Talk:Archimedes

Remove metal bar demonstration (not relevant and explanation is wrong)

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 – Revision 1175633671

Measurement of volume by displacement, (a) before and (b) after an object has been submerged. The amount by which the liquid rises in the cylinder (∆V) is equal to the volume of the object.

The section Archimedes' principle (anectode about volume of gold crown and bath; permalink) includes a demonstration. I am proposing to remove this demonstration because it is not related to the corresponding text, and because the explanation in the caption is incorrect:

• The demonstration is related to Archimedes' principle (separate article), but it's not related to the anecdote in question (which is only about using displacement to measure volume). The idea that "the submerged crown would displace an amount of water equal to its own volume" is so simple that I don't think it requires any demonstration, and the current demonstration only creates confusion because it is counterintuitive and not related to the text.

• The caption says "A metal bar, placed into a container of water on a scale, displaces as much water as its own volume, increasing the mass of the container's contents and weighing down the scale." This is is incorrect. To see why, suppose the metal bar was replaced by an object of the same shape but with near-zero density. The container would still lower, even though no mass is "added" (whatever that means). The correct explanation is buoyancy: the water exerts an upward force on the object proportional to the displaced volume, and by Newton's Third Law the object exerts an equal and opposite force on the water, pushing the container down. The description of the file explains this correctly.

-- Hddqsb (talk) 16:54, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

The story told by Vitruvius says only that Archimedes noticed that the water level of the bath rose as he got in, which is displacement of a fluid, and could be used to measure the volume of the crown. The video isn't what Vitruvius said so it is not a direct illustration. I also think that the video could be removed without a great loss. The illustration of the screw in the water is what Vitruvius actually says.--♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 18:31, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

That illustration is perfect, thanks for finding it! (I did look earlier but couldn't find anything.) I'll go ahead and replace the video with this illustration in a couple of days if there are no objections. -- Hddqsb (talk) 08:03, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

I've gone ahead and swapped the video for the new image. Displacement-measurement.svg was uploaded to Wikimedia Commons in April 2022 so it is a relatively new image there. It does fit in with the text of the Vitruvius anecdote a lot better than the video.--♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 09:51, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

Thanks! -- Hddqsb (talk) 15:54, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

Arcamidus was born in siracuse Sicily was not greek

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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arcamidus was born in siracuse Sicily was Sicilian 51.155.64.194 (talk) 09:05, 15 May 2024 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

FA Criteria

This article is deeply below FA standards, and unless immense and extensive improvements are made, it should go to WP:FAR. This may all sound harsh, but that's because the issues are so woven into the article's structure that most, if not all, sections would need to be completely rewritten to meet FA standards. I understand that various editors have attempted to maintain this page over the yeas, but its existing structure from the 2007 nomination has deeply limited such efforts.

There is poor sourcing all throughout; aside from non-existent citation formatting and sporadic page numbers, random web sources of highly variable notability are consistently prioritized over academic scholarship. In fact, I can't see that a single contemporary book-length survey of Archimedes is even touched, let a lone used extensively—why are they all in the further reading!

There are way too many references in the lead (see WP:LEADCITE), which seems to imply that the lead and the body are not matched at all. The lead includes no biographical information, and its structure is very difficult to follow.

The Biography section pulls directly and extensively from ancient sources, without any filtering through modern commentary. Citations are sporadic and inconsistent. The discoveries and mathematics sections are extremely choppy and brief. Every single work of his does not need its own subsection just to include two (usually uncited) sentences. The legacy section is merely a list of length quotes and random trivia; no information on his actual influence into later mathematics is explained.

There is much more to say, but in conclusion I'm afraid the issues are rather extreme. Aza24 (talk) 20:20, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

We don't know much about the life of Archimedes and everything we do know was written long after his death; the article makes this clear. I'm not sure how "filtering through modern commentary" would help, as he has been dead for over two thousand years. This is a weird argument to make.--♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 08:03, 28 June 2024 (UTC)

Hi there, this is a rather revealing point to harp on, and I highly recommend you take a look at some recent FAs (Leucippus, for instance) and read WP:Primary. Every featured article needs to be "a thorough and representative survey of the relevant literature; claims are verifiable against high-quality reliable sources and are supported by inline citations where appropriate". Primary sources are simply not allowed in place of suitable secondary ones. You can disagree with this all you like, but you will find that no reviewers will agree. The aforementioned Leucippus, for example, has a biography section only citing academic articles and books from the last 20 years (albeit a single one from 1979).

Yes, "he has been dead for over two thousand years"—exactly! So scholars have had two thousand years to analyze, update and revise his biography! Would you really claim that there are no scholars which have altered, changed, updated, reinterpreted his biography from 2000 year old accounts?

I understand it is easy to see my comments as "[weird] argument[s]", but this is a misunderstanding. I am citing real and rather egregious issues, after having review hundreds of articles for FAC & FAR, in content and source reviews. This article falls extremely flat, and defending it will take you no where, unfortunately. Aza24 (talk) 18:07, 28 June 2024 (UTC)

Sorry, this is still a weird argument. We know very little about the life of Archimedes other than what was said by Roman historians many years after his death. I'm not sure what these "modern sources" are supposed to be, perhaps you could find them if it is such a problem. I don't have access to specialist academic libraries or paywalled academic resources, so it is hard for me to know exactly what you want here. We know that many of the things said by the Roman historians are likely to be apocryphal, which is why they are treated with caution.--♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 18:28, 28 June 2024 (UTC)

"which is why they are treated with caution" — they shouldn't be treated at all... that's WP:Original Research, please read WP:Primary, we do not interpret primary sources on Wikipedia. This is a tertiary encyclopedia that summarizes secondary sources. We don't cite from Roman sources directly, period, and we definitely do not in featured articles.

Where are the modern sources? How about the huge Further reading section that includes multiple major recent surveys? Why is not a single one of them included? How can this be "a thorough and representative survey of the relevant literature; claims are verifiable against high-quality reliable sources and are supported by inline citations where appropriate"? Aza24 (talk) 18:44, 28 June 2024 (UTC)

A lot of the sourcing in Leucippus seems to be from specialist academic sources. I don't have easy access to this type of material and people who want to read the sources for themselves would also have this problem. However, I accept your point on this.--♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 18:57, 28 June 2024 (UTC)

I appreciate that. Certainly that material is more difficult to access, but nowadays there are more resources for that. GoogleBooks includes extensive previews, and Archive.org is a goldmine for academic sources. You'll see that the further reading section already includes quite a few links to archive.org copies, which are freely available to borrow (sometimes a free registration is needed). Aza24 (talk) 19:17, 28 June 2024 (UTC)

@Aza24, @Ianmacm. Sounds like a heated discussion is occurring. I pinged both WP:WPM and WP:PHY for more opinions. Dedhert.Jr (talk) 02:30, 29 June 2024 (UTC)

It would help if someone dug up recent scholarly work that evaluated the traditional tales and checked them for consistency, plausibility, etc. Something like what the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy does for Pythagoras. I don't see a fundamental problem with our reporting "Cicero said..." as long as we have further, modern sources to contextualize that. Nothing in the WP:NOR policy forbids judicious use of primary sources. (Indeed, I'd actually fault the Leucippus article for not giving direct pointers to editions/translations of the ancient sources; that's mildly inconvenient! When we say, for example, Plato explored cosmological ideas similar to those of Leucippus in the dialogue Timaeus, a reader shouldn't have to get a paywalled journal article to find which sections of the Timaeus are relevant.) XOR'easter (talk) 04:54, 29 June 2024 (UTC)

Leucippus doesn't even try to link to the source texts where its claims originate. This does a disservice to readers, because it makes them jump through hoops to figure out what was actually said. I imagine in most if not all cases there are online scans of these texts and probably also translations. Frankly I am not impressed. All of the content is along the lines of "So-and-so says Leucippus says XYZ" where so-and-so was writing a few centuries after Leucippus, but then the link shows that Wikipedia's text is a paraphrase of some paywalled academic paper where the author paraphrased an earlier Greek/Roman source who was paraphrasing Leucippus, so what Wikipedia readers are getting is 4 steps removed from the original. This helps tick off FA boxes, and might help scholars looking for a list of recent works to cite, but readers would probably be better off with a direct quotation of the oldest extant work or a translation. –jacobolus (t) 04:54, 29 June 2024 (UTC)

The sourcing in Leucippus has a high gloss sheen, but if someone wanted to actually read and verify the cites it would be very difficult. I have tried to stick to easy to follow cites, not what someone said about it on page 336 of an obscure or paywalled academic work.--♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 06:43, 29 June 2024 (UTC)

I agree overall with jacobolus and Ian, and appreciate the "high gloss sheen" comment in particular. I think there is no problem citing ancient sources appropriately in the biographical sections. While I haven't looked that closely, everything I looked at sourced to an ancient source also had a secondary source nearby. E.g., Something about ancient source [ footnote to ancient source ]. Another sentence or two.[ footnote to secondary source ]

There are some sourcing issues to be sure (which are very easy to fix!) The mathematics section needs better sources, as there are some paragraphs lacking footnotes. But this material is so standard as to be found in tertiary sources like Kline, or Boyer and Merzbach. Perhaps the sections in Archimedes works each should be individually referenced with a footnote to the Heath source (which provides commentary, and therefore is a secondary source on the works of Archimedes), as this remains the standard modern reference for Archimedes works. Only the palimpsest, which post-dates Heath, needs to be referenced separately (which it is). In any case, concerns over the lack of sourcing of this section are overwrought, considering the extremely high quality references Knorr and Sato that are very explicitly intended to support the section as a whole.

The "Legacy" section is also very weak. It's hard to overstate the continuing legacy of Archimedes in mathematics: one could go so far as to say that he invented mathematics as we know it. The section doesn't even try. Tito Omburo (talk) 11:46, 29 June 2024 (UTC)

Primary sources are not the main problem here. It is the lack of academic secondary sources (which extends to the entire article). The FA criteria are explicit in asking for "a thorough and representative survey of the relevant literature". Outside of the lead, there is a single book on Archimedes sourced. The result is highly noticeable in the article, as you point out, the mathematics sections and legacy are surprisingly sparse, and the reliance on solely primary sources (or not sources) for large swathes of text is not ideal.

These academic sources are not niche or hard-to-acess. Archimedes#Further reading lists multiple works by clearly established historians, and includes direct links to archive.org which is freely available. If one wants to actually engage in a "thorough and representative survey of the relevant literature", this will include academic sources which are sometimes difficult to access. That's why Wikipedia exists, to make such information more accessible.

If I only used web/non-academic sources when I wrote the now-FA Cai Lun, it would have been a paragraph long, maybe two. You'll see that I linked almost every page number to google books: readers can click on any one and immediately find the information. How is this difficult to access? By the way, I regularly used plenty of primary sources in Cai Lun and found no issues at FAC; this is because I paired each one with a secondary source, which is certainly more advisable (and productive) than sole reliance on primary sources.

In any case, there seems to be some confusion. I'm not saying this is a bad article, or even that the sourcing is bad, I'm saying that it does not match the Featured article criteria. Alas, these are two very different things, and you are all welcome to (rather bizarrely) dig on Leucippus all you want, but it reflects the reality of what FAs are now a-days. Aza24 (talk) 18:18, 29 June 2024 (UTC)

Where is there reliance exclusively on primary sources? Tag some specific problems, please. A side note is that many of the sources listed in further reading are very pulpy. E.g., Netz and Noel is not a scholarly or academic source, and some of the others are, rather more obviously, probably not good references. Boyer is a tertiary source, generally good (I suggested above for the mathematics section), but there are better secondary sources. Clagett is a very good source, but also specifically focuses on mathematics in the middle ages, and is incredibly detailed: we already cite his survey article on this topic. I think the Dijksterhuis is a good source, particularly for the life of Archimedes, that could be used for some of the history section, and also for the mathematics section. Tito Omburo (talk) 18:45, 29 June 2024 (UTC)

Almost the entire biography is exclusively relying on primary sources; please note that these "Rorres, Chris" citations are just a web page with a public domain translation of Greek authors.

• The biography's first paragraph does not have primary sources; it includes a source from 1897 (?), a 1975 journal article and a dictionary entry, the latter two being some of the only scholarship in the whole section. The last sentence is uncited.
• The biography's second paragraph is only primary sources
• The biography's third paragraph is only primary sources (save for the line "He also mentions that Marcellus brought to Rome two planetariums Archimedes built")
• The biography's fourth paragraph is only primary sources, save for the its last line (I checked the Jaeger source and it only covers the last line).
• The biography's final paragraph is only primary sources

Now this is just a single section, I suspect there are plenty of others. Other examples (from a glance) include the first paragraph of the Heat ray section and the second paragraph of the Astronomical instruments. – Aza24 (talk) 18:59, 29 June 2024 (UTC)