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In doing the translation of a portion of the Biography section, it became obvious that the original article in Dutch has been vandalized by someone who inserted some idiotic nonsense into the article. I wanted to document this first so went ahead and translated it anyway so it can be evaluated by others here in English if desired, before we discard it. (Although some of it doesn't hang together very well in the original and is well nigh untranslatable, but that hardly matters.)
In any case, if you wish to have a look, you can see the text in question in the Biography section: it's the entire paragraph tagged {{ dubious}}. ( permalink). I'll also go make a note at the Dutch talk page, to alert them as well. Mathglot ( talk) 07:42, 17 March 2017 (UTC) Edited by Mathglot ( talk) 10:59, 17 March 2017 (UTC)
The first part of this discussion (box) was moved here from WP:PNT#Jean Hoeufft.
I've gotten stuck on that last paragraph. Not able to work out who hit who first ... any help appreciated! Somej ( talk) 03:43, 14 March 2017 (UTC)
@ Somej and HyperGaruda: Thanks for finding that link. I'm certainly not disappointed, and the story is highly entertaining, but only remotely relevant to Hoeufft. At least, that source makes it clear who exactly the characters were that were being discussed in that paragraph of the article, which was very unclear on that point. It is now apparent, that that paragraph was about one of the many scuffles that must have taken place between various parties who claimed an interest in the estate of one of the wealthiest men of the time. By the time that incident occurred, Houefft had been dead six years.
Nobody really cares who fought whom for scraps of his immense fortune years after his death. This seems to suffer from a reliability issue to say the very least; how would "young Dutch travelers" even know about this, other than hearsay, because everybody in Paris was talking about it; it would be like some European tourists to America in the 1970s going home and writing about the immense fight about the billionaire Howard Hughes estate that dominated the news for a long time. You could probably pad out many stub bios on WP with details of inheritance fights, but rarely is that worth more than a few lines, if at all, especially in such a short article. It's a great story, and that "Voyage of two young Dutchmen" is a great find, but there's nothing I've seen on the six pages with references to Hoeufft that will improve the article. If there were thousands of references about Hoeufft like there are about Howard Hughes, maybe the inheritance scuffle would rate a sentence or two, but given the impoverished state of the article, it just isn't relevant, and should come out. We could leave a link to it at See also or Further reading, that might be a good place for it.
The guy is actually very interesting, and was very important in his time. I've been looking for ways to improve the article, and have found three references so far, which I've incorporated into the article. A couple of those, have lots more information that can be mined for additional expansion of the article. That's where my efforts are focused. Mathglot ( talk) 00:55, 18 March 2017 (UTC) Edited by Mathglot ( talk) 03:39, 18 March 2017 (UTC)
Back to the who-hit-who topic: if it isn't already obvious about how sketchy that "Voyage of Two Young Dutch Travelers" story is, two things jump out at me: the incentive to exaggerate or invent, and the time lapse involved.
As to the former, the work reads like a picaresque novel, involving stories about in-fighting among heirs to the estate of the richest non-royal in Europe, and people clobbering people with wooden legs. Sounds like one of Jan Steen's paintings about wild carousing. Plenty of people had axes to grind at that time, and I'm sure would say or do anything to get a piece of the pie. Not that events couldn't have happened that way, but inventing stories or exaggerating them would have been in the interest of certain parties. Do we even know that the "two young Dutch travelers" ever existed?
Secondly, the tome reports events that supposedly took place around 1658, and the book was published in 1899. That's over 240 years. To keep that in perspective: this would be like two young Dutch tourists visiting Philadelphia in 1787 and picking up gossip about James Madison and Benjamin Franklin writing the U.S. Constitution, and then their story gets printed for the first time, in.. wait for it.. the year 2028. Can you spell D-u-b-i-o-u-s? Mathglot ( talk) 21:35, 19 March 2017 (UTC)
References
Mattheus Hoeufft (1606-1669), the nephew and a banker with whom Jean cooperated, was estimated as one of the richest people of the Dutch Republic in the 17th century; his estate was more than a million guilders. It is likely Jean invested money in his brothers and nephews bank and business. Taksen ( talk) 07:29, 23 April 2017 (UTC)
![]() | This article is rated Start-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
In doing the translation of a portion of the Biography section, it became obvious that the original article in Dutch has been vandalized by someone who inserted some idiotic nonsense into the article. I wanted to document this first so went ahead and translated it anyway so it can be evaluated by others here in English if desired, before we discard it. (Although some of it doesn't hang together very well in the original and is well nigh untranslatable, but that hardly matters.)
In any case, if you wish to have a look, you can see the text in question in the Biography section: it's the entire paragraph tagged {{ dubious}}. ( permalink). I'll also go make a note at the Dutch talk page, to alert them as well. Mathglot ( talk) 07:42, 17 March 2017 (UTC) Edited by Mathglot ( talk) 10:59, 17 March 2017 (UTC)
The first part of this discussion (box) was moved here from WP:PNT#Jean Hoeufft.
I've gotten stuck on that last paragraph. Not able to work out who hit who first ... any help appreciated! Somej ( talk) 03:43, 14 March 2017 (UTC)
@ Somej and HyperGaruda: Thanks for finding that link. I'm certainly not disappointed, and the story is highly entertaining, but only remotely relevant to Hoeufft. At least, that source makes it clear who exactly the characters were that were being discussed in that paragraph of the article, which was very unclear on that point. It is now apparent, that that paragraph was about one of the many scuffles that must have taken place between various parties who claimed an interest in the estate of one of the wealthiest men of the time. By the time that incident occurred, Houefft had been dead six years.
Nobody really cares who fought whom for scraps of his immense fortune years after his death. This seems to suffer from a reliability issue to say the very least; how would "young Dutch travelers" even know about this, other than hearsay, because everybody in Paris was talking about it; it would be like some European tourists to America in the 1970s going home and writing about the immense fight about the billionaire Howard Hughes estate that dominated the news for a long time. You could probably pad out many stub bios on WP with details of inheritance fights, but rarely is that worth more than a few lines, if at all, especially in such a short article. It's a great story, and that "Voyage of two young Dutchmen" is a great find, but there's nothing I've seen on the six pages with references to Hoeufft that will improve the article. If there were thousands of references about Hoeufft like there are about Howard Hughes, maybe the inheritance scuffle would rate a sentence or two, but given the impoverished state of the article, it just isn't relevant, and should come out. We could leave a link to it at See also or Further reading, that might be a good place for it.
The guy is actually very interesting, and was very important in his time. I've been looking for ways to improve the article, and have found three references so far, which I've incorporated into the article. A couple of those, have lots more information that can be mined for additional expansion of the article. That's where my efforts are focused. Mathglot ( talk) 00:55, 18 March 2017 (UTC) Edited by Mathglot ( talk) 03:39, 18 March 2017 (UTC)
Back to the who-hit-who topic: if it isn't already obvious about how sketchy that "Voyage of Two Young Dutch Travelers" story is, two things jump out at me: the incentive to exaggerate or invent, and the time lapse involved.
As to the former, the work reads like a picaresque novel, involving stories about in-fighting among heirs to the estate of the richest non-royal in Europe, and people clobbering people with wooden legs. Sounds like one of Jan Steen's paintings about wild carousing. Plenty of people had axes to grind at that time, and I'm sure would say or do anything to get a piece of the pie. Not that events couldn't have happened that way, but inventing stories or exaggerating them would have been in the interest of certain parties. Do we even know that the "two young Dutch travelers" ever existed?
Secondly, the tome reports events that supposedly took place around 1658, and the book was published in 1899. That's over 240 years. To keep that in perspective: this would be like two young Dutch tourists visiting Philadelphia in 1787 and picking up gossip about James Madison and Benjamin Franklin writing the U.S. Constitution, and then their story gets printed for the first time, in.. wait for it.. the year 2028. Can you spell D-u-b-i-o-u-s? Mathglot ( talk) 21:35, 19 March 2017 (UTC)
References
Mattheus Hoeufft (1606-1669), the nephew and a banker with whom Jean cooperated, was estimated as one of the richest people of the Dutch Republic in the 17th century; his estate was more than a million guilders. It is likely Jean invested money in his brothers and nephews bank and business. Taksen ( talk) 07:29, 23 April 2017 (UTC)