A fact from Tauzieher appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 19 October 2012 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:
Did you know... that the 1911 Tauzieher sculpture (pictured) in Cologne depicts a worker tying a rope to a bollard as a "Herculean" nude?
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Latest comment: 12 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
"It is approximately 6.5 feet (2.0 m) tall, roughly twice the height of the original statue exhibited in 1908, of which the base makes up a little more than half"
This reads as if someone has thoughtlessly jammed an idea into an existent sentence.
"It is approximately 6.5 feet (2.0 m) tall, roughly twice the height of the original statue exhibited in 1908." This makes sense.
"It is approximately 6.5 feet (2.0 m) tall of which the base makes up a little more than half" This almost makes sense.
However both of the ideas which are tacked onto the main sentence link directly to the height 6.5 feet. Neither of those ideas can have a different idea shoved in between them . It currently reads as nonsense because the height of the base is half the height of the original. Is that intended?
These two ideas of the present statue being twice the height of the original, and the base being a certain proportion of the whole are so totally unrelated to each other, that they ought not be linked. One describes a relationship with a previous object that belongs to the history of the sculpture, but which the viewer cannot now see, and the other concept relates to a direct description of what is there. One is "process" and the other is "finite". Don't put them in the same sentence.
With regards to the height, and the height of the base, I am going to presume that the reference to the base does NOT refer to the "original" but to the one that the article is about.
Is this entire thing only 6.5 including its base? That's not very high for a public statue! I would expect it to be 6.5 excluding the base!
By "base" what do you mean? Are you referring to the two-stage plinth on which it rests, or the rocky base from which the statues rises? It you refer to that undressed rocky bit, then it certainly doesn't make up "a little more than half". It is considerably less than half the total sculpture.
Well spotted; I checked the German and it's 6.5 metres, the values were flipped in the conversion template. I've put the comparison to the height of the original in parentheses hoping that's a bit clearer. Yngvadottir (talk) 04:12, 20 October 2012 (UTC)Reply
Let me put it to you that the original was not set on a great big plinth. So the original is probably not 3.25 metres high but more like 1.5 metres high.
You cannot separate the 6.5 metres from the words "of which the base makes up a little more than half" with anything without creating nonsense. Putting the unrelated idea in brackets doesn't solve the problem.
You are telling two stories here: one about the relationship of the finished work to the original, and the second about the actual form of the finished statue. The relationship of the present part to each other has nothing to do with the relationship of the size of the model and the completed object. Just because they both relate to the notion of height does not put them in the same sentence.
