Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/History of science/archive1

History of science

This article has undergone extensive expansion since its recent creation in January and especially since its recent COTW in February. It now encompasses a huge general area quite well, not too in-depth, but captures the trends well. It's full of pictures, good wikiformat, and has references. Looks like a wonderful article to me.--Dmcdevit 03:10, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)

• Object. This is a good article, but still not ready for the big time. The peer review comments need to be adressed first - for example, there is no mention of economy and several other scientific disciplines at all, especially from the social sciences area - so the article fails on the grounds of being incomplete. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus Talk 09:59, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)
  • The number of links to other disciplines has doubled. The navbox to them has correspondingly grown in size. Some of the content has been moved to pages in the respective disciplines. Ancheta Wis 14:39, 1 Apr 2005 (UTC)
• Oppose Nearly twice the recommended page size. Article size is very important given that the average attention span of people is 20 minutes and it takes the average person about that amount of time to read 30 to 35 KB of prose. So a person who needs a good primer on this topic would not likely finish reading this article. Nothing wrong with having a great deal of coverage on a topic, but having so much in one article is not optimal. See Wikipedia:Summary style on how to fix this (involves summarizing some sections and moving the more detailed text to daughter articles). --mav 20:56, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Do we care whether the average person will actually finish something? Don't we care, rather, whether an interested person will read something? Besides, this is the history of science. Demanding that it be less than 32KB is, with due respect, just ignorant. Hydriotaphia 21:45, Mar 28, 2005 (UTC)

Yes we do care - that is why we are here. A person who wants a primer on the whole topic should not have to be exhausted by reading. Expecting every user to need the same level of detail is, with due respect, ignorant. --mav 22:05, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)

That's what I thought. I certainly considered the length, but thought that rule was obsolete with History of Russia's successful FAC. Especially with the more stringent rules, it's extemely hard to keep them that short.--Dmcdevit 22:03, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Many articles without references were featured before that was a requirement. --mav 22:05, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Right... so you're saying this should be featured, because there is no rule against length? I don't see your point.--Dmcdevit 23:23, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)

My point is that there is a transition period before a new requirement is added where people object to articles based on that future requirement but since that requirement is not set yet some of those articles objected to get featured anyway. So some articles that would not pass after that requirement was added did pass before it was added. --mav

OK—but doesn't that beg the question of whether it's actually a valid requirement or not? Let's not just assume it's legitimate. Let's have a reasoned, civil discussion about it. Apropos of that, I do sincerely apologize for calling your earlier comment ignorant; that was hardly civil. Hydriotaphia 04:51, Mar 29, 2005 (UTC)

• Redirection. The article is currently at 66KB and growing. The work is attracting some excellent editors. Perhaps it is premature to seek to prune it until the content stabilizes. I quote from The Autobiography of Science, 2nd edition, edited by Forest Ray Moulton and Justus J. Schifferes: "... the history of science resembles a flowing river ... Its beginnings lie beyond the farthest horizons of the unknown. As rivulets join successively into larger and larger streams, finally becoming irrestible floods, so the elementary and isolated first elements of various branches of science progressively combine and develop into ... great syntheses of experience and reasoning." I am attempting to prune it, see the link below. But it seems a shame to stifle the flood right now. You are seeing a great article form before you. Perhaps one approach is to nominate a pruned Summary_style version after this big one stabilizes. FAC is not as important as keeping the interest up in this one, right now. Ancheta Wis 12:02, 1 Apr 2005 (UTC)

• Object. The article contains some great prose and most certainly has potential. However, I think this article needs a more detailed peer review. The article's talk page contains some problems I have with the first half of the article. Jan van Male 01:32, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)

• Comment. I've worked a lot on this article after the CotW ended, I think it improved a lot. I put it up for peer review to get comments on it and to get more people interested again. It helped, but I have to agree the article is not ready for FA status yet. I've greatly shortened many paragraphs but it's difficult to preserve all the different fields and disciplines at the same time. -- Cugel 08:09, Mar 29, 2005 (UTC)

• Attn: Check out new page Talk:History of science/Summary style for new page construction. Considering the major revision to account for length, it may not be an immediate fix. It seems most of the consensus is that that is the major problem, and it has all, if not too much, of the required info, much of which is now being moved to daughter pages. --Dmcdevit 02:49, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)

• Support. I think the article does a fairly good job of an overview to an immensely large topic. The fact that it is only 66K is AMAZING in my opinion, considering the range of subjects and time periods it covers. It gives a nice broad overview of both the history of various disciplines, the professionalization of science, theories of scientific change, and manages to do it without being too Western-centric. The 32K limit has never been a hard and fast rule (and matters substantially less now thanks to section editing than it ever did before) and should not be applied in a knee-jerk manner. There are certain topics in which to try and sum them up in 32K would be more of an atrocity than going over it a bit. --Fastfission 20:09, 1 Apr 2005 (UTC)