Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/December 2016/Review essay


 * By Hawkeye7

Back in 2011, I started improving the articles on the Manhattan Project, with an objective of turning them into a Featured Topic. This proved to be impossible, but after five years I am finally closing in on good topic status. The last article (on Project Y) achieved Good Article status in November. Every article had to be improved to at least Good Article status. When I started, none had this status, although four were featured. I had to rescue one of them from a Featured Article Review, and another might have suffered the same fate but I fixed it up first. The whole is now at Featured Topic Candidates, where it is facing an uphill battle for approval.

Over this time, the number of articles in the topic set has steadily grown, despite the efforts of myself and other editors to keep a lid on the numbers. I tried to hold their number at 80, then 90, and now at 100. This caused a lowering of the sights to a good topic. At the height of the effort, eight were promoted to featured each year. There are now 29 featured articles and one featured list) in the set, but at the current rate, it would take another four years to get 20 more through the featured article process. Nonetheless, each article has been written as well as I could make it, so there is no shortage of candidates.

Some general rules emerged over time to select the articles in the topic, which matches the navigation box at the bottom of the page. There are five subsets: sites, administrators, scientists, operations, weapons, and a grab bag called "related topics". These represent a selection from the category. There was some debate about which articles should be included. The general policy resembles that of the vital articles, in that adding one now means removing another, and arguing the merits of one over another. I didn't always get my own way on which articles were included in the set. One argument was over the article on the Oppenheimer security hearing. I opposed this being on the list, because I felt that it related primarily to the post-war period. I lost the argument, and so had to improve the article. It's now featured.

For the scientists, I adopted some rules. Everyone who worked on the Manhattan Project and won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry or Physics is included in the topic. (Two others, who won Nobel prizes for Medicine and Peace are not.) These all have good sources, although many of those who did not work on nuclear weapons (and therefore do not fall under our MilHist project) still have poor-quality articles. While some of them, like Niels Bohr, James Chadwick and Enrico Fermi were famous then, most, like Richard Feynman, were young scientists just starting out on their careers. Aage Bohr mainly carried his father's suitcase, and Val Fitch was a lowly member of the Special Engineer Detachment (SED), technicians found within the Army's ranks.

When the Los Alamos Laboratory began its major effort in 1944 to develop the implosion-type nuclear weapon, Oppenheimer asked the director of the Manhattan Project, Major General Leslie R. Groves, Jr., for 200 physics PhDs. This was impossible; prior to World War II, only a handful of universities in the United States produced them at all, and the output was but a handful each year. It was the atomic bombs and atomic energy developed by the Manhattan Project (coupled with ample funding) that would interest university presidents in building up their physics departments in the post-war years. Nonetheless, the effort was made. Groves combed scientists working elsewhere in the Manhattan Project, like Fermi, Leona Woods and Samuel Allison, and sent people with PhDs in areas other than physics, like Richard Hamming and Stan Ulam. The Manhattan Project wasn't all about physics, and I made sure the mathematicians, chemists, astronomers and ordnance experts were represented.

Beyond the Nobel-Prize winners, scientists were selected for several reasons, mostly based on their fame. Harry Daghlian and Louis Slotin made the cut because they were killed in criticality accidents. George Koval and Klaus Fuchs are present because they were spies. John von Neumann is, on page views, the third most popular of the scientists after Oppenheimer and Bohr (and ahead of Feynman, Chadwick and Fermi). I wasn't enthusiastic about his inclusion because Wikiproject Mathematics had loaded the article full of his mathematical achievements, but I couldn't deny his importance. There was some pushback on articles like this along the lines of MilHist attempting to claim articles. The author of the article on Stan Ulam was very unhappy about my complying with reviewers who wanted off-topic information removed.

I made a conscious effort to improve articles on women scientists, notably Leona Woods, Maria Goeppert Mayer, Kay Way, Hoylande Young, Jane Hamilton Hall and Joan Curran. I also created articles on Priscilla Greene and Dorothy McKibbin to balance the coverage a bit. To get information on Joan Curran, I contacted the archivist at Newnham College, Cambridge. As a result, I have improved more articles on women scientists to good article status than any member of WikiProject Women scientists.

It is hard to know the audience for articles. I assume that the reader has a high-school education, and I remember everything that I was taught in high school, including mathematics, physics and slabs of Russian poetry. When writing about Oppenheimer, I wanted to emphasise that he was a scientist. The centennial of his birth in 2004 was the occasion for a conference on him, and a rush of books and articles. His article was a thankless task, being a former featured article. As with all too many other articles that needed improving, there were swathes of unsourced text. Without knowing where it came from, I had to assume that it might be copyvio, and rewrote it, perhaps needlessly.

Oppenheimer is one of those subjects with plenty of book sources, but too much of what has been written about him (including the original Wikipedia article) is about his politics and his girlfriends (two of whom, Melba Phillips and Jean Tatlock, have their own articles) and I wanted to bring out his achievements as a scientist. The article pays lip service to keeping it within high-school science, but the blue links will take you to far more challenging material. When possible, I added original papers to the references, which of course are more challenging still. I did not have the time to work on improving articles about the actual science of the Manhattan Project.

The topic set has been written top down. I started with updating the main article, although I soon got sidetracked into fixing up the article on Oppenheimer. In retrospect, this worked out fairly well, although I know far more about the subject now than I did then. Some errors have been found and corrected. These were mostly related to the Demon Core. I think that it presents a well-balanced account, more so than most. Several sub-articles were created specifically for the topic. My favourite is the one on the British contribution to the Manhattan Project. Operation Peppermint was also a fun article to write, being about a truly obscure subject that I first came across decades ago reading Omar Bradley's A Soldier's Story.

Under the heading of "administrators", I placed all the Manhattan Project's project heads, although many were scientists too. Initially, they were all Nobel laureates: Ernest Lawrence, Arthur Compton and Harold Urey. This exhausted the supply of American laureates, which is why Oppenheimer was appointed to head Project Y. Vannevar Bush and James B. Conant are also filed here, as is Charles Allen Thomas and Frank Spedding, the directors of the lesser-known Dayton Project and Ames Project. Most scientists have one biography; few have more. Often though, there is a biographical memoir to work from. Just because a scientist wasn't on the main list did not stop me from bringing their article up to good article standard. At least one good article was spun off from each featured article, and at least one B-class article from each good article. For example, the Trinity (nuclear test) spawned McDonald Ranch House, while Mark Oliphant generated Harrie Massey and Eric Burhop.

All the senior military people received biographical articles. You would think I would have been on firmer ground here, but while there are several books on Leslie Groves, the rest are not so well served. Deak Parsons has a biography, and Kenneth Nichols and Paul Tibbetts have autobiographies. I have found that these have to be approached with caution. I was unhappy when another editor created the article on James C. Marshall, as it forced me to improve it. Fortunately, he did throw me a bone; he noted that Marshall was a West Point graduate. This enabled me to fill in the details about him from Cullum. It also led me to a biographical obituary on the West Point site written by his son. A more difficult subject was Franklin Matthias precisely because he was not a West Point graduate. I had a friend access his papers at the University of Washington in Seattle. Armed with this biographical information, I was able to locate sources needed to improve his article; more could be done on this one to improve it to featured.

The operational articles were easiest, mainly because had done most of the work already, and the articles were easy to get up to standard once I figured out what his sources were. Moreover, he was amenable to co-nominating them for FAC. Another great collaborator was, who did sterling work on Operation Crossroads. You can read about him at Howard Morland - he's one of the rare Wikipedians who has his own article. I wrote about his adventures in another featured article, United States v. Progressive, Inc.

It is still possible to create more articles on the Manhattan Project, and there are many articles in the category that could be improved. There are also the post-war nuclear programs, and those of other countries. I collected a substantial amount of material on that of Britain.