Talk:Laws of Wisbuy

Looking at further improvements for the article

The article's been extensively rewritten since my original creation, and good; I always expect and indeed depend on other editors to improve articles I create. Here tho, I dunno... I had five refs, granted they were limited and some were old, but they were all deleted and replaced by a single ref -- which is an academic book, which is fine, but no page numbers are given, and the ref is only used once at the very end of the article. This may mean that book is reffing the entire article, but if so, the article would normally be tagged as not have specific refs. If the book is reffing only the last part of the article, that means most of the article is unreffed.

I'm going to look over the article and see what's what. I expect to make make some changes. I'm not going to remove the book, of course, but hopefully I can find some pages numbers, which I wish the other editors had included, but fine. Herostratus (talk) 21:30, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

Mnmh. It's not a book, it's a chapter. Edda Frankot does have a PhD and is a legit historian of maritime law, and she has written a book on the subject. She's an associate professor at a university in central Norway, and fine.

But. The chapter begins

This chapter explores the history of medieval maritime law and its practice in North-

ern Europe. It argues that, contrary to the historiography, a common supra-territorial

law of the sea did not exist in the Middle Ages in this region.

Note the second sentence. Farnkot is stating that she has a novel approach, which is contrary to current historical assumption. Of course she does. That is what serious historians do. If you're writing a history of Peninsular War, or the Industrial Revolution in Germany, or whatnot... if you don't have anything new to say, why bother, you're just repeating stuff that's already been written, that is kind of pointless and won't get you tenure. You're expected to do deep research and find new things.

And thank goodness historians do this. This is how our understanding of history is improved. However, note that these are new takes, going against established mainstream historical thought. A lot of times these novel approaches are wrong, or partly wrong, or overemphasize minor matters, or right or wrong are just ignored and remain outside the mainstream.

At the Wikipedia, we want to go with boring middle-of-the-road mainstream thought mostly. Just saying. Herostratus (talk) 23:52, 16 December 2021 (UTC)