Talk:Bogdanov affair

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Changelog

Changes made in this edit:

• Removed a line from the "Origins" section that was needless biographical detail
• Expanded the "Lawsuits" subsection
• Expanded the "Reflections on peer review" section
• Added a subsection on L'équation Bogdanov (2008)
• Verified a heap of old URLs in the references that hadn't been checked since 2006 or 2007
• Converted some bare URLs to templates
• More references about the CNRS report that became public in 2010
• Added some inter-language wikilinks
• Simplified a few torturous sentences
• Moved a few details into footnotes

I've kept the section links in the lead. There does not appear to be a project-wide rule or even guideline about this, and what little discussion there was about this article itself fizzled without arriving at anything like a consensus (it got a lot quieter after BKFIP was banned). Any way one slices it, I can't see either course of action making the page more than a little better or a little worse. Point: the links are redundant, because the table of contents is right there. Counterpoint: not everyone can see the TOC — whether or not it appears in mobile browsing is apparently pretty darn stochastic — and not everything enumerated in the TOC is mentioned in the lead, so further information is extra added value, not redundant. Counter-counterpoint: if we tried to address every oddity of mobile browsing, we might drown lead sections everywhere in overlinking. (Counter)³point: this article is long and almost intrinsically unwieldy, on a topic where the content can be organized in multiple ways, none much better than the others, so it's too unusual to set a precedent. Discuss, I guess, if desired?

Other concerns:

In places, the article perhaps indulges in inside baseball about old forum drama. However, it might not be more so than Woit's book, which mentions another pseudonym in addition to "Professor Yang".

Around this same time a message defending the Bogdanovs appeared from a 'Roland Schwartz', whose computer was using exactly the same Paris internet service provider as Professor Yang. Later that month the brothers started sending e-mails using an internet domain name purporting to be an International Institute of Mathematical Physics in Riga. This address hosts a website for a Mathematical Centre of Riemannian Cosmology, devoted to the work of the Bogdanovs. In a posting on a French internet newsgroup, the brothers helpfully explain that the University of Riga set up the site for them, and that is why it has a Lithuanian domain name. One problem with this is that Riga is in Latvia, not Lithuania.

This may be an unwarranted cheap shot on Woit's part: we can dig that newsgroup posting out of our own references, and it turns out that the brothers just repeated the mistake of the person they were replying to, who also said "domaine lituanien". Woit's chapter on l'affaire Bogdanov says very little about the content of the papers; our article, with its recounting of the "any plane contains a point" business and so forth, is much more detailed. But Woit's book is mostly about other things anyway.

A while back, I removed a comparison of the Bogdanov papers' citation count to that of the ekpyrotic universe proposal, on WP:SYNTH grounds. To my great surprise, I found a book which devoted a few pages to the Bogdanov affair and which tallied up their citations (up through 2007).

XOR'easter (talk) 12:36, 23 July 2019 (UTC)

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