Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/September 2023/Op-ed


 * By Hawkeye7



A couple of weeks ago I noticed a strange upsurge in page views and edits on J. Robert Oppenheimer, the article on the man who headed Project Y, which built the first atomic bombs. Soon the daily page views soared into the hundreds of thousands! What was going on?

The answer was the impending release of a new biographical film, Oppenheimer. This caused the daily page views to soar over the million mark. The article made the Top-25 list three weeks running. By the time the smoke started to clear, the article had clocked up over 13 million page views in four weeks. Now this happens to some articles every week, but last time it happened to a military history article was when we celebrated the anniversary of Apollo 11. I knew the film was coming, but was totally unprepared for the surge of interest on- and off-wiki.

My own involvement with the article dates back to 2010. Due to off-Wiki events, I had to switch the focus of the articles I was working on, and chose to concentrate on fixing up articles on the Manhattan Project. Unwisely (I was young and inexperienced back then) I chose to start at the top, with the main article. I soon descended to the subarticles and the biographies. (My military history prof used to say all history is biography.) I started with, of course, Robert Oppenheimer.

The article was in poor shape. It had been featured back in 2005, but had been struck after a featured article review in 2007. I set to work addressing its deficiencies, which mainly related to a lack of referencing and coverage. A lot has been written about Oppenheimer! Apparently, no scientist has more biographies except Newton and Einstein. A lot came out in the wake of celebrations of the 100th anniversary of his birth in 2004. So I read four biographies and a pile of journal articles and went to work. To me, the article concentrated too much on his politics and what he did with his dick, and not enough on what I regarded as important, namely his physics and building atomic bombs.

I'm not the expert on the Manhattan Project on Wikipedia; that's. My doctorate is in military history. I am the editor who worked on the Wikipedia articles. See the Manhattan Project navbox? I took them all to GA or FA. I shepherded the Oppenheimer article through GA and A-Class, and then though FAC. Here, there was a great deal of valuable input from other editors and we workshopped the structure of the article so that it neatly covered his whole life. Today, reviews are in decline due to a shortage of editors willing to undertake them, but I maintain that the review process is a crucial aspect of the whole wiki crowd-sourcing concept. The result has been praised for its style and prose; one off-wiki reviewer held it up as an example of how a crowdsourced article can still maintain a distinctive and eloquent voice.

The danger that many fear is that articles will degenerate into what we call "gray goo" as a result of too much well-intentioned editing. So the sudden surge of millions of eyeballs and hundreds of editors put this to the test. First of all, there was no vandalism! I'm accustomed to a vandal horde descending on a Today's Featured Article, but this was refreshing and pleasant. It was attributable of course to the fact that the article was already semi-protected. This did not stop over a hundred editors having a go at changing the article. Nor did it deter IPs (and the occasional registered editor) who asked for changes on the talk page. All were checked by the many page watchers.

Most edits barely rose to the level of what I would term gnomish, fiddling with things like white space, paragraph breaks, the order of templates in the lead, and linking articles that were already linked, often in disregard of WP:NOTBROKEN - the sort of changes barely worth doing, much less undoing. One editor added Oppenheimer's children to the infobox; another took them out again. Did Jean Tatlock commit suicide, or did she kill herself? Someone did find a misspelling that had avoided detection for over a decade. And the Sanskrit texts got switched around at some point.

There were some serious discussions. One was about Oppenheimer's name. That was controversial, and someone eventually dug up a secondary source with a copy of his birth certificate. You know you're dealing with a difficult biographical subject when even his name is contentious. Once the movie - sorry, film - was released a lot of attention also fell on related pages, such as the Trinity nuclear test, Katherine Oppenheimer and Jean Tatlock.

For the most part though, I quite enjoyed the film. Knowing the story from reading the books and editing the Wikipedia articles certainly added an extra dimension to viewing the film. For example, I instantly recognised Dick Feynman when the character first appeared as Oppenheimer recruits him from Princeton (he was wonderfully played by Jack Quaid from The Boys), whereas most viewers only picked up on him when he started playing the bongo drums. And I immediately spotted Ruth Tolman while other people asked; "That was the blonde, right?" Others such as Lilli Hornig and Charlotte Serber are not well known, and not so likely to be identified by the viewers. Nonetheless, their page stats show a distinct jump, articles that normally get a couple of hundred views a day suddenly getting thousands. People say that I must have noted lots of errors in the film. Yes, I spotted a few. All the dialogue was made up except for the security hearing transcript. Some really annoyed me, like the reference to Oppenheimer's Q clearance when these did not appear until after the war. And despite his Hispanic-sounding name, Luis Alvarez was tall and blonde, not short and dark.

There was another aspect too. A controversy erupted over the scene where the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, struck Kyoto off the target list on the grounds that he had spent his honeymoon there. Apparently he did not. The Wikipedia article has been changed, but good luck getting that story. The interesting thing here, from my point of view, is that the book the film was supposedly based on, American Prometheus, does not say this. Wikipedia does though. There was another scene where the dialogue follows Wikipedia rather than the book. Of course, they could have sourced these scenes from somewhere else. There is still debate over whether Stimson's decision was personal and arbitrary, or shrewd and calculated. In any case, his decision was not the end of the matter; the Army repeatedly attempted to get Kyoto back on the target list.

There's another scene that was played for laughs, about Oppenheimer and Groves discussing setting the atmosphere on fire. In real life, Groves was aware that this was not going to happen and was annoyed at Fermi for scaring the guards. But it drives a point about the physicist's "non-zero". In physics class you calculate the odds of the car quantum tunnelling through the next bump in the road, or beer spontaneously flowing up and over the top of a glass. Not going to happen does not even begin to convey magnitude of the true odds. Not once in a trillion times the life of the universe.

My big fear was that people might leave the cinema with the idea that building the atomic bomb had something to do with quantum physics. It doesn't. The fact is that before the war physics was not widely taught in the United States. Many colleges did not teach physics at all, and many of those that did taught the 19th century physics: mechanics, electrodynamics, thermodynamics. As the movie - sorry, film - shows, you had to go to Europe to learn it in those days. At the University of Göttingen, Oppenheimer studied under Max Born, who cultivated what I call a "school". Most brilliant minds who come across an idea will research it themselves. Born kept a filing cabinet full of research ideas, and would farm them out to his PhD students, taking their talents and abilities into consideration. Oppenheimer replicated this. Many scientists loathe teaching, but Oppenheimer enjoyed it. In fact one of his conditions for coming to the Institute for Advanced Studies was that he could continue to teach. They rounded up some students from Princeton University for the purpose. Of course, things changed after the war; every college set up a physics program and people who had been at Los Alamos were in great demand.

All in all, the characterisations of Oppenheimer and Groves were really good and the performances were first rate. For characters like Kitty Oppenheimer, the viewer has to assemble the puzzle pieces scattered through the film. This is about social class, which is always a touchy subject in America. Kitty impressed Oppenheimer with her horse riding, but equitation was a fairly standard "accomplishment" for a lady of her social class. Both Kitty and Jean were university-educated, and were fluent in German and French respectively. They were communists, but they weren't bimbos. Many people I spoke to though were expecting a film about the Manhattan Project rather than one about Oppenheimer. You can get more out of it by reading through the Wikipedia articles. There is a lot in there for the inquisitive mind to find.