Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/A Guide to the Scientific Knowledge of Things Familiar/archive1

The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was not promoted 03:52, 21 April 2007.

A Guide to the Scientific Knowledge of Things Familiar

Self-nomination I started this article at the beginning of April, not expecting to be able to say much about the book. However, I found more info about it than I had expected from numerous sources, leading to a hopefully comprehensive article. Happy with my efforts, I put it up for peer review and obtained some personal comments from User:Yomangani, which led to fruitful edits. Further exposure to wider audiences with a DYK entry and by adding links to the article on various other pages did not result in any major changes (I believe I have addressed one editor's concern over a statement about evolution) so it appears quite stable. I like to think I'm not a bad writer :). So what do other people think? GDallimore (Talk) 23:44, 9 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

It looks like a lot of it is original research (e.g., the accuracy section, which ought to be simply cut). Even most of the material that is not original research is taken directly from the primary source (a dubious source at best, for some of the information presented, like the "almost unparalleled" success of the book). There is a fairly significant amount of historical literature on Victorian popular science; if this book is really very significant, it is probably discussed at least briefly in some secondary sources. Even if it's not in the historical literature, there is certainly a lot that could be done to place this book into historical context as part of a very significant genre about which much has been written. Based on a very cursory electronic search, I'm not sure an FA-level article could be written on this topic, unless there are some substantive secondary sources that I'm missing.--ragesoss 01:09, 10 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The accuracy section is fine I think. Although I haven't referenced external sources myself, wikipedia itself has plenty of articles, which I have linked to, explaining the history behind the old theories posited by the book and explaining why they are now obsolete. The fact that these theories have been obseleted (particular the caloric theoy of heat flow, which was still being taught when I read physics as a useful step towards understanding thermodynamics) is quite important to the development of physics as these other articles make clear. For this reason, I believe that the article does place the book in a useful historical context in terms of common understanding of physics at the time it was written. It's important that it wasn't written by or for men of science, but by and for people with limited scientific understanding, so the answers it presents are illustrative of the understanding of the common-people at the time.

As for the sources - yes, it is the book itself that serves for the "unparalleled" bit. While I agree this is unfortunate, I think it is a straightforward and sufficiently non-boastful enough statement that the primary source can be trusted. However, you'll see that it is an editorial from the Dictionary of Phrase and Fable that explains why the Guide to Science was so important to the development of the Dictionary and that all of the other comments about the history of the book also come from external sources. GDallimore (Talk) 08:26, 10 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

And I've just realised that, by discounting the "accuracy" section of the article, it's no wonder the commentator couldn't see its worthiness. Changes in scientific understanding and, as a consequence, the dubious accuracy of some of these 19th century answers to questions of science was my entire motivation behind writing the article since I'm fascinated by such things. GDallimore (Talk) 09:23, 10 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I appreciate that 19th century science texts are very inaccurate by the standards of modern science; the issue (and why I consider the "accuracy" section original research) is why and in what ways this particular one is wrong. That is (especially with respect to the accuracy issues the article deals with) 19th century science was extremely complex and varied. For example, there were many different (and competing) cutting edge aether theories, and they changed dramatically just over the publishing history of the book, much less in the time since. Other Wikipedia article are definitely not acceptable sources (even implicitly) for this kind of information; few articles on obsolete science reflect modern historical scholarship on these topics. The "religion" section is likewise problematic; a lot has been written about the Victorian popular science and religion (see, for example, Science and Salvation: Evangelical Popular Science Publishing in Victorian Britain by Aileen Fyfe, though it is focused on evangelical religion whereas I presume Brewer was Anglican... an important distinction for any discussion of Victorian science and religion). The bulk of the article is a list of selected Q & A entries from the book, prefaced by statements that border on original research. Oppose.--ragesoss 16:47, 10 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

In an effort to turn this into something constructive, if I'm reading you correctly then your only objection is that I'm using wikipedia to source the definitions of things like "caloric theory" or "divine providence". For more debtable things, I'd agree that would be inappropriate, but these are such basic definitions I thought it would be OK. If it will address your objections, I can get the definitions from the same sources used by the articles in question, or from my physics texts, or even from dictionaries in some cases. If it won't address your objection, then what is your objection?

One other point is that you previously mentioned that if the book was significant, its errors would be discussed elsewhere. That appears to be mixing in questions of notability, which isn't an FA requirement. The book is notable for its part in the publication of the Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, not in its content. But it is its content which makes it interesting. I do not believe that it is necessary that everything that is interesting enough in a topic to include in an article should also be notable, otherwise half the articles on wikipedia would shrink to a quarter their size. GDallimore (Talk) 18:22, 10 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose The bulk of this article appears to be original research. WP:OR The content of the book should ideally be described using quotations from the actual text itself as well as generalizations by scholars (wikipedia is supposed to present the scholarly consensus on topics). While I understand why you wanted to include an "accuracy" section, it would be better to have described the book in its historical context, explaining why such "mistakes" were made (again, using scholarly sources). It is hard to fault a book for presenting the science of its time (which is what you seem to be doing here)! You also separate science and religion in a way that many nineteenth-century thinkers and most nineteenth-century readers probably would not have, again leading to historical anachronism. This is where scholarly sources would, again, have helped you out. Awadewit 06:28, 11 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

As with ragesoss you seem to be opposing this nomination because the article is not saying the things about the book that you want it to say, not because there is anything wrong with what it DOES say. I can't give a scholarly discussion of why the book got things wrong because if I had done that, it would have definitely been original research into the detailed history of the development of certain scientific ideas. The article is not providing a detailed look at the book from a 19th century perspective, because I know very little about how it would have been viewed from such a perspective - I am not and never intended to study the book as it would have been viewed and received at the time except to point out that it was popular and caught people's interest. Instead, I am primarily looking at the book from the present. Is there something wrong with that? To do this, I have taken extracts from the book and have highlighted that these extracts conflict with very well established modern thinking - the prime example being caloric heat flow. If an external source for a definition of what is meant by "caloric" (and so on) would address the concerns, I'll do that. This page, for example, gives a nice tight summary of what is meant by caloric and how the theory has been abandoned.

I am opposing because it is original research and incomplete. Your source is primarily the book itself, by the way - that makes the page original research. I'm sorry that you don't know about the 19th century context of the book, but that is why you need to do research and quote scholars' views on the book. Looking at the book from the present alone is not acceptable; it must be done in conjunction with a historical view. Looking at the book from the viewpoint of the present is a method call "presentism." One of the criticisms of presentism is that it addresses all books as if they were twenty-first century productions with all of the expectations of that. This is what you have done in the "accuracy" section. Thus the page itself endorses a particular method of looking at the book and also violates WP:NPOV. What would a historical reading say? What would a psychoanalytic reading say? What would a Marxist reading say? These are legitimate methods within in literary studies and by prioritizing one over the other because you personally like it, you are deceiving the reader into thinking that there is only one way to read this book. You must find the scholarly consensus on this work of literature. Science pages present the scholarly consensus of the scientific community and humanities pages aim to do the same (though it is often much more difficult). The point is, you have no even tried to locate the scholarly consensus. You might look at A Vindication of the Rights of Woman to see what a page about a book can look like. Awadewit 17:13, 11 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I guess the problem is that my purpose in the article was not actually to discuss the book, but to discuss the contents of the book. I can't accept that doing such a thing is, in itself, original research so long as the contents of the book can be directly and unambiguously associated with well-established and verifiable knowledge that is exterior to the book. The word "caloric" is a prime example of this. This word has no other meaning in the history of science than the fluid which carries heat, so discussing that part of the book in combination with modern thinking on caloric is not an OR synthesis of information, in my view, since I am not adding anything of my own to it, merely combining two bits of information that are, without doubt, discussing the same topic and which should, therefore, be read in combination. I did probably go over the boundaries with the discussion of surface tension since it required me to interpret what the author meant by "attract" but I think there is a line that can be drawn and that not all of the examples in the article cross that line.

Ultimately, if you were expecting a literary discussion of the book, it's no wonder everyone's opposing its nomination. I don't do literary discussions! :) I'm a scientist, not a linguist, so it is the content, not the context that intrigues me. Unfortunately, I have been unable to find any other literary discussion of the book that could be used as the basis for the sort of article you seem to want. Having said that, I don't see why an article about a book needs to be a scholarly literary discussion of it. Why is discussing the content insufficient? GDallimore (Talk) 17:40, 11 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

"I don't see why an article about a book needs to be a scholarly literary discussion of it." Interesting, since that is the discipline dedicated to studying literature. Apparently, there is also no reason to dedicate the page on gravity to the scientific discussions of gravity, even though that is the discipline that studies gravity. You need to rethink your scholarly orientation to this page, I think. This book is a product of its time and is studied by scholars as such. You should use what the scholars trained in those fields have discovered to write your article just as I would use what scientists have discovered about gravity in a gravity article. It would not be acceptable for me to include theories of gravity that suggest money will flow into my pockets simply because I will it to (this is actually published material, by the way) on a gravity page; such theories have not been verified or even hypothesized by the scientific community. Awadewit 18:21, 11 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Also, it is becoming clear to me that what you really what to write about is the history of science - the development of caloric theory and such. You do not want to write about this book - this book is one example that would feature in your history of the caloric theory or heat or whatever (it is a popularization of those theories as they were understood in the nineteenth century). Furthermore, if you were to write a history of caloric theory or heat, you would then have to include many more texts since, obviously, two data points are insufficient to establish a history. Awadewit 18:21, 11 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.