Wikipedia:Peer review/Elias Ashmole/archive1

Elias Ashmole
I've been working on this for the last couple weeks, and finally got it posted. I guess I'm thinking about eventually proposing it for FA. Mostly, I want to make sure that there are no serious lapses, and that the level of detail is appopriate. (A note about the picture: there are much better pictures out there, but this is the best one I've found with reliable and complete source info.) PRiis 22:04, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * I have done a light copyedit and added links (many unfortunately red - Garter King-of-Arms, for goodness sake - but there we go). An image of the Ashmolean may be a good idea.  Otherwise, looks ready for FAC to me. -- 14:25, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * Thanks for going through it. Yeah, a lot of red, but hopefully they won't stay red for too long. I'll look for a good Ashmolean pic. PRiis 21:23, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)
 * My web searches haven't turned up anything suitable, so I've put in a request at WP:RP. PRiis 04:51, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)

It's truly a pleasure to see the PRiis Model Featured Article Workshop under steam again! Hi, Pete, the Ashmole article's looking very good, but I think you'll get asked for greater detail on WP:FAC. Especially for a fuller Lead, and more detail in the first paragraphs. I understand the principle that he did more important things later in life, but I still think the first paragraphs are unnecessarily bald. If there isn't more info available, I'd still quite like more explanation. Take the paragraph "Ashmole was a firmly committed royalist..." It's more interesting to be told what that meant--to be reminded of who he was committed to--than to have to click on the royalist link (and be sent to a disambig page, yet). If it was me, I would also explain what being King's Commissioner of Excise entailed and what it says about his position, his loyalties, his status, his income (except that I wouldn't know ;-)). And what kind of a military post, through whose influence? Do you know how he "became associated" with Brasenose College, it sounds a little vague? Was there a political reason he left Oxford in 1645? Stuff like that.

Generally, I feel that the text relies a little heavily on having the reader click on wikilinks. Take the Philosopher's Stone. Of course that should be a link, for the reader who wants a full account and explanation of the concept; but I think there should also be an explanatory sentence around the link, for the reader who just wants to read this text--a quite honorable wish, which also needs to be catered for. The alchemy paragraph is very interesting! It raises some questions: it sounds almost provocatively exotic that an "annotated compilation of alchemical poems in English" would be an important alchemical work. How was it his most important work, exactly..? Oh, and a detail: the last sentence bothers me a little. How do you mean, "Though"? Why would the factors mentioned make him more likely to carry out experiments (as "operations" should perhaps be translated)? From your chronology, I get the impression that he abandoned alchemy before the rage for experiments--I'm a bit hazy on this, but wasn't it fairly common before the Restoration to construct oneself as an alchemist through reading books, rather than by getting down and dirty in the lab? Perhaps that's my prejudice (successfully floated down the centuries on a wave of Royal Society propaganda).

I love the final sentence, but the final paragraph is a little abrupt otherwise, with a lot of same-y sentence structure. Also POV: "He was an ambitious man with a strong will", etc. Your references look fine, but I should warn you that FAC has become a lot more concerned with inline references since your last FA: you'll certainly be asked to ascribe every dot of the opinions in the last paragraph to a particular source. (In fact this may come in the form of a request for footnotes, but don't believe anybody who tells you it's obligatory to give the information in that form--it isn't.)

I don't quite understand what the problem is about the image. Of course you've seen this lovely baby (scroll down). MQ Magazine, which is one of your sources, claims that it's from the National Portrait Gallery, in other words that it's the same (obviously cropped) as this mean little scan which the NPG provides, according to their custom. Which part of the info do you consider inadequate? It's a little weird that the NPG says in one place that John Riley is the artist and in another that it's "after" Riley, admittedly, but if I were you I'd just quote the contradiction on the image description page and go ahead and use it. Unless there's some further problem that I'm missing? Best wishes, and again, lovely to see you back! Bishonen | talk 21:31, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * All righty! Thank you for going into that kind of detail--it's nice to get this kind of reading, and I know it's not always easy to put your finger on just what's needed (but you do it so well!). I'm pretty clear on the work needed on the lead, detail on the early years, making things more explicit and not relying too much on links. So I'll get to work on that and the lots of other points. (I won't go through them one-by-one, but I've printed them out as a roadmap.)


 * I did notice that in-line citations seem to be a bigger deal now on the FA page. Do you think the assertions in the last paragraph are the only kinds of things that would need in-line citations? Are they expected for non-controversial biographical facts?


 * About the picture. Most of the other pictures out there didn't have any real source info at all. I do love that picture from the MQ magazine. I thought about it--I guess the fact that it's from the NPG is what makes me nervous. I know that these should all be public domain because of Bridgeman, but I worry that the NPG might be more likely to raise a fuss than some random .edu page (where I'm sure nobody cares)--especially because they already have a system for charging exorbitant prices for the use of "their" scans on the web. Anway, I'm pretty sure that one is "after Riley" rather than Riley. If you' think it's OK, I'd love to use the Big Face!


 * Thanks again for spending this kind of time, and I'll report back! PRiis 03:34, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * Big Face: pish. It's we who should be raising the fuss, about the misleading copyright claims the NPG and other museums make on their sites to try to intimidate people. Anyway, Wikipedia is crammed full of two-dimensional representations of these 100+ year-olds, we have a template,, specially for the purpose of claiming them to be public domain, and I've never heard of any of the wiki image copyright cops having thoughts of questioning or deleting them. So, if it should turn out we're wrong about Bridgeman, Wikipedia is going to be in so much trouble that one more or less isn't going to matter. :P


 * About inline citations for the rest: well, on a common sense principle exclusively, by no means to clutter up the text like it was a research paper. Actually I think a little discussion of the sources as such wouldn't hurt any, and that could perhaps be made to conveniently stand in for specific inline refs—you know, the "this account is based on blabla unless otherwise indicated" kind of thing. Has Hunter updated Garnett significantly? Are there reliability issues? You could tuck anything like that out of the way as annotations in the reference section, or put it up front the way it is in John Vanbrugh ("Early life section"), or whatever would be more convenient. I suppose the final paragraph is in fact based on Garnett? If your formulations in that paragraph are very close to his—I sort of get an impression they might be—if you're pseudo-quoting him, you might want to think about having more of the quoting actual and acknowledged. I don't have access to the DNB (curses! workplace too mean to subscribe to it!) to take a look for myself, unfortunately. Please let me know if I'm not making sense here! I look forward to seeing this on FAC. Bishonen | talk 11:46, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * OK, now that that ndash thing is all straightened out, I think I'm ready. Has everything been addressed? PRiis 1 July 2005 20:40 (UTC)