A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity has been listed as one of the Natural sciences good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it. Review: October 23, 2020. ( Reviewed version).

This article is written in British English, which has its own spelling conventions (colour, travelled, centre, defence, artefact, analyse) and some terms that are used in it may be different or absent from other varieties of English. According to the relevant style guide, this should not be changed without broad consensus.

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 pageviews.wmcloud.org

A fact from A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 14 November 2020 ( check views). The text of the entry was as follows: Did you know... that as part of a famous priority dispute, E. T. Whittaker's 1953 book claimed that Henri Poincaré and Hendrik Lorentz developed the theory of special relativity before Albert Einstein? A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2020/November. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity.

This article is rated GA-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects:

Books This article is within the scope of WikiProject Books. To participate in the project, please visit its page, where you can join the project and discuss matters related to book articles. To use this banner, please refer to the documentation. To improve this article, please refer to the relevant guideline for the type of work.BooksWikipedia:WikiProject BooksTemplate:WikiProject BooksBook articles Physics: Publications / History Low‑importance This article is within the scope of WikiProject Physics, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Physics on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.PhysicsWikipedia:WikiProject PhysicsTemplate:WikiProject Physicsphysics articles Low This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale. This article is supported by Publications Taskforce. This article is supported by History Taskforce. History of Science Low‑importance This article is part of the History of Science WikiProject, an attempt to improve and organize the history of science content on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion. You can also help with the History of Science Collaboration of the Month.History of ScienceWikipedia:WikiProject History of ScienceTemplate:WikiProject History of Sciencehistory of science articles Low This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion:

• A history of the theories of aether and electricity. Whittacker E.T. (1910).pdf

Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. — Community Tech bot ( talk) 03:08, 1 October 2020 (UTC) reply

This review is transcluded from Talk:A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Forbes72 ( talk · contribs) 01:45, 19 October 2020 (UTC) reply

Barely a month old, but it's already in pretty good shape. You've put some serious work into this, Footlessmouse. I'm happy to look this over in detail. 〈  Forbes₇₂ |  Talk 〉 01:45, 19 October 2020 (UTC) reply

GA review – see WP:WIAGA for criteria

1. Is it well written?

   A. The prose is clear and concise, and the spelling and grammar are correct:

   Mostly clear, missing a few full names for scientists and wikilinks to technical terms with their own articles.
   -> Chapter 4 convers [sic] the... fix typo.
   -> still largely focuses on Descartes, Newton, Fermat, Hooke, and Huygens, among others. - Give the full name of the scientist (not just last name) and wikilink their page on the first mention of them in a section. It's OK to use just the last name on second mention within a section, though.
   -> Other examples: "Fitzgerald" "Dyson, in his 1954 review,", "In his 1954 Nature review, Hagedorn notes "
   -> Thomas Preston (scientist) - reformat to hide disambiguation
   -> Platonic and Aristotelian philosophies - add inline wikilinks
   -> old quantum theory - wikilink.
   -> Infobox - are the different page numbers for the different editions? Better to clarify inline (1st ed.) (2nd ed., vol. 1) (2nd ed., vol. 2) if you can. Ditto for publication date and publisher.

   B. It complies with the manual of style guidelines for lead sections, layout, words to watch, fiction, and list incorporation:

   A couple things to fix:
   -> Overview of Volume I, Reception of the first volume - Simplify section titles per MOS:NOBACKREF. The rest are similar.
   -> book established Whittaker as a leading historian of science, he was also widely recognized as a preeminent mathematician Try to make this more substantial: the combination of "leading", "widely recognized", and "preeminent" is getting into MOS:PUFF territory.
   ->Move

2. Is it verifiable with no original research?

   A. It contains a list of all references (sources of information), presented in accordance with the layout style guideline:

   The references themselves are excellent. However, the text is a bit cluttered with citation info.
   -> Citing Max Born (1956),[43] Gerald Holton (1960,[44] 1964,[45] 1968[46]), Charles Scribner (1964),[47] Stanley Goldberg (1967,[48] 1969[49]), Elie Zahar (1973),[50] Tetu Hirosige (1976),[51] Kenneth F. Schaffner (1976),[52] and Arthur I. Miller (1981). - No need for dates in the text, WP:HARV style refs are depreciated.
   -> More broadly, no need to list the publication place inline for any of the reviews - that's what the references are for.

   B. All in-line citations are from reliable sources, including those for direct quotations, statistics, published opinion, counter-intuitive or controversial statements that are challenged or likely to be challenged, and contentious material relating to living persons—science-based articles should follow the scientific citation guidelines:

   Well-referenced.

   C. It contains no original research:

   Article seems to follow from the sources nicely.

   D. It contains no copyright violations nor plagiarism:

   One sentence seems too close:
   -> set forth the relativity theory of Poincaré and Lorentz with some amplifications, and which attracted much attention",[42] and he credited Einstein only with being the first to publish the correct relativistic formulas for stellar aberration and the Doppler effect. is the same phrasing used at [1]. Should be rephrased. The rest seems fine.

3. Is it broad in its coverage?

   A. It addresses the main aspects of the topic:

   Quite comprehensive coverage from the number of sources.

   B. It stays focused on the topic without going into unnecessary detail (see summary style):

   Two things:
   -> the namesake of the Sparrow criterion in spectroscopy A parenthetical aside seems out of scope. Leaving a redlink is OK until somebody writes an article about him.
   -> At just under 88kb, the article is flirting with WP:TOOLONG territory. I can see a reasonable argument made to keep unified or split (probably by edition), but I'd like to hear your thoughts here.

4. Is it neutral?

   It represents viewpoints fairly and without editorial bias, giving due weight to each:

   The article is a little heavy on praise, as I mentioned in 1a WP:WTW section. But it's just surface style, the broader substance appears to be quite representative of the sources as far as I can tell. So no other concerns beyond that.

5. Is it stable?

   It does not change significantly from day to day because of an ongoing edit war or content dispute:

   A minor grammar fix recently, but otherwise pretty stable.

6. Is it illustrated, if possible, by images?

   A. Images are tagged with their copyright status, and valid fair use rationales are provided for non-free content:

   Only picture is a correctly tagged image of a book in the public domain.

   B. Images are relevant to the topic, and have suitable captions:

   The single image and caption are relevant, but a single picture is not enough. The images do not all have to be of the book itself, you can include some of the scientists/experiments/whatever you think is relevant. But surely you can find a few relevant illustrations to add.

7. Overall:

   Pass or Fail:

   The article is close. On substance, I think enough good content is there, but the issues mentioned above should be addressed. 〈  Forbes₇₂ |  Talk 〉 02:58, 22 October 2020 (UTC) reply

Note Thank you for taking the time to review this! I have made changes to fix all of these problems, except for the one that begins "move", did you mean to put something else there? I ended up deleting a couple of problematic statements that did not seem particularly necessary for the article and so won't be missed. I added a portrait of Whittaker and a photo of Einstein. The readable prose size is 48 kB, so it is in between the categories of "Length alone does not justify division" and "May need to be divided (likelihood goes up with size)". So I wasn't sure. If more content were to be added, I would say it definitely should split. The books have enough notability that each is separately notable, but I am not sure if anything else needs to be said about it. I am not sure either way, there are good arguments for both sides on this one. The main argument to keep it together is that the first volume of second edition is basically same as first edition and many of the references talk about both. I am open to suggestions, it is certainly a future possibility. Please let me know if you there are any more issues. Thanks again for taking the time to review the article! Footlessmouse ( talk) 04:37, 22 October 2020 (UTC) reply

• @ Forbes72: I have made some additional edits fixing mistakes I saw and have reduced the number of times the word "praised" is used. I also ran it through Word for spelling and grammar to be safe. Let me know if there's anything else I can do to improve the page. Thanks again! Footlessmouse ( talk) 23:38, 22 October 2020 (UTC) reply

• Looks good. I was taking some time to try to decisively tidy up the copyright status of the images, but it turns out to basically be a black hole of interacting copyright law from about a half dozen countries. Everything here appears be public domain, and is tagged as such, but while I was able to find more suitable tags on Poincaré, I guess we have to settle for the generic US public domain tags on Whittaker, Born, and Lorentz. (e.g. apparently Whittaker's portrait was one of the portraits involved in the National Portrait Gallery and Wikimedia Foundation copyright dispute, and wikimedia commons apparently doesn't have a generic UK public domain tag?) Even some pictures from featured articles [2] have the same over-generic tags, so I guess we just ignore the problem?

Anyway, back to the article itself. You're right, I've accidentally conflated the article size with the prose size, so the article probably isn't too long in its current form. The word move was a mistake, I was thinking about asking to move the Publication history/Release details to the end matter, but decided against it, since it seems more a matter of personal preference. I'm glad you've cut down on the praise somewhat. The article favors Whittaker's point of view a bit more than the consensus history, but the article is specifically about his book, so that emphasis not WP:UNDUE in this context. You've fixed the other issues I brought up, so I'm going to pass review. 〈  Forbes₇₂ |  Talk 〉 02:40, 23 October 2020 (UTC) reply

@ Forbes72: Thank you again for your careful review, I greatly appreciate the feedback and the promotion! I have changed the second paragraph of the lead to both add in a potential DYK statement and to make it clear that scientific consensus is not on Whittaker's side in the intro. Let me know if you have any concerns, given you just promoted it. Also, there is a drive going on at WP:WikiProject Good articles/GAN Backlog Drives/October 2020 you have to add your name and keep track of the articles you review there to take part (it's not automatic). I saw you were reviewing one before you started mine, so I thought I would let you know in case you didn't see it or didn't know it wasn't automatic. Footlessmouse ( talk) 06:15, 23 October 2020 (UTC) reply

@ Footlessmouse: That's about it, thanks. Probably needs some more polishing before WP:FAC, but the GA criteria are not so strict. As for the drive, I'm not personally interested in the review awards, but there's a pretty big backlog of GA reviews, so I agree that it's a good place to focus. Nice work with the article. 〈  Forbes₇₂ |  Talk 〉 19:18, 23 October 2020 (UTC) reply

[Removed duplicate of nomination for clarity]

@ Footlessmouse: Not sure what this is supposed to be, but if you're nominating this for a DYK, the instructions on how to do that are at Wikipedia:Did you know / Template talk:Did you know#To nominate an article. Headbomb { t · c · p · b} 05:14, 23 October 2020 (UTC) reply

If anyone has any comments about DYK or the article in general, please let me know. Thanks! Footlessmouse ( talk) 05:19, 23 October 2020 (UTC) reply

@ Headbomb: Sorry about that. I was going to ask for comments after getting it ready. Thanks! Footlessmouse ( talk) 05:24, 23 October 2020 (UTC) reply

Hi all, if any anyone has any ideas on the section titles I would be grateful. MOS says that at each level they have to be concise, but they also have to be unique to the page. They more or less have to conform to page title guidelines. I have found that balance somewhat difficult for this page (currently using parentheses to disambiguate sections). The obvious fix is to split the article up, but I still have a few strong reservations on that. Thanks! Footlessmouse ( talk) 09:09, 25 November 2020 (UTC) reply

Hi all, I have opened a discussion on WikiProject Physics to ask what the correct target of wave mechanics should be, as there doesn't appear to be a clear answer. Thanks! Footlessmouse ( talk) 22:48, 11 December 2020 (UTC) reply