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96.226.161.157 ( talk) 17:58, 28 June 2014 (UTC)shilpanicodemus
Supposedly a ban-evading user keeps changing the Watson-Watt link to Robert Watson-Watt. I don't know much about this user, but why isn't the link Robert Watson-Watt? Mgnbar ( talk) 12:04, 24 March 2016 (UTC)
I didn't understand the concept behind this aphorism until I read this article. I think that another way to say part of the concept is "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". The remainder of the concept is covered by the expression "At some point in the design process we must kill the engineers and go to production". Jimb101 ( talk) 04:26, 28 March 2016 (UTC)
Yes I can't think of a closer saying in English however this is not really the same sentiment but more of a related concept. The King Lear quote is closer to "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" or "Leave well enough alone" which is related be not the same meaning. The Duke of Albany's quote concerns something that is already good howwever "il meglio è nemico del bene" includes works in progress that are not already good enough as they are not finished. For example in undertaking a simple task or project but try to include everything one can think of in the scope of the task or project and never finish. Whereas limiting the scope of the task would have resulted in a good finished outcome. The subject was not "well enough" without taking any action. I think the King Lear reference would be meglio in the Related Concepts section. But it could also be left where it is instead of trying to be too perfect. Also another related concept is Ecclesiastes 7:16 "Be not overly righteous, and do not make yourself too wise. Why should you destroy yourself?" Halconen ( talk) 15:56, 21 June 2017 (UTC)
I agree about the Shakespeare quotes and have removed them. Colintedford ( talk) 23:04, 9 August 2018 (UTC)
there's a Chinese idiom which matches this fairly closely as well: 画蛇添足 huà shé tiān zú ‘to draw a snake and add feet’, that is, to continue embellishing on something until you end up adding superfluous detail that ends up being detrimental rather than useful
source: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/100500/best-is-enemy-of-the-good-russian-idiom-saying
178.140.89.185 ( talk) 18:37, 30 March 2016 (UTC)
See: https://books.google.ru/books?id=fgaUQc8NbTYC&pg=PA21&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false 178.140.89.185 ( talk) 19:10, 30 March 2016 (UTC)
Voltaire's « le mieux est l'ennemi du bien » more accurately translates "better is the enemy of well-being", which is much deeper insight than "better is the enemy of good". (C.f. the difference between « bon », good, and « bien », welfare, metaphysical Good as opposed to Evil, or kindness/generosity.) It further suggests that when this aphorism was translated into English, "good" actually meant the general, public, or theoretical good, which would have been consistent with 18th century English usage. (Note that « le mieux » translates as "the best" in modern English, but again, was translated as "the better", meaning the best in 18th century English.) Laodah 05:31, 13 December 2017 (UTC)
It's interesting to note that the readership statistics have a strong weekly cycle -- it's about 500/day from Monday to Friday but only about 250/day at the weekend. Maybe the stress and pressure of work causes a focus on this issue during normal business days which goes away when domestic and leisure activities dominate. Or maybe it's the sort of page that people read when they are goofing off... Andrew D. ( talk) 10:46, 18 October 2018 (UTC)
/info/en/?search=Superiority_(short_story)
Suggesting the idea of having a link between this article and the Arthur C Clarke short story Superiority, at one or both of the articles. The plot involved a war where the side with the superior technology lost the war because they kept delaying building weapons until they were perfect - which never happened. Silversplash ( talk) 12:44, 11 October 2021 (UTC)
The quote in the image caption seems to be fake, actually coming from someone else who lived two millennia after Confucius (and arguably also mistranslated). Googling the apparent original (宁为有瑕玉不作无瑕石) makes this pretty clear. (There's also a similar Japanese saying, tama ni kizu, which may be of Chinese origin, is definitely older, and actually means something completely different. [1])
Is propounded the principle of the golden mean which counsels against extremism in general
referring to the same quotation? Whether or not this is the case, a better source, written by a professional sinologist (or other specialist) should be used.
Hijiri 88 ( 聖 やや) 06:47, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
very rare—so rare, in fact, that it’s possible to spend a lifetime in the jewelry industry without ever seeing one[2] The claim that the term " paragon" refers to flawless diamonds is also wrong: the term doesn't appear on the GIA's website, but according to Joan Younger Dickinson's 2001 The Book of Diamonds it has been used at different times (rarely?) to refer to either
any diamond weighing more than 12 caratsor
a perfect or flawless diamond of more than 99 carats, i.e., it refers first and foremost, if not exclusively, to carat weight, and not to diamond clarity or even to some non-specialist meaning of "flawlessness". Hijiri 88 ( 聖 やや) 09:38, 8 September 2022 (UTC)
All quotations ... must include an inline citation to a reliable source. Hijiri 88 ( 聖 やや) 03:20, 10 September 2022 (UTC)
Hijiri 88, let's start with your issue (1). Here is a source to support the sentence being a Chinese proverb ( here is the entry). Is that attribution sufficient for you? If not, please provide a source showing that it should, instead, be be attributed to a specific author. - Butwhatdoiknow ( talk) 06:08, 10 September 2022 (UTC)
a better source, written by a professional sinologist (or other specialist); a dictionary of quotations compiled more than a century ago by a 19th-century churchman (and inaccurately attributed by your link to a contemporary "English literary critic, essayist and novelist") is not that. It may indeed be that "Better a [gemstone] with a flaw than a pebble without" is a bona fide Chinese proverb attributed to one or more of the three people I named above, but in order to say that you will need a much better source, written by someone with at least a bare minimum of knowledge of literary Sinitic. Hijiri 88 ( 聖 やや) 08:35, 10 September 2022 (UTC)
The 1893 Dictionary of Quotations from Ancient and Modern, English and Foreign Sources cites a similar proverb, which it claims to be of Chinese provenance: "Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without one."But it would technically violate NOR to cite the 1893 text itself for the claim that this article's title is similar to that quote; you'd need a secondary source that explicitly makes the connection. Hijiri 88 ( 聖 やや) 09:53, 10 September 2022 (UTC)
That brings us to your issue (2). Two questions: (a) It seems to me that your reading of NOR would lead us to remove the first sentence of this article (which contains an unsourced meaning of "perfect is the enemy of good"). Or am I misunderstanding your position? (b) What do you think is the meaning of "Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without one."? - Butwhatdoiknow ( talk) 15:23, 10 September 2022 (UTC)
Better a gemstone with a flaw than a pebble without."Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without." may be a better (more idiomatic) translation, but it is not (as far as I am aware) what the Chinese says. Hijiri 88 ( 聖 やや) 10:02, 12 September 2022 (UTC)
If so, I renew my request for your understanding of that text.means -- did you mean "If not..."?
Many sources claim that Voltaire's proverb first appeared in the 1770 edition of his Dictionnaire Philosophique.
It appears, however, that no one has ever bothered to examine the 1770 edition of Voltaire's Dictionnaire Philosophique. For although it's claimed that the proverb appeared in the article that's titled "Art Dramatique", no such article appeared in editions of the Dictionnaire Philosophique that are dated 1764, 1769, or 1770. However, an article on "Art Dramatique" did appear in his Questions sur l’Encyclopédie of 1770, and the proverb appears there on p. 250. Subsequently, publishers incorporated, into the Dictionnaire Philosophique, articles from the Questions sur l’Encyclopédie (which itself included some articles from the Dictionnaire Philosophique), and publishers continued to call the resulting combination the Dictionnaire Philosophique. (See, for example, an edition of 1838, where the proverb appears on p. 162. See also this edition of 1878, which cites, in footnote 1, Questions sur l’Encyclopédie of 1770 as the source of the article "Art Dramatique".)
VexorAbVikipædia ( talk) 17:25, 11 May 2022 (UTC)
Um… is that not a tautology? 61.68.176.248 ( talk) 07:23, 10 February 2024 (UTC)
I find the inclusion of the Pareto principle example somewhat confusing when it is, at best, only tangentially related to to the subject. The quote itself says nothing about a distribution of effort, nor does it make a claim about when sufficient effort is reached, and on the other hand the Pareto principle does not inherently imply that any effort beyond the 80% completion is 'excessive' or 'the enemy of good'. The relationship seems forced. By contrast, the general reference to diminishing returns seems much more apt, but is relegated to the end of the top line summary.
Suggesting to remove the Pareto principle example from the summary. 86.84.65.23 ( talk) 05:23, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Perfect is the enemy of good article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
Daily pageviews of this article
A graph should have been displayed here but
graphs are temporarily disabled. Until they are enabled again, visit the interactive graph at
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This article is rated Start-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||
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96.226.161.157 ( talk) 17:58, 28 June 2014 (UTC)shilpanicodemus
Supposedly a ban-evading user keeps changing the Watson-Watt link to Robert Watson-Watt. I don't know much about this user, but why isn't the link Robert Watson-Watt? Mgnbar ( talk) 12:04, 24 March 2016 (UTC)
I didn't understand the concept behind this aphorism until I read this article. I think that another way to say part of the concept is "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". The remainder of the concept is covered by the expression "At some point in the design process we must kill the engineers and go to production". Jimb101 ( talk) 04:26, 28 March 2016 (UTC)
Yes I can't think of a closer saying in English however this is not really the same sentiment but more of a related concept. The King Lear quote is closer to "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" or "Leave well enough alone" which is related be not the same meaning. The Duke of Albany's quote concerns something that is already good howwever "il meglio è nemico del bene" includes works in progress that are not already good enough as they are not finished. For example in undertaking a simple task or project but try to include everything one can think of in the scope of the task or project and never finish. Whereas limiting the scope of the task would have resulted in a good finished outcome. The subject was not "well enough" without taking any action. I think the King Lear reference would be meglio in the Related Concepts section. But it could also be left where it is instead of trying to be too perfect. Also another related concept is Ecclesiastes 7:16 "Be not overly righteous, and do not make yourself too wise. Why should you destroy yourself?" Halconen ( talk) 15:56, 21 June 2017 (UTC)
I agree about the Shakespeare quotes and have removed them. Colintedford ( talk) 23:04, 9 August 2018 (UTC)
there's a Chinese idiom which matches this fairly closely as well: 画蛇添足 huà shé tiān zú ‘to draw a snake and add feet’, that is, to continue embellishing on something until you end up adding superfluous detail that ends up being detrimental rather than useful
source: http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/100500/best-is-enemy-of-the-good-russian-idiom-saying
178.140.89.185 ( talk) 18:37, 30 March 2016 (UTC)
See: https://books.google.ru/books?id=fgaUQc8NbTYC&pg=PA21&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false 178.140.89.185 ( talk) 19:10, 30 March 2016 (UTC)
Voltaire's « le mieux est l'ennemi du bien » more accurately translates "better is the enemy of well-being", which is much deeper insight than "better is the enemy of good". (C.f. the difference between « bon », good, and « bien », welfare, metaphysical Good as opposed to Evil, or kindness/generosity.) It further suggests that when this aphorism was translated into English, "good" actually meant the general, public, or theoretical good, which would have been consistent with 18th century English usage. (Note that « le mieux » translates as "the best" in modern English, but again, was translated as "the better", meaning the best in 18th century English.) Laodah 05:31, 13 December 2017 (UTC)
It's interesting to note that the readership statistics have a strong weekly cycle -- it's about 500/day from Monday to Friday but only about 250/day at the weekend. Maybe the stress and pressure of work causes a focus on this issue during normal business days which goes away when domestic and leisure activities dominate. Or maybe it's the sort of page that people read when they are goofing off... Andrew D. ( talk) 10:46, 18 October 2018 (UTC)
/info/en/?search=Superiority_(short_story)
Suggesting the idea of having a link between this article and the Arthur C Clarke short story Superiority, at one or both of the articles. The plot involved a war where the side with the superior technology lost the war because they kept delaying building weapons until they were perfect - which never happened. Silversplash ( talk) 12:44, 11 October 2021 (UTC)
The quote in the image caption seems to be fake, actually coming from someone else who lived two millennia after Confucius (and arguably also mistranslated). Googling the apparent original (宁为有瑕玉不作无瑕石) makes this pretty clear. (There's also a similar Japanese saying, tama ni kizu, which may be of Chinese origin, is definitely older, and actually means something completely different. [1])
Is propounded the principle of the golden mean which counsels against extremism in general
referring to the same quotation? Whether or not this is the case, a better source, written by a professional sinologist (or other specialist) should be used.
Hijiri 88 ( 聖 やや) 06:47, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
very rare—so rare, in fact, that it’s possible to spend a lifetime in the jewelry industry without ever seeing one[2] The claim that the term " paragon" refers to flawless diamonds is also wrong: the term doesn't appear on the GIA's website, but according to Joan Younger Dickinson's 2001 The Book of Diamonds it has been used at different times (rarely?) to refer to either
any diamond weighing more than 12 caratsor
a perfect or flawless diamond of more than 99 carats, i.e., it refers first and foremost, if not exclusively, to carat weight, and not to diamond clarity or even to some non-specialist meaning of "flawlessness". Hijiri 88 ( 聖 やや) 09:38, 8 September 2022 (UTC)
All quotations ... must include an inline citation to a reliable source. Hijiri 88 ( 聖 やや) 03:20, 10 September 2022 (UTC)
Hijiri 88, let's start with your issue (1). Here is a source to support the sentence being a Chinese proverb ( here is the entry). Is that attribution sufficient for you? If not, please provide a source showing that it should, instead, be be attributed to a specific author. - Butwhatdoiknow ( talk) 06:08, 10 September 2022 (UTC)
a better source, written by a professional sinologist (or other specialist); a dictionary of quotations compiled more than a century ago by a 19th-century churchman (and inaccurately attributed by your link to a contemporary "English literary critic, essayist and novelist") is not that. It may indeed be that "Better a [gemstone] with a flaw than a pebble without" is a bona fide Chinese proverb attributed to one or more of the three people I named above, but in order to say that you will need a much better source, written by someone with at least a bare minimum of knowledge of literary Sinitic. Hijiri 88 ( 聖 やや) 08:35, 10 September 2022 (UTC)
The 1893 Dictionary of Quotations from Ancient and Modern, English and Foreign Sources cites a similar proverb, which it claims to be of Chinese provenance: "Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without one."But it would technically violate NOR to cite the 1893 text itself for the claim that this article's title is similar to that quote; you'd need a secondary source that explicitly makes the connection. Hijiri 88 ( 聖 やや) 09:53, 10 September 2022 (UTC)
That brings us to your issue (2). Two questions: (a) It seems to me that your reading of NOR would lead us to remove the first sentence of this article (which contains an unsourced meaning of "perfect is the enemy of good"). Or am I misunderstanding your position? (b) What do you think is the meaning of "Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without one."? - Butwhatdoiknow ( talk) 15:23, 10 September 2022 (UTC)
Better a gemstone with a flaw than a pebble without."Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without." may be a better (more idiomatic) translation, but it is not (as far as I am aware) what the Chinese says. Hijiri 88 ( 聖 やや) 10:02, 12 September 2022 (UTC)
If so, I renew my request for your understanding of that text.means -- did you mean "If not..."?
Many sources claim that Voltaire's proverb first appeared in the 1770 edition of his Dictionnaire Philosophique.
It appears, however, that no one has ever bothered to examine the 1770 edition of Voltaire's Dictionnaire Philosophique. For although it's claimed that the proverb appeared in the article that's titled "Art Dramatique", no such article appeared in editions of the Dictionnaire Philosophique that are dated 1764, 1769, or 1770. However, an article on "Art Dramatique" did appear in his Questions sur l’Encyclopédie of 1770, and the proverb appears there on p. 250. Subsequently, publishers incorporated, into the Dictionnaire Philosophique, articles from the Questions sur l’Encyclopédie (which itself included some articles from the Dictionnaire Philosophique), and publishers continued to call the resulting combination the Dictionnaire Philosophique. (See, for example, an edition of 1838, where the proverb appears on p. 162. See also this edition of 1878, which cites, in footnote 1, Questions sur l’Encyclopédie of 1770 as the source of the article "Art Dramatique".)
VexorAbVikipædia ( talk) 17:25, 11 May 2022 (UTC)
Um… is that not a tautology? 61.68.176.248 ( talk) 07:23, 10 February 2024 (UTC)
I find the inclusion of the Pareto principle example somewhat confusing when it is, at best, only tangentially related to to the subject. The quote itself says nothing about a distribution of effort, nor does it make a claim about when sufficient effort is reached, and on the other hand the Pareto principle does not inherently imply that any effort beyond the 80% completion is 'excessive' or 'the enemy of good'. The relationship seems forced. By contrast, the general reference to diminishing returns seems much more apt, but is relegated to the end of the top line summary.
Suggesting to remove the Pareto principle example from the summary. 86.84.65.23 ( talk) 05:23, 8 March 2024 (UTC)