cutting it down to a few delicious steaks. —Kusma (talk) 09:43, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

    That sort of careful review sounds like a good plan, the old version is always there for reference. If that seems sensible to everyone, I would suggest closing this GAR as a delist noting that plan, which may take the apparent heat off this discussion. CMD (talk) 10:19, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

    This is the discussion on the talk page, and if it would help consensus, I would support reverting to the February 2022 version before the self-proclaimed "Resident expert on John von Neumann" had started adding WP:INDISCRIMINATE information. FWIW, looking at the avenues this rather productive GAR has gone down, I might start an RfC to see if there is still consensus that TOOBIG is outdated. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 10:24, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

    We might also benefit from getting "my article is special" or "my article is exempt from best practices" type arguments added as an example of ownership behavior under WP:OWN to limit instances of this in the future. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 16:09, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

    I want to be very clear here: I (and several other participants here arguing against steep cuts for cuttings' sake) had nothing to do with writing this article.

    This is not at all about "ownership", but rather recognition that Von Neumann is a very unique character whose biography, to match whatever general criteria you set up for biography quality, should naturally be significantly longer than almost any others. There have been a small number of other characters whose wide range of technical or other contributions arguably should be comparably expansive – people like Da Vinci, Euler, Franklin, FDR, Napoleon, ... – about some of whom our current articles are somewhat limited and (unfortunately) don't try to describe the full range of their work/influence to readers, but even among these kinds of people, Von Neumann stands out as having started a large number of completely new disciplines, on which his influence cannot reasonably be compressed or elided in anything resembling a "good" article.

    Anyone insisting a Von Neumann biography must be of similar length to biographies of other people is setting it up for failure. –jacobolus (t) 17:07, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

    It seems you're expecting that these articles should be comprehensive works that cover the totality of the subject. But that's not what they're supposed to be. If you're interested in such comprehensive coverage of von Neumann, a Google Books search turns up several works that provide it. Wikipedia is a reference work, meaning it collects the information in these books and presents the main points in a way that can be read in under half an hour or so. That's what it's always been. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 17:21, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

    I don't see where "under half an hour or so" comes from, and the best articles on Wikipedia are supposed to be comprehensive. XOR'easter (talk) 17:27, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

    It comes from our own editing guidelines, which editors are expected to follow: A page of about 10,000 words takes between 30 and 40 minutes to read at average speed, which is close to the attention span of most readers. Understanding of standard texts at average reading speed is around 65%. At 10,000 words it may be beneficial to move some sections to other articles and replace them with summaries per Wikipedia:Summary style. Articles are not exempt from editing guidelines because we think they're really really important. And if you think that your interpretation of "comprehensive" in regard to FA is correct, then I implore you to go over there and start challenging featured article candidates that don't meet it. I guarantee you that none of them will. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 17:48, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

    It's not about "importance", but about how much detail is needed to basically describe the subject. "Summary style" is a poor fit for biographies. (Which is to say, you are welcome to create new articles about "Von Neumann's contributions to economics", "Von Neumann's contributions to mathematical analysis", "Von Neumann's contributions to set theory", "Von Neumann's contributions to computing", "Von Neumann's contributions to quantum mechanics", "Von Neumann's contributions to statistics", "Von Neumann's contributions to lattice theory", etc., but that will serve to supplement rather than replace the main article, which at most can only thus be shortened by maybe 10–15%, because these subjects still need to be summarized on John von Neumann and there's some lower-bound limit to how compressed such a summary can be while still meaningfully describing the subject.) Really the issue here is that you are trying to rigidly apply rules of thumb as bureaucratic requirements without paying any attention to context or content. This does a grave disservice to readers, for basically no benefit other than ticking some boxes on a spreadsheet. –jacobolus (t) 18:03, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

    That's the same page with the WP:TOOBIG section which editors perennially disagree with (just check out the talk page!). And besides, the banner at the top of that guideline says that occasional exceptions may apply, just like for any other guideline. So, yes, being really really important can be a valid reason for an article to be longer.

    Honestly, I think this article is about in the range that would be considered "comprehensive" for FA purposes. It's a bit rambly and redundant in places, but nothing it covers should be omitted completely. XOR'easter (talk) 18:07, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

    I think Hawkeye7's version of the article that passed GA in 2016 said everything important, and did so in less than half of the current length. —Kusma (talk) 18:38, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

    I can think of at least one thing it didn't (an adequate history of his attempt at a no-hidden-variables proof for quantum mechanics), because the necessary references hadn't even been published yet. The man is dead, but scholarship on him continues. XOR'easter (talk) 14:29, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

    No, I am talking about an extremely compressed and basic summary. Something "comprehensive" is going to be 10 volumes of dictionary-length door stoppers. –jacobolus (t) 17:28, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

    I see no reason to revert before actually evaluating whether the added material is, in fact, indiscriminate. This evaluation has barely begun. XOR'easter (talk) 16:26, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

    I generally feel blanket reverting far back, like more than a year, should only be done in extreme cases like copyvio. It is a very imprecise tool as it wipes out any improvements as well. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 20:31, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

    That sounds about right. XOR'easter (talk) 14:39, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

    Okay, then we can delist this now and it can be renominated in 3 to 12 months. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 12:20, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

    Or we could keep it listed and fix whatever problems it has in a sober, step-by-step way, since none of those problems are actually bad enough to merit delisting. XOR'easter (talk) 16:16, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

    The article has really significant issues throughout. Take for example the final paragraph in Weather systems and global warming. The first sentence makes sense, informative and helpful. The second however opens with "Von Neumann proposed a theory of global warming as a result of the activity of humans", which is almost certainly not true; the theory has been floating around since the 19th century. It is followed by a quote which both does not support the claim and which says very little. Then there follows a very long quote which again says very little. The penultimate sentence seems good, but then it's followed by "Although he died the next year, this continuous advocacy ensured that during the Cold War there would be continued interest and funding for research.", which is very bold claim embedded into an odd sentence I can't figure out. An advocacy of 1-2 years hardly seems continuous (unless this refers to something else?), and giving that period credit for "continued interest and funding for research" seems unlikely (unless again this refers to something specific not mentioned). CMD (talk) 16:46, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

    Yes, the idea has been floating around since Arrhenius at least, but saying that von Neumann proposed a theory doesn't imply that he proposed the first theory.

    His involvement in weather forecasting dates back to late 1945, with what one would call "advocacy" ramping up in 1946, so we're talking about a decade or so rather than 1 or 2 years. I trimmed the last sentence, since going by the Edwards book it didn't sound quite right, but I don't think it was entirely misguided either. XOR'easter (talk) 17:04, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

    So far as the explanatory quote elucidates, the theory mentioned is that carbon dioxide causes global warming, the implication being given that this was novel. Your explanation of the advocacy makes sense, but it is not what was in the article. If there is similarly an explanation for the global warming theory sentence, the article should be adjusted accordingly. I doubt the issues being raised are due to anything being entirely misguided, but the current text could use some work and time. CMD (talk) 17:37, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

    Since conciseness is an actual GA criterion, 23,000 words of text is a problem bad enough to merit delisting. AryKun (talk) 10:14, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

    Comprehensive is a requirement for FA. It is normal for a good article to become unstable as editors expand it for FAC. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 10:33, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

    Yeah, and there are ways to be comprehensive that don't involve writing two hour long articles. In any case, this wouldn't pass FAC with 23,000 words either, so I really don't get that argument. AryKun (talk) 10:37, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

• De-list per 1A and 3B. Strip it down per WP:SUMMARY (with which some people clearly need to refresh themselves; it's not a percentage of everything that's been written on the guy), then renominate and relist. At the moment, it's bigger than Donald Trump. This is a foolish situation. I support TheEd17's approach.
  And while we're at it, can everyone calm down and lose the aspersions and bludgeoning? We're only discussing a Wikipedia article, no one's trying to separate the healthy from the sick. SN54129 11:53, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

  Who has argued for making any decision in terms of a percentage of everything that's been written on the guy? I don't think that has been anyone's position in this whole fracas. XOR'easter (talk) 14:35, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

  You mean, no one has literally used that form of words. Welcome to summary style, with which the argument "there's so much been written on him that we have to write loads too" is countered. SN54129 14:42, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

  No, I mean that that's not even a reasonable paraphrase of how anyone is actually thinking, as far as I can tell. The issue is not merely that much has been written, but that von Neumann did many things each worth encyclopedic treatment. XOR'easter (talk) 15:00, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

  It was literally a paraphrase of your fellow BLUDGEONeer, jacobolus *facepalm* Anyway—to the room generally, not this particular BLUDGEONista—since this only a GA, it's worth pointing out that it could never become a FA in its present condition. SN54129 15:07, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

  I honestly think it's an inaccurate paraphrase of jacobolus' point. XOR'easter (talk) 15:11, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

  If that is "literally a paraphrase" you may want to take up a hobby you have more affinity for than paraphrasing. –jacobolus (t) 15:38, 25 September 2023 (UTC) Edit: Striking my comment here; defending vs. angry insults is cathartic but usually takes conversations off the track. –jacobolus (t) 16:25, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

  Ah, the Two Bludgeoneers :D SN54129 15:43, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

  A fine addition to the conversation, completely consistent with your previous "can everyone calm down and lose the aspersions"? Meanwhile, the two editors you are attacking here have been busy (with The ed17) on actually cutting down some of the prolixity in the article. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:25, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

  David, I see that you have the time to complain about other editors but not to retract your own appallingly uncivil comment about Airship. Your conduct in this entire discussion is far below the standard administrators are supposed to uphold. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 20:51, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

  Can we all stop now. This entire sub-thread starting from SN54129's original comment is 100% off topic. –jacobolus (t) 22:31, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

  It's not bloody well off topic to expect an administrator to adhere to basic conduct standards. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 22:33, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

• Delist per 1a and 3b. 23,000 words is an entire book at that point; even if von Neumann was Jesus, Newton, Aristotle, and Linnaeus combined, that is way too many words. At an average speed, this would take almost two hours to read, which is clearly ridiculous for an encyclopedia entry. As evidenced by this entirely too long discussion, we aren't going to be able to trim it down quickly, so delist and renominate later if anyone ever manages to cut it down to a reasonable word count. AryKun (talk) 10:02, 27 September 2023 (UTC)
• Delist per TOOBIG. My poor laptop struggled to load the article, and I don't have an old or cheap laptop. Which means YES, size is an issue here. Either start chopping or walk away, but don't claim that an article users might not be able to even read is a GA. What I did read of the prose was borderline peacock, fawning, and poorly written. Happy editing, SilverTiger12 (talk) 13:39, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

  That has nothing to do with the text; the lead image in the infobox alone in 281K, which is larger than the wikitext. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 18:55, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

  The 21,000 words are an issue though; it takes 2 seconds to look at a photo, but almost two hours to read the entire article at an average reading speed. AryKun (talk) 19:03, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

  Nobody is being forced at gunpoint to read Wikipedia articles. Readers are extremely varied in their background, preparation, interests, and needs: most probably just want a few sentences explaining the basic definition of an unfamiliar term (or in the case of a bio, a few-sentence idea of who/what the person is); others have specific information they are curious about and will skim/search in the page to find it; others want to read articles for pure enjoyment and may be entirely indifferent to length; others may be themselves researchers or authors using Wikipedia as a reference or bibliography; etc. Articles should not be written with the expectation that most readers will read most of the text: as a fundamental priority/criterion that sets them to fail to meet any readers' needs. –jacobolus (t) 20:31, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

  Jacobolus, if this is how you feel, then you have two options: either go to WP:VPP and make an argument WP:LENGTH should be amended, or find a way to accept it and write articles how the community expects them to be written. Trying to create a WP:LOCALCONSENSUS against guidelines doesn't accomplish anything. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 20:40, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

  WP:LENGTH is a guideline. A guideline "is best treated with common sense as occasional exceptions may apply". WP:LENGTH is subject to local consensus based on its own wording. WP:HASTE: There is no need for haste in splitting an article when it starts getting large. Sometimes an article simply needs to be big to give the subject adequate coverage. If uncertain, or with high-profile articles, start a discussion on the talkpage regarding the overall topic structure. Moreover, there is already an ongoing discussion at Wikipedia talk:Article size, and Jacobolus's position has considerable support. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 22:09, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

  This is not "against guidelines". The GA guideline explicitly says an article must be "Broad in its coverage". Such a criterion is impossible to satisfy about this particular subject in anything like the length you might expect for a person with narrower interests/influence (which is to say, with vanishingly rare exceptions, every other person in human history), without cutting the discussion far short of any criteria you might come up with for "good" encyclopedia writing.

  It is entirely plausible for readers to come to the article John von Neumann looking to know about his contributions to economics, or functional analysis, or quantum mechanics, or lattice theory, or the atomic bomb project, or computer architecture, or cellular automata, or any of several other subjects in which Von Neumann did foundational work. These readers should be able to learn about Von Neumann's contributions to any (or all) of those subjects that they are curious about, here in one place. All of these are clearly encyclopedic and "main aspects of the topic" (as are at least a few sections about Von Neumann's working habits and personal quirks, which have been an object of significant interest and discussion by a wide variety of colleagues, scholars, biographers, etc.), and involve some irreducible amount of complexity to discuss. Covering someone's work with the barest minimum of detail required to explain it to a reasonably broad audience of nonspecialists is not "unnecessary detail". These sections are already extremely compressed, sometimes describing years of work in a few sentences, leaving much of the context and detail to linked sources or other articles (which don't necessarily focus on Von Neumann's contributions). You are not going to be able to significantly compress them without making the article much worse, and some sections should probably even be expanded.

  Readers who don't care about any or all of those sections are entirely free (and the great majority are expected, just like readers of any other article) to skip or skim the parts they don't care about and more carefully read the parts they do.

  The main problem here is that most of the people discussing seem to have no interest or knowledge of the subject, and no particular care for likely article readers' interests or needs. Instead they have come up with some pre-determined numerical criteria which they intend to apply by force without any consideration of context, no matter the cost to the article or the broader encyclopedia project.

  Some editors here are describing the current article as hagiographic. In my opinion, folks making this claim are making it from a place of substantial ignorance (and frankly a closed-minded lack of curiosity). If anything, the current article is rather understated and undersells Von Neumann's abilities and influence. –jacobolus (t) 22:22, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

  But that's the problem. You think that your favorite subject is special. It's not. There are thousands upon thousands of articles about really important, wide ranging subjects. I don't care if von Neumann cured cancer, walked on Mars, and invented a perpetual motion machine on the same day. This is an encyclopedia article, not a dumping ground for everything there is to say about a subject. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 22:29, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

  An encyclopedia article is where people come to find out information about a subject. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 22:41, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

  Hawkeye8, honest question, this. Could you please explain why you're so insistent on defending this article's verbosity (just look at that bloated Personality section!), when your own FA's—for example James Chadwick (<5000 words), Richard Feynman (~8000), Apollo 11 (~11,000 and not a word out of place)—are scrupulously and fantastically concise? I can't imagine you'd appreciate it if a Personality section consisting of dozens of lengthy quotes and anecdotes was inserted into J. Robert Oppenheimer (also less than half the size of this one). ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 22:51, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

  I think you've got the wrong Hawkeye, this one hasn't edited since 2010. Trainsandotherthings (talk) 23:02, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

  No, we've been over this. Going to Mars is a glorified school trip that only closed-minded, incurious anti-intellectuals would attempt. Of far more interest is the anecdote that a mathematician liked to write stuff down. How intelligent is that?! ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 22:42, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

  It's not my "favorite subject". I don't find Von Neumann's work to be the most personally inspiring, most directly relevant to my personal interests, find him to have had the most interesting life, feel any particular personal connection, etc.

  I'm just hard pressed to think of anyone who would merit a comparable amount of discussion to end up with an article of equal depth of coverage. Among mathematicians I don't think even e.g. Newton, Leibniz, any of the Bernoullis, Euler, Lagrange, Gauss, Riemann, Hilbert, Poincaré, Don Knuth, ..., are going to need as much discussion to adequately cover their contributions. More recent mathematicians are generally more specialized, so even the most prolific can have their work more easily bundled up into a smaller number of sections. Euler might be the most comparable (our current article about Euler, despite currently having a "featured article" star, doesn't come anywhere close to comprehensiveness, I don't personally think meets the GA standard for "broad in its coverage" as regards his mathematical work, and would IMO benefit significantly from dramatic expansion including at least half a dozen new sections; I think the article could stand to be maybe twice as long as its current length). Among physicists, there's certainly plenty to say about e.g. Newton, Faraday, Lord Kelvin, Maxwell, Einstein, or Dirac, but none of these did work in nearly so wide a range of subjects as Von Neumann. If you wanted to write about e.g. Thomas Edison, a lot of the material is going to be about managing and selling other people's work, and doesn't necessarily take much technical depth to describe the contributions. Folks like Leonardo da Vinci or Benjamin Franklin did pretty wide ranging work, but even still I think it is notably easier to summarize [The Da Vinci article would be comparably long to this one but has split out sub-articles on Science and inventions of Leonardo da Vinci and Personal life of Leonardo da Vinci which in my opinion would be better to merge back in: removing these has made the main article worse, and they aren't particularly good as stand-alone articles). There's plenty to say about, I dunno, Rousseau or Nietzsche or Hegel or Marx, but it can still be grouped into relatively fewer high-level buckets and summarized in decent detail in a shorter total space.

  I think your best bet for finding people with similarly wide ranging impact is to pick figures like Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Stalin, or FDR (and indeed, our articles about all of these are pretty long, some broadly comparable to this bio of Von Neumann). –jacobolus (t) 04:06, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

  Jacobolus, you've repeatedly shown that your understanding of comprehensive is very far off from what consensus on the site is; will you please stop stonewalling the discussion now and let the delisting proceed? The Euler article is plenty comprehensive, because it is about the person, not every single thing he wrote in his life. If a person's work is independently notable, we can create a subarticle, as we have over at Euler, instead of bloating the main article to an unreadable length. No person in this world (this is not hyperbole) is going to read a two hour long Wikipedia article, no matter how interested they are in the subject; having this long an article just discourages casual readers from going past the lead. AryKun (talk) 07:55, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

  It's not possible to "stonewall" this discussion; nobody needs my assent to do whatever they like. the person, not every single thing [Euler] wrote – You are not at all following my basic point. Describing every single thing Euler wrote would be its own multi-volume encyclopedia, and nobody is coming close to suggesting that here. What I'm talking about is significant areas of research with 10+ papers written through his life, which later spawned centuries of follow-up research but are completely unmentioned or barely mentioned in our current article, but should instead merit at least a paragraph or two. No person in this world (this is not hyperbole) is going to read a two hour long Wikipedia article ... discourages casual readers – First, this is false on its face: I can guarantee you that somebody is going to not only read an article multiple times any of the lengths we are talking about but will even follow up by examining many of the cited sources for further detail. But even if we grant that nobody would read an article of this length in its entirety, that's besides the point and betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how people read Wikipedia and what its purpose is. Someone interested in operator algebras could skip over the part about the atomic bomb. Someone interested in quantum mechanics could skip over the part about game theory. A layperson interested in the general human experience and the concept of "polymaths" might skip all of the specific detail about every aspect of Von Neumann's work. Etc. That is to be expected and entirely fine. Articles should not be written with the expectation of someone reading them straight through in one sitting; that is setting them up for failure before you even start writing. –jacobolus (t) 16:08, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

  To be fair, it loads the thumbnail version of the image, which is only 63.36 KB. Opening the article in Chrome's incognito mode shows HTML code of the page being the largest file the browser loads. Regardless, readability aside, I don't think the file size in itself is an issue at all, on any hardware from the past decade. Can't compare the desktop browser experience as I have a decently powerful PC (all the tools I use work fine, including the DYK tool that takes a bit since it loads all the recent edits), but I just tried opening the article on a cheap 1 GB RAM, quad-core CPU Android tablet (that barely loads some apps) and it loaded in less than 2 seconds. AstonishingTunesAdmirer 連絡 18:27, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

Content work

• @Jacobolus, XOR'easter, and The ed17:, can I get your opinions on whether the lengthy illustrative example in the second paragraph of the quantum logic section (beginning with "This latter property..." and ending with the formula) is needed? ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 20:43, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

  I've been taking a look at that section. I'm not sure what to do with it yet. Using the Putnam quote at the end like that strikes me as awkward; a bland mathematical fact doesn't need that treatment, and it's not like Putnam's words are particularly golden here. XOR'easter (talk) 21:04, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

  On a similar note of poor organisation, can we remove the "known for" section in the infobox, on the basis that a) it's so big my laptop refuses to show the 93 more lines (which is a problem) and b) I feel like you could stick a thousand things in there without plumbing the depths of his work? ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 21:16, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

  The same could go for the "influenced" section—there's no reason to select a dozen names when it could very possibly say "Every mathmatician since." ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 21:19, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

  The specific example was not actually in the Birkhoff and von Neumann paper, and I didn't find it anywhere in Putnam's book, so I trimmed it out.

  The "known for" list has some overt redundancies; for example, middle-square method and pseudorandom number generator are both listed, despite the former being an example of the latter. There is currently a discussion ongoing about removing "influenced" and "influences" from the scientist infobox. XOR'easter (talk) 21:27, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

  As that proposal looks like its going to pass (and we're both in favour of it) I've removed the "influenced" list. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 22:51, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

  My computer also refuses to show the 93(!) more things that van Neumann is known for. Template:Infobox person says that field is meant to be "A brief description of what the person is notable for": we wouldn't need 120 entries even if readers could actually view them Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 09:33, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

  I don't know when I'll next have time to work on this, but the "Personality" section probably needs more trimming than anything else. We could perhaps split off the list of publications, on the rationale that the ones about which there is enough to say will already be covered in the text, but that does seem a bit like splitting for the sake of it. XOR'easter (talk) 16:23, 29 September 2023 (UTC)

Removed material

Once this article is in a somewhat settled state, can we compile a "graveyard" of all of the removed sentences, quotations, and paragraphs someplace? (If so, where would be a good place?) I feel like some of the removed material (including friends' anecdotes, von Neumann's quoted opinions, biographical and technical details, background context, etc.) is encyclopedic, of general interest to people reading about von Neumann, and worth retaining or at least discussing concretely, but it's going to be somewhat tricky for passers-by to manually diff the initial and end versions. –jacobolus (t) 22:38, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

The pre-change diff will always be accessible in the history; if you want to do a formal collation of cut content, userspace would probably be the best place, as you have significant contributions to the site. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 22:42, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

@AirshipJungleman29 in my opinion your recent edits are butchering this article, removing much of the material which is most interesting to readers and most human. It's shorter, but in my opinion the result is more like an atomized list of trivia and less like a biography. –jacobolus (t) 18:44, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

Transforming a compilation of any and all anecdotes willy-nilly stuffed into a bloated hagiography into something that has thought behind it is "butchering"? Sure, I'll wear that insult as a badge of honour, if you don't mind. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 18:58, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

And I suggest you remember, as mentioned above, that readers are likely to find no information in this article at all interesting if they are unable to load it due to its massive size. Why should people not fortunate enough to have good equipment be unable to access a Wikipedia article because you feel that flowery descriptions of lecturing styles are "human"? ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 19:05, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

We aren't supposed to write a biography; we're supposed to write an encyclopedia entry, which should be significantly shorter than the current article's 21,000 words. AryKun (talk) 13:41, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

A proposal: splitting out subsidiary articles

The discussion has become polarized, so perhaps an alternative take on the question might be in order. The article is certainly long by Wikipedia standards. Biographies do not need to go into great detail on the technical aspects of a subject's work, indeed it's not desirable and we generally don't do it.

I suggest that rather than attempt to copy-edit the article down piecemeal - difficult and time-consuming, and quite likely to create a bad result - we should simply create a set of five (quite long) subsidiary articles, namely John Von Neumann's mathematics achievements (or similar wording), John Von Neumann's physics achievements, John Von Neumann's economics achievements, John Von Neumann's computer science achievements, and John Von Neumann's defense achievements. Each one will contain the whole of the current chapter on its topic, and will be replaced by a brief summary (like an article lead section) with a "main" link to the subsidiary article. This will shorten the parent article very considerably, while not "throwing away" large amounts of text. If colleagues would like this, I'm happy to do the splitting and summarizing. If the answer is yes, please ping me. Chiswick Chap (talk) 19:30, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

Chiswick Chap, I would think that this proposal is dead in the water before it starts—editors such as jacobolus have expressed, for example, that splitting Leonardo da Vinci has made the main article considerably worse; they feel that articles such as Leonhard Euler are nowhere close to comprehensive and should be twice the length. Hawkeye7 has similarly stated opposition to splitting, citing WP:HASTE. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 19:43, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

Please yourselves. Splitting is a proven and clean way to cope with large amounts of material: indeed, it is the only generally-applicable method. Chiswick Chap (talk) 19:47, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

I am aware, and would support the idea; however, some editors do not feel that WP:SS is applicable here (despite being part of the GA criteria)/useful to improve an article/useful in the slightest. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 19:51, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

@Chiswick Chap: I don't disagree with your contention that splitting is the only generally-applicable method we have of coping with large amounts of material. The main alternative is trimming, whereby we tighten the text to say the same thing in fewer words, but this seldom results in a significant reduction in size. However, splitting also has its limits. It works best when we have a large section that can be moved into its own article with a two or three paragraph summary. Where an article consists of a series of short sections, splitting will not produce a useful result.

Note that while Summary Style is a project guideline, GAs do not have to the meet every project guideline, just a subset of them. The actual requirement of GA is addresses the main aspects of the topic; and it stays focused on the topic without going into unnecessary detail, with SS as an advisory rather than a hard requirement. Moreover the guideline itself cautions that opinions vary as to what counts as an ideal length; judging the appropriate size depends on the topic and whether it easily lends itself to being split up. I therefore remain resolutely opposed to delisting Good Articles based on a guideline they are not required to comply with.

That having been said, I think this proposal is worthy of further consideration. It will not cause the loss of material, and would facilitate further expansion through the subarticles. The downside would be that many (perhaps most) readers would now have to drill down into one or more of the subarticles, depending on their topic of interest. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 22:44, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

I think that would help, but others strongly disagree. Personally, I think many of our articles (including many FAs) are of excessive length. —Kusma (talk) 19:52, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

it's not desirable [to describe scientists' technical work] and we generally don't do it. – It absolutely is desirable, and we should do it wherever possible (while trying to make the presentation as accessible as practical). It significantly improves biographies of technical authors, and readers uninterested in the details can trivially skip over them. Biographies of technical contributors which skip their technical accomplishments do a huge disservice to technically minded readers. –jacobolus (t) 20:50, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

To follow-up, can you even imagine making this kind of claim about any other kind of person? For instance, "it's not desirable to describe athletes' athleticism, athletic innovations, or major competitions and we generally don't do it"; "it's not desirable to describe authors' writings or writing style and we generally don't do it"; "it's not desirable to describe composers' music and we generally don't do it"; "it's not desirable to describe judges' major legal decisions and we generally don't do it"; "it's not desirable to describe actors' major film roles or acting style and we generally don't do it"; "it's not desirable to describe military officers' major battles or strategies and we generally don't do it"; etc. It would be laughable. But somehow as soon as, say, undergraduate level technical background is required we are supposed to throw our hands up and just leave out the subject's contributions because they might go over some readers' heads? (These are readers who, we should note, probably don't have the context to care about technical authors anyway.) –jacobolus (t) 22:04, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

We absolutely should not be going into the nitty gritty of decisions made by judges or how an actor portrayed a given character. This is an encyclopedia, not a biography. The whole point is to provide a brief overview to make it accessible for those who won't or can't use more technical sources. You may wish to read WP:Make technical articles accessible. If you want to read a full length biography about John von Neumann, then buy a full length biography about John von Neumann. Right now the article is so convoluted as to be effectively useless to the average encyclopedia reader. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 22:30, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

I am very familiar with Wikipedia:Make technical articles understandable, but YOU might consider reading it carefully. I'll quote one of the more relevant bits to make it easy:

A highly educated, knowledgeable, motivated reader may comfortably read a 5,000-word featured article to the end. Another reader may struggle through the lead and look at the pictures. A good article will grab the interest of all readers and allow them to learn as much about the subject as they are able and motivated to do. An article may disappoint because it is written well above the reading ability of the reader, because it wrongly assumes the reader is familiar with the subject or field, or because it covers the topic at too basic a level or is not comprehensive. (my emphasis)

–jacobolus (t) 02:09, 12 October 2023 (UTC)

Of course I can imagine that, seeing as it's extremely common.

• For athletes, see Andy Murray, recently delisted because minute and irrelevant details of injuries, minor matches, WP:RECENTISM, quotes, and other anecdotes.
• For musicians, see Iron Maiden, recently delisted because of massive indiscriminate fluff, minor details, repetitions of quotes and anecdotes, and hagiographical puffery.
• For films, see Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise, whose GAR will hopefully be finishing shortly, which was so full of lengthy quotations, anecdotes, and distractions its creator found room to split NINE articles out of it.

And on, and on, and on. Check the GAR archives if you think I'm making stuff up. Now presumably, you'll follow one of three paths: either you feel that all three of the above GARs are "laughable", in which case you should probably start an RfC to deprecate the GAR process; or you think that von Neumann's fluff, anecdotes, lengthy quotations, and other indiscriminate additions are justifiable because he was very important and technical details of his work are indisputably superior to technical details of tennis matches, music awards, or film production, in which case you should probably start a discussion at WT:GAN to amend the GA criteria to allow exceptions for articles you consider important. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 22:59, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

Not constructive. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 15:22, 12 October 2023 (UTC)

If you consider "minute and irrelevant details of injuries" to be equivalent to "here is a bare-bones summary of the decades-long research project which founded a brand new scientific discipline", then I really don't know what to tell you. This seems like a shockingly anti-intellectual take for Wikipedia. –jacobolus (t) 02:02, 12 October 2023 (UTC) Can we please discuss without alluding to or repeating earlier personal attacks? AirshipJungleman29 was replying to provide an example of athletes following your mention of them, there is no need to isolate one part of their reply and attach an opinion and quotes they didn't say to it. CMD (talk) 02:12, 12 October 2023 (UTC) AirshipJungleman29's comment was largely a non sequitur which indiscriminately pulled "minute and irrelevant" examples not responsive to my point. What we are talking about here in the case of von Neumann, the bulk of this article which the GAR reviewers dislike so much, is not minute irrelevancies, but several extremely compressed summaries of sweeping, groundbreaking, extremely influential work. –jacobolus (t) 02:22, 12 October 2023 (UTC) I would ask again to please not quote some words in isolation and assert meaning to them that was not there in the original usage, it does not help the discussion. CMD (talk) 02:27, 12 October 2023 (UTC) I'm just increasingly frustrated as the promoters of this discussion undertake a campaign of repeated mischaracterizations (of the article and comments here), false equivalences, absurdly misleading comparisons, and basically entirely ignore the substance of arguments opposed. It's exhausting. –jacobolus (t) 03:48, 12 October 2023 (UTC) Pretty long-winded way of saying you'll follow the second path, that jacobolus. Would you mind starting that discussion at WT:GAN? And if you feel that the conduct of anti-intellectuals in this discussion is contrary to Wikipedia's ... something (spirit? goals? intellectualism?), you are of course free to start a thread at WP:ANI. If you don't want your arguments "mischaracterized", I would suggest not frantically backpedalling when comparisons you throw out are actually, you know, thought about. I wonder if that's "intellectual"? And no, I do not dislike the technical sections. If you bothered to stop ignoring opposing arguments, you might learn that. I've actually highlighted the section I dislike for a week or two using a nice big banner, just in case any fellow anti-intellectuals don't know which is problematic. Weirdly enough, it's near-entirely quotations and anecdotes, something I've actually repeatedly highlighted (probably for no reason, I'm just an anti-intellectual after all). ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 09:35, 12 October 2023 (UTC) The section you claim not to like is now something like 10% of the article. The majority of the "votes" above are based predominantly on indiscriminate application of a byte/word count standard, with several editors claiming that the technical sections should be removed, summarized (good luck), or extracted away into some other article. The substance of at-length responses to all of these have been ignored. Because the standard demanded by those is (in my opinion) unachievable on this article, whatever happens with the section(s) you dislike will have no affect on the outcome of this process. If your problem with this article was just that one section had too many anecdotes (moving the goalposts incredibly far from the initial claims and the "votes" above), then this process was a farcically combative and unhelpful frame for achieving it. In the future you should start a polite and consensus-building talk page discussion (or take it to a WikiProject or similar if that doesn't get enough eyeballs), or just start doing the work. –jacobolus (t) 14:28, 12 October 2023 (UTC) This was meant to be the polite and consensus-building discussion. Your immediate response was "this must be a joke". Farcically combative, you say? ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 15:12, 12 October 2023 (UTC) This was meant to be the polite and consensus-building discussion. – Your initial post claimed that it "appears that this article attempts to compile everything ever written about the man", and an immediate follow-up called it a "dumping ground for any mildly interesting thing". Other editors followed with claims that "radical cuts are needed", etc. A polite and consensus-building initial frame for a discussion (on the article talk page) would be something like: "I have noticed that the Personality and X, Y, Z sections have grown considerably in size over the past couple years, and I think they need a significant copyedit and tightening. Some of the added anecdotes seem off topic, and the tone doesn't seem formal enough for an encyclopedia. I'm planning to start working on trimming some of these sections down, would anyone like to help out or double-check my edits? Thanks!" Notice that this version doesn't make sweeping exaggerations, doesn't implicitly attack previous editors, doesn't suggest that there's an inevitable conflict with some kind of time limit, etc. –jacobolus (t) 15:49, 12 October 2023 (UTC) Have you read the nomination statement, and your response? Are the sweeping exaggerations, implicit attacks, and suggestions of inevitable conflict in the former, or are they in the latter? ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 15:58, 12 October 2023 (UTC) Yes, I (unfortunately) read this entire conversation from top to bottom. You have never head-on addressed the substantive criticisms offered repeatedly by several other editors (or even indicated that you understand what that criticism is), instead repeatedly dodging questions, making exaggerated mischaracterizations and misleading off-topic comparisons, and spinning up tangential meta-discussion. –jacobolus (t) 17:25, 12 October 2023 (UTC) Also, I didn't say "you are an anti-intellectual". What I said is, (paraphrased) "it seems pretty anti-intellectual to equate some list of an athlete's every minor injury with compressed prose explanations of the genesis of several new academic disciplines, implying that the latter is just as 'minute and irrelevant' to the subject of a scholar." –jacobolus (t) 14:34, 12 October 2023 (UTC) You don't have to paraphrase, we can all read. Probably. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 15:12, 12 October 2023 (UTC)

Given the breadth and depth of von Neumann's work, I suspect quite a few subarticles could stand alone. I don't think that is the issue here though, which seems to be about what should be on this page. Regarding copyediting, the current prose needs serious attention, whether on this page or a subarticle. "Like in his work on measure theory he proved several theorems that he did not find time to publish." If he proved them, how do we know, and the section on measure theory mentions only one unpublished proof that was supposedly told to someone else who then apparently published a different proof for the same question. CMD (talk) 01:39, 12 October 2023 (UTC)

Closing discussion

There have now been no edits for a week here, on the article, and on the talkpage, until today when some were made to edit war off a tag. The article remains full of banal anecdotes, mildly hagiographic fluff, and a claim that von Neumann planted people in the CIA (from snippet view this seems an overinterpretation). The tag removal and lack of editing seem to suggest these are no longer being worked on, so this should probably be delisted and closed. CMD (talk) 18:17, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

You need to build consensus to delist. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 20:12, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

Lee Vilenski, as a GAR coordinator and a bureaucrat, could you please close this discussion? User:Novem Linguae/Scripts/GANReviewTool can handle the practicalities, if you're unaware. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 21:37, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

I'd love to help, but I'm currently struggling for time. This page has now reached a crazy length, so will take me some time to read through the lot.

From what I've skimmed - it seems like a lot of the issues with the article are general issues with the text (too long, etc), I'd like to see what people's thoughts are on which of the criteria this makes the article fail. That is the crux of a delist discussion. Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 11:19, 29 October 2023 (UTC)

The {{very long}} banner was added in special:diff/1162338987 by Nikkimaria without any consensus and without starting or participating in any discussion. The article is about 1/3 shorter (8000 fewer words) than when the banner was added.

The portions of the article relevant to all of your (Chipmunkdavis) specific concerns up-thread were since edited by others trying to accommodate you. Which anecdotes do you think are banal, which part do you consider "hagiographic fluff"? If you think the claim about the CIA is unwarranted, why not double check sources / remove it yourself? Nobody at all is stopping you (or anyone else) from "working on" this. Please go for it. –jacobolus (t) 23:33, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

Removing misinformation about the origins of the carbon dioxide link to global warming theory is accommodating me? I am not going to go through 20,000 words to pull out every banal anecdote and piece of hagiographic fluff, but I am particularly tickled by the note that he got all A's except for when he didn't, and that he sometimes walked and talked with some of his friends. On the CIA I explicitly checked the source, see my comment above. I have done a small amount of work on this article, and like others who have stopped I am under no obligation to do more, but if no-one is going to work on it (and especially if removing misinformation is only done to accommodate others?) and it is to remain in its current state then this process should be closed and it should be delisted. CMD (talk) 01:18, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

You are no obligation to do anything, this is a volunteer project, but you could also refrain from persistent use of hyperbole, sarcasm, shifting goalposts, non sequiturs, or vague handwaving. If you have specific criticisms to make, make them. If you have particular criteria you think should be hit, describe them. If you see concrete problems, fix them or point them out. –jacobolus (t) 01:49, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

I'm not sure where I have done the above items. You stated "all of your (Chipmunkdavis) specific concerns up-thread were since edited by others trying to accommodate you". My first comment in this thread mentioned an "abundance of quotes and other content creates a somewhat hagiographic feel", those are the same concrete problems and the same goalposts as in my most recent comment. I did find the factual in accuracies later though, if that is what you mean, but I do not feel that is a goalpost that needed to be established in the first place. The criteria to hit are the GACR. CMD (talk) 02:17, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

By shifting goalposts I was specifically thinking about this "too long" banner you did 3 reverts to preserve, summarized as "longstanding tag, plenty of activity to resolve it so far, more still to do. Verbiage is not grand." It would probably be fairer to say "undefined/unclear goalposts", what counts as "verbiage" or "more still to do"?

Your initial comment above was that the scientific parts seemed (maybe?) fine, but the rest you agree was too long with their "abundance of quotes and other content". Well, that "rest" has now been chopped by roughly half, including dumping most of the quotations and anecdotes. So what are your goals/criteria then? The specific points from others upthread were that ~23,000 words is too much (now ~8,000 words fewer), that the personality section was too long (now much shorter), that the lead was too long (now much shorter). None of those same people has weighed back in about what they currently think needs to be done or how they assess the state before vs. after, so other editors are just less guessing.

Since "this is too long" has persistently been the main concern described throughout the conversation above, but for the most part people seem to concede that the scientific parts seem okay (or at least won't concretely say which ones they think should be eliminated or made more concise), which parts do you think are too long? The parts about nuclear weapons? The parts about other government work? The biographical sketch at the top? The (I agree weirdly organized) "personality" section? Be specific, and feel free to reorganize, summarize, eliminate, or offer concrete recommendations about these.

What counts as hagiography in your book? Apparently having explicit quotations from a bunch of the world's top scientists saying (paraphrased) "this is the smartest person I have ever met, 10x smarter than myself" is unacceptable. But how else would you propose to describe the way JvN was viewed by his peers, beyond just directly quoting them? "Hagiography" means exaggerating/idealizing someone's life, as in the fictionalized legends about miracles performed by saints. But is just quoting someone's scientist colleagues (serious people not generally known for hyperbole or flights of fancy) really an idealization? What concretely would you recommend doing to not give this impression? Is the problem just that you don't think there should be anyone who Nobel Prize winners keep praising as incomprehensibly intelligent? Or...?

[For a comparable example from another field, our article about Michael Jordan quotes Doc Rivers calling him "the best superstar defender in the history of the game", Larry Bird calling rookie Jordan the best player he ever saw, "one of a kind", and later "God disguised as Michael Jordan". Is that also too hagiographic?]

Other problems you had were paragraphs about a meeting (cut down/removed), "oddly trivial" observations (removed), "strangely boastful" comments (also removed). That's what I mean by your specific concerns addressed.

You didn't like the description of JvN's commentary about global warming, and it was fixed. What you are hyperbolically calling "misinformation" I would characterize as "a slightly sloppy summary unnecessarily prone to misinterpretation, so thankfully now clarified".

You now think mentioning JvN's high school grades is irrelevant, I agree: just take it out! (I did.) Thanks for being specific.

If you have further specific concerns, list them and they can be addressed. A handwave at «this seems like it needs copyediting» isn't specific enough to be actionable. –jacobolus (t) 03:01, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

I have not divided the article into parts that are too long, I have noted issues in multiple parts throughout the article. That the article is 20,000 words does make it a challenge to go through and list all concerns, but I have found the issues readily apparent, as apparently have others given the work that has been carried out

Before I noted a few issues in climate change, you now mention the "parts about nuclear weapons", and the Mutual assured destruction subsection there is another example of the issues in the article, so a good one to drill down on. I haven't said anything about quotes from top scientists so I'm not sure where those questions arise, most of the hagiography (the exaggerating/idealizing of his life) comes through in peacocky writing (like the all A's except when they weren't framing). In this subsection the second sentence is "He also "moved heaven and earth" to bring MAD about", a quite flowery description, and the section frames the whole program as his personal goal, directly contrasting him 1:1 with the entire Soviet Union. (While here, "that they could deliver to the USSR" needs rewording.) This is followed up by the eyebrow-raising claim von Neumann planted people in the CIA, whether you think misinformation is hyperbolic this is wrong. "an ICBM was the ne plus ultra of weapons" is a flowery addition which seems to serve no purpose than to associate von Neumann with a latin phrase? The bulleted pointed list (this should be summarized in prose) of actions von Neumann personally took includes "he promoted the development of a compact H-bomb which could fit in an ICBM", which does not feel remotely notable or unique. (The third bullet is similarly weak.) The one sentence paragraph after that frames von Neumann's views as one man against the general feeling of the time, another obviously hagiographic framing.

These are all issues that come through in reading only the prose of that subsection. Checking the source (which I've now found the relevant pages of), they become even more concerning. The "moved heaven and earth" quote, even if it wasn't flowery, does not appear to be in the book (not turning up in the gbooks search at any rate). Most of the views framed as von Neumann's particular thinking are outputs and conclusions of a panel he led. What is provided as his personal thoughts are the missile gap and the inadequacy of bombers, but these are not presented as him against the general thought but against "some people". The "proven correct in the Sputnik crisis" framing is flatly contradicted by the source, which notes Sputnik was "much less importantly, although more dramatically" relevant than ICBM tests and intelligence gained from German scientists who had worked for the USSR. The source even notes that the crisis was when "Americans were fearful of a missile gap that had actually closed two years earlier" (emphasis mine). The CIA plant claim is about a period when von Neumann was working for the CIA. The individuals he "planted" were colleagues who participated in different CIA projects and reported to him. This is just one subsection, and is not simply a copyediting issue (although that would help). CMD (talk) 04:28, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

The article is only 20,000 words. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 05:13, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

Whoops, that's an unfortunate typo, fixed. CMD (talk) 05:18, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

Let's not exaggerate. It's under 15,600 words (leaving aside image captions, footnotes, and bibliography entries). –jacobolus (t) 05:31, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

The prose alone is exactly 20,073 words as of this writing. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 05:33, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

I literally just did a detailed word count, and it clocks in at 15,568 words (including >100 words of section headings). If you are getting 20k words you must be counting something that is not prose. –jacobolus (t) 05:35, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

Then I suggest you file a bug report with WP:PROSESIZE and inform its authors that their tool is broken. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 05:38, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

Please, don't become sarcastic. Let's all just try to stay civilized, alright? Hildeoc (talk) 05:41, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

The tool is definitely inaccurate (whether based on poor parsing, poor heuristics for deciding what counts as prose, or a poor word count algorithm I'm not sure; my experience is that it consistently overcounts by a significant margin across every article I have ever double-checked). It's not a trivial problem to parse wikitext etc., so whether this counts as "broken" is a matter of opinion. I'd say it's generally a bad idea to be overconfident in the output of tools you don't understand, whose design/implementation you haven't examined, and whose results you have never bothered to double-check. [edit: strike for a sharp tone]

I based my count on copying the article content directly from the rendered output page in my browser into a separate document, and manually stripping out parts that aren't prose. I promise you it is about as accurate as you can get without hand counting all of the words. (I missed chopping out a couple more mathematical equations, so actually my count above is a very slight overcount.)

In any event, I promise you your count is incorrect by more than 20%, which is pretty significant here. If you want to argue about it, go count more carefully yourself using a better tool than "prosesize". –jacobolus (t) 05:50, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

This is unfortunately expressed, especially after the message immediately above it. I am happy to file the bug report on this very common and widely used tool. CMD (talk) 06:01, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

Sorry to get further off topic here. I haven't examined it closely, but my expectation is that significant changes could plausibly be pretty technically tricky, especially if you want something highly accurate across the full range of wiki articles.

The way to start would to be by gathering together a long list of test cases with their expected word count, including data tables, figures with captions, inline and block math formulas, footnotes of various flavors, lists, block quotations, etc., using the full range of moderately common templates and html tags, and include prose with a wide range of punctuation, etc., so you have something to check against.

Depending on the results of that testing, it might be necessary to use a different parsing strategy or more careful parsing logic, a better heuristic for splitting "prose" from "non-prose" content, or a better algorithm for counting words in sentences with various kinds of punctuation, etc. –jacobolus (t) 06:26, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

It appears to, indeed, be a bug in the tool. It's the formulae that crank up the word count. If you press Ctrl+Shift+I, switch to Console tab and then execute $(".mwe-math-element").remove() to remove all the formulae from the article, you get 15,268 words. AstonishingTunesAdmirer 連絡 07:36, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

And even if it were more, the mere quantity shouldn't be decisive, if our relevance and documentation criteria are met, right (see note below)? Hildeoc (talk) 05:34, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

 Note: Generally regarding WP:AS, and to get this right – apart from potential particular issues within this article –, as long as the contents are relevant and well-referenced, merely claiming "That's too much" cannot really be considered a substantial, valid argument, can it? Hildeoc (talk) 05:31, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

If we treat a topic comprehensively, doing so in a single article is often not the way to go, but Wikipedia:Summary style is. Our article on World War II should not include everything that happened in the war, but just a high level summary. As editors, we do no indiscriminately add all possible detail, but choose a level of detail appropriate for the article.

I think it is very useful to have a rough guide of what is "too much". Having a target of "under 10000 words" looks OK to me; exceeding that by 50% (like in the present article) may be appropriate for some topics, but exceeding it by a factor of ten is going to be too much. World War II at 13k words would not be improved by merging in the 15k words of Eastern Front (World War II), which in turn should not spend 5k words on the Siege of Leningrad and near 14k words on the Battle of Stalingrad. —Kusma (talk) 09:37, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

Okay, great, thanks for being specific. I don't have any particular expertise about MAD or nuclear war, and don't have the bandwidth to tackle this anytime in the next few days, but this kind of substantive content review is something that is of practical value, that other editors can either work on or at least concretely respond to. –jacobolus (t) 05:34, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

@Thebiguglyalien: Since we have far longer articles around, which precise contents do you consider expendable here? Also, what exactly do you mean by "unaddressed maintenance templates"?--Hildeoc (talk) 04:45, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

Having just found this discussion, I'll just remark on the irony of thousands of words being written on whether the article is too long or not. A browser based word counter shows it a little over 16,000 words, and I'm not sure if it is legitimate to discount those very long captions, but even at 15,600 words this article is too long per WP:SIZERULE. This is an encyclopaedic biographic article but not a biography in book form, so to illustrate the issue here, the Mathematical quickness section says in 3 paragraphs, and 402 words something that is important but could be said in a sentence (maybe two) in another section. We don't need all the anecdotes. The encylopaedic information was that he was noted for his exceptional speed of calculation, even amongst his peers. This verbosity is a theme. So by the size rule and by perusal of the content, this article needs significant trimming. Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 07:04, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

WP:SIZERULE is a self-professed "rule of thumb" which should never have been called a "guideline", which should never be cited in the manner it has been repeatedly through this discussion (and e.g. in demanding the presence of eyesore banners; cf. User:Jorge Stolfi/Templates that I sorely miss and also User:Jorge Stolfi/DoW/Vogonization), and which should frankly be scrapped (there have apparently been repeated discussions to that effect on the relevant talk page, and the arguments for keeping it around are flimsy and unsupported).

The length here is much closer to "pamphlet", "chapter", or "paper" than "book" (let's not exaggerate), and is broadly in keeping with the typical depth of coverage of other decent quality Wikipedia biographies (but just happens to be about a subject with much wider scope/more wide reaching influence than most) or with biographical articles about comparable figures in sources such as the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, while being significantly shorter than a decent number of existing "good" articles.

could be said in a sentence (maybe two) – Again, let's not exaggerate. You can certainly argue that this section is longer than it needs to be, that it should be reorganized or combined elsewhere, or even that it should be removed altogether; however, the claims in question been a significant subject of interest to secondary sources (e.g. an hour-long video biography devoted well over 2 minutes to showing Wigner relate the anecdote there, both directly and especially proportionally more than our article), and the same substantive content cannot be meaningfully addressed in 2 sentences. That is, if you chopped it to "maybe two" sentences you'd be saying something substantially different. Which one is better or more appropriate should be left to consensus of wikipedians working on the page and consideration for the plausible range of reader interest, not decided out of hand based on slavish devotion to numerical criteria. –jacobolus (t) 07:39, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

Your disagreement with SIZERULE may be taken up on the appropriate forum, but while it remains it is indicative of a consensus. The style of writing is what makes this look like a book treatment rather than an encyclopaedic article. The article is too verbose. I provided an example. You say a couple of sentences is not enough. If we need 402 words to say that the subject could compute remarkably quickly, then we are not writing in encyclopaedic style, and the number of readers of this article reading the whole thing is probably close to nil. It's too long. It should be tagged as such to attract editor effort to fix this. Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 08:05, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

it is indicative of a consensus – no it really isn't. It was created in the early 2000s based on technical criteria, edited more or less arbitrarily by a random handful of people in the mean time, and never based on anything more than institutional inertia and having a few defenders who cared enough about it that it wasn't worth the trouble for anyone to mount a large-scale effort to get rid of. This is not anything like "consensus". readers of this article reading the whole thing – this is not the purpose or even aspiration of encyclopedia articles. –jacobolus (t) 08:10, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

It seems incredible that after all this time we've still got people imagining readers reading entire articles from top to bottom as the predominant use case. What a laugh. EEng 14:29, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

Studies indicate that many readers jump about the article looking for specific details. The readers of this article are likely to home in on the section that most interests them, and will expect it to be comprehensive. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 18:18, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

• I think I am in favour of delisting now. There is still bloat/duplication and sometimes poor organisation of sections (what type of content is in "Career and private life" versus "Personality"? "Mathematical range" and some of the related subsections of "Personality" could be closer connected to the mathematical work. The blindfold chess anecdote sounds like it belongs into "mathematical quickness". And these are just easily found examples. Some of this duplication would be less problematic if the article was split into several pieces). There seems to have been a lot of local editing, but the article lacks overall cohesion. —Kusma (talk) 09:53, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

  poor organisation of sections – I agree. This is a problem most obviously addressed by re-organization. Propose away, or go boldly make changes. –jacobolus (t) 12:15, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

  Is this a good organisation now a Good Article criterion? Hawkeye7 (discuss) 18:31, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

Actual discussion closure

Hi, as I had a request to close this discussion, and as I'm making my way through reading the discussion, can someone point to which of the GA criteria is not being met by the article? Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 11:54, 29 October 2023 (UTC)

This was opened regarding 1a and 3b, although there are some 1b (WTW) issues as well that seem linked to a bit of 2c. CMD (talk) 13:39, 29 October 2023 (UTC)

No 1a, 1b or 2c issues have been raised. All discussion concerned the size of the article, which is not relevant to any criterion. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 18:01, 29 October 2023 (UTC)

Broad in its coverage

3b. it stays focused on the topic without going into unnecessary detail (see summary style)

This seems like a criterion that is very directly relevant to the complaint raised. WP:TOOBIG suggests that articles over 15,000 words be divided, and the article currently has 20,000 words. But this is a very fixable problem: just start spinning off the extra parts into summary style subarticles, worst comes to worst. I really don't see why that can't be done - look at all the subarticles in Category:Albert Einstein. Even 17,000 words would be easier to sell as maybe a worthy exception, but 33% over the very highest limit is pushing it. SnowFire (talk) 00:04, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

The current article is under 15,600 words. –jacobolus (t) 00:41, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

To be clear, that number is from the WP:PROSESIZE tool which says "Prose size (text only): 101 kB (20075 words) readable prose size" for me. Does it come up with something different for you, is there a bug where it's miscounting, or something else? SnowFire (talk) 01:10, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

The prose size tool is incorrect. –jacobolus (t) 01:17, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

@SnowFire: please use the updated tool here. CMD (talk) 01:19, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

Interesting. I'm guessing the math symbols threw the prosesize tool off? Definitely file a bug if it hasn't been already. I did some copy-pasting into a different browser based word counter, throwing away the math symbols, and came up with ~15,800 words, so mildly more than jacobolus. Anyway, I wasn't planning on !voting, but... articles that use the full 15,000 word max are rare. My suspicion is that there will be a lot less stress for the closer of this GAR if, as a show of good faith, the article could be whittled that extra little bit more. But I was mostly chiming in after seeing the comment above that no GA criterion was cited. SnowFire (talk) 01:37, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

WP:TOOBIG is not criterion 3b. There has been no assertion that details in the article were off-topic and could be moved to other articles. ie the article is not focused on the subject, which is what 3b is properly about (WP:COATRACK). What WP:TOOBIG has to say is: There is no need for haste in splitting an article when it starts getting large. Sometimes an article simply needs to be big to give the subject adequate coverage. If uncertain, or with high-profile articles, start a discussion We had a discussion, and a proposal was put forward to split off various sections. Each one would contain the whole of the current section on its topic, which would be replaced by a brief summary with a "main" link to the subarticle. However, it was unclear if this had consensus. WP:TOOBIG is never a sufficient reason to split. The "rule of thumb" is arbitrary and itself lacks consensus. The relevant section is currently under review at Wikipedia talk:Article size, and it is pointless to debate it here. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 00:51, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

I believe that the existing size criterion does have consensus, and certainly would support it as common sense myself. Wikipedia articles are overviews, not books. I'm not saying that books on von Neumann are bad - in fact, they're fascinating. But it's not what the top-level Wikipedia article is supposed to be. Anyway, it sounds like the article is very close to getting below 15K words, so maybe worth just going a little farther? And to be clear, the whole system of summary-style spinoff articles is what is done everywhere else on Wikipedia. This isn't unusual or weird to expect that this article conform to this. (Alternatively, if you truly want to get rid of TOOBIG, then as a procedural matter, you could argue to put this GAR on hold until an RFC to do so is resolved. But I am skeptical such an RFC would pass. And even then, could always spin any excess content off to summary-style spinoff articles first, propose TOOBIG be removed, and then if that somehow passes, merge them back?) SnowFire (talk) 01:37, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

Some were brought up at the beginning, most recently please see my analysis of prose and factual issues in a single subsection above which you replied to. CMD (talk) 01:00, 2 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.

Issues with nuclear weapons / mutually assured destruction section

I'm copying this section of the GAR discussion above down to here so it doesn't get lost in the fray. Hopefully you don't mind Chipmunkdavis. –jacobolus (t) 17:32, 27 October 2023 (UTC)

---

Before I noted a few issues in climate change, you [jacobolus] now mention the "parts about nuclear weapons", and the Mutual assured destruction subsection there is another example of the issues in the article, so a good one to drill down on. I haven't said anything about quotes from top scientists so I'm not sure where those questions arise, most of the hagiography (the exaggerating/idealizing of his life) comes through in peacocky writing (like the all A's except when they weren't framing). In this subsection the second sentence is "He also "moved heaven and earth" to bring MAD about", a quite flowery description, and the section frames the whole program as his personal goal, directly contrasting him 1:1 with the entire Soviet Union. (While here, "that they could deliver to the USSR" needs rewording.) This is followed up by the eyebrow-raising claim von Neumann planted people in the CIA, whether you think misinformation is hyperbolic this is wrong. "an ICBM was the ne plus ultra of weapons" is a flowery addition which seems to serve no purpose than to associate von Neumann with a latin phrase? The bulleted pointed list (this should be summarized in prose) of actions von Neumann personally took includes "he promoted the development of a compact H-bomb which could fit in an ICBM", which does not feel remotely notable or unique. (The third bullet is similarly weak.) The one sentence paragraph after that frames von Neumann's views as one man against the general feeling of the time, another obviously hagiographic framing.

These are all issues that come through in reading only the prose of that subsection. Checking the source (which I've now found the relevant pages of), they become even more concerning. The "moved heaven and earth" quote, even if it wasn't flowery, does not appear to be in the book (not turning up in the gbooks search at any rate). Most of the views framed as von Neumann's particular thinking are outputs and conclusions of a panel he led. What is provided as his personal thoughts are the missile gap and the inadequacy of bombers, but these are not presented as him against the general thought but against "some people". The "proven correct in the Sputnik crisis" framing is flatly contradicted by the source, which notes Sputnik was "much less importantly, although more dramatically" relevant than ICBM tests and intelligence gained from German scientists who had worked for the USSR. The source even notes that the crisis was when "Americans were fearful of a missile gap that had actually closed two years earlier" (emphasis mine). The CIA plant claim is about a period when von Neumann was working for the CIA. The individuals he "planted" were colleagues who participated in different CIA projects and reported to him. This is just one subsection, and is not simply a copyediting issue (although that would help). CMD (talk) 04:28, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

Okay, great, thanks for being specific. I don't have any particular expertise about MAD or nuclear war, and don't have the bandwidth to tackle this anytime in the next few days, but this kind of substantive content review is something that is of practical value, that other editors can either work on or at least concretely respond to. –jacobolus (t) 05:34, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

The concept predates von Neumann (our article on it even gives an example from Wilkie Collins, better known for The Moonstone). The term postdates him [1]. I've snipped out that subsection. XOR'easter (talk) 23:44, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

Misleading statement

" Unable to accept his impending death,[82] Von Neumann was given last rites by Father Strittmatter before dying." This falsely implies a cause and effect relationship between his inability to accept death and his decision to receive last rites. He converted to Catholicism earlier, and so the last rites would be given regardless of his view of death.77Mike77 (talk) 15:19, 9 January 2024 (UTC)

en.excessively-techni-pedia.org

"Later, von Neumann suggested a new method of linear programming, using the homogeneous linear system of Paul Gordan (1873), which was later popularized by Karmarkar's algorithm. Von Neumann's method used a pivoting algorithm between simplices, with the pivoting decision determined by a nonnegative least squares subproblem with a convexity constraint (projecting the zero-vector onto the convex hull of the active simplex). Von Neumann's algorithm was the first interior point method of linear programming"

It's stuff like this that reminds me that I don't know why I bother reading these articles.

80.71.142.35 (talk) 17:46, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

How fortunate that no one forces you to do so. Favonian (talk) 18:20, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

If you can come up with an accurate summary which is more accessible that would be a welcome improvement. But notice from the previous paragraph that "von Neumann provided an hourlong lecture" about related topics to explain something to another expert. It's going to be tough to duplicate that, plus prerequisites back to some arbitrary point, in the space of a paragraph or two. Readers who don't know what linear programming is (and related other jargon terms used here) should probably just skim past this paragraph, taking away a message like «Von Neumann made some advances in optimization algorithms using his cutting-edge understanding of linear algebra»; but notice this version is vague to the point of meaningless; the more detailed version gives some idea to people who do know about these topics what Von Neumann's specific contributions were about. A curious reader such as yourself can click through a wikilink to linear programming or Karmarkar's algorithm to try to make more sense of it, if you want to. –jacobolus (t) 19:35, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

"never appeared"

The article says "he would send a preprint of his article containing both results, which never appeared". Does that mean that they never appeared in a printed publication? Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 05:01, 10 June 2024 (UTC)

Competing claims about university studies

In John von Neumann § University studies, the last sentence says "Von Neumann was enrolled in chemical engineering at the University of Budapest while studying mathematics in Berlin", but previous sentences say otherwise. As a reader, I would think that the article should either give some indication of which claim is more likely to be true based on the evidence in each source, or else accept one claim as true and delete the other or relegate it to a footnote about mistaken scholarship. Biogeographist (talk) 22:37, 3 October 2024 (UTC)