Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/John von Neumann/1: Difference between revisions

John von Neumann

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Result pending

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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

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)[reply]

• 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)[reply]
• 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)[reply]
• 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)[reply]

  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)[reply]

  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)[reply]

  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)[reply]

  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)[reply]

  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)[reply]

  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)[reply]

  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)[reply]

  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)[reply]

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

  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)[reply]

  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)[reply]

  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)[reply]

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

• Keep listed Oh, no, the biography of one of the most influential scientists of the 20th century is too informative. XOR'easter (talk) 21:35, 23 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]