Talk:Harold F. Cherniss

Some Revisions
Hi, I am working through some of Cherniss's academic work and noticed his Wikipedia page was thin. Herewith some expansions and revisions. JohnD&#39;Alembert (talk) 02:11, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

I'll add illustrations and some more on his works later. JohnD&#39;Alembert (talk) 18:12, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

I'm mostly finished with the Life and will start in on his major works. This section is a mere outline at this point. Does anyone mind if I take out that long last paragraph from Geldon? JohnD&#39;Alembert (talk) 22:04, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

Whew! Ok, I think that does it for now. I'm finished with my additions and revisions. Apart from Tarán's memoir on his research there is very little biographical information on Cherniss, and this is now I suppose, thanks to the power of Google, the best online biography and commensurate with his scholarly importance. Any improvements and further contributions are, of course, welcome! JohnD&#39;Alembert (talk) 09:26, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

Judgmental section title: "Cold War hysteria at Berkeley"
That title expresses a popular but non-neutral POV. See WP:NDESC. The term "hysteria" does not appear in the article, "Panofsky agonistes", subsequently referenced — I just linked that reference to a PDF of that article. I suggest replacing the word "hysteria" with "anxiety", on the grounds that it captures the same emotional tenor of that time while I think even the defenders of McCarthy and cold war policies directed at perceived domestic enemies would agree that they had anxieties – and that they were justified. The following links to the McCarthy and HUAAC articles allow users to draw their own conclusions on the issue. The word is used once more in "the rising hysteria stoked by..." and I would substitute "anxiety" there too, keeping the word "stoked" as permissable color.

Without objections, I will make the change, but others, including the editor who wrote the current version, JohnD&#39;Alembert, may have other ideas, so I invite your comments. —Blanchette (talk) 23:46, 1 July 2019 (UTC)


 * Done. —Blanchette (talk) 16:10, 12 July 2019 (UTC)

Confusing, non-conforming quotation style
I just noticed this article is non-conforming to standard English-language quotation practice and violates the Wikipedia Manual of Style in presenting quoted material inside of single quotes (') instead of double quotes ("), making it appear that one is looking at a quote within a quote, but when one tries to find the outer quote, it's not there. See MOS:DOUBLE.

I invite any interested editor to go through the article to correct this, and I may try to do it myself when I have more time — I think the appropriate thing would be to verify the quotes one is modifying where possible and to do the whole job at one sitting, since the inconsistency of two quotation styles likely would be worse than this single-quote style, which appears to be used consistently here. —Blanchette (talk) 16:35, 12 July 2019 (UTC)


 * I added "Template:Copy edit" to alert those in the March copy-editing drive. See WikiProject_Guild_of_Copy_Editors.—Blanchette (talk) 22:19, 1 March 2020 (UTC)