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Sources

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I attempted to contact several people at the Kraków Museum of Ethnography for further details but have received no reply. Of special interest is a confirmation and photo of the mentioned calendar printed soon after Jan's first flights. Such confirmation and validation of authenticity would increase the accuracy of this article. BatteryIncluded 01:38, 15 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

  • Update: I have continued to contact museum personnel by e-mail without success. No reply, documents/copies/transcripts are forthcoming. I consider a glider model and claims of early controlled flight based on secret documents are unacceptable. The claim of such controlable glider needs to be substanciated; A simple reference to the Karkow Museum is not enough proof.BatteryIncluded 14:30, 21 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Sourcing problems

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I have looked at some of the online links and it appears that the article's sourcing is very weak. The references should be overhauled. Some external links might be elevated to reference status. There are two classic texts which should be mentioned, one from 1961 and one from 1970. See below...

  • http://www.krakow-info.com/museums.htm
    • This source is useless. It is supposed to establish that Professor Seweryn was the director of the Museum of Ethnography, but it fails that mission. Establishing the credentials of Seweryn is the least of our worries. Wnęk is the focus here.
  • http://www.dziecidodzieci.republika.pl/wnekfr.htm
    • This source is published in Polish and French. I looked at a machine-translated version of it, and I used my laughably inadequate schoolboy French to examine the French translation. The author, Piotr Kulawik, apparently suffers from logorrhea—he seems to think the more he writes, the more importance is lent to the subject. At the bottom of the page Kulawik lists his sources of information, and one of them, the first one, is Polish Wikipedia. His second source is English Wikipedia. Thus, his article suffers from the problem of having an unreliable source as its basis. It cannot be used per WP:CIRCULAR.
Possible solutions
  • http://web.archive.org/web/20090215180413/http://www.avia.tarman.pl/index.php?action=histwnek
    • This is an archived webpage, a copy taken from a 1995 magazine print source written by Dr. Stanisław Konstanty Wałęga (1909–2006). The Wayback Machine shows that the article was published online by at least July 2004 which takes away any question of circular sourcing since this Wikipedia biography was first mounted two months later. Another, currently viewable webpage carries the same text: "Chłopski Ikar znad Dunajca". The title translates roughly to "Peasant Icarus Above the Canyon". The author compares the Jan Wnęk story with other early aviation attempts including people jumping from high places with umbrellas, parachutes and wings, and makers of crude gliders. The author moves on to say that Wnęk was successful with a first flight of 2 kilometres (1.2 mi), that he is considered "the father of the Polish Air Force".
  • User:Carroll F. Gray wrote a short piece for his Flying Machines website in 2003: http://www.flyingmachines.org/wnek.html
    • This text is a bit more detached than Dr. Wałęga about the possibility of any successful flight but Gray accedes that "[t]here does seem to be reason to believe that he may have made at least a few true glides in his aerial apparatus."
  • http://www.dziecidodzieci.republika.pl/walega.htm
    • Here is another text by Dr. Wałęga which identifies Professor Tadeusz Seweryn of the Ethnographic Museum in Krakow as the modern-day re-discoverer of Jan Wnęk. Wałęga writes that Seweryn interviewed local people beginning in 1932, and that in 1933 a Pastor Anthony Slezak helped him locate old newspaper stories about Wnęk that were published in 1868 and 1869 in Warsaw and Krakow. Wałęga writes that Polish encyclopedias of aviation history do not include Jan Wnęk because they either did not know of him or they thought his was a fanciful story. The book Technicy i wynalazcy ludowi (Technicians and inventors of the people) was published by Seweryn in 1961 in Warsaw, describing Jan Wnęk's supposed flights with a distance of between 1 and 3 miles (1.6 and 4.8 km).
  • Alexander Minorski (1970) "Icarus Above the Canyon".
    • This work is mentioned by Dr. Wałęga in his text linked just above. Wałęga says that Minorski makes a few mistakes, for example the name of Jan Wnęk's wife.
  • Tadeusz Seweryn (1961) "CHŁOPSCY POTOMKOWIE IKARA" ("Peasant descendants of Icarus"), a chapter within the book Technicy i wynalazcy ludowi (Technicians and inventors of the people).
    • This text discusses a number of early experimenters. It says that Jan Wnęk's last flight was about 0.5 miles (0.8 km) before he crashed and was mortally wounded. The book was printed in English in 1978 by the Smithsonian, titled Folk Technicians and Inventors. The English version says "From a historical point of view, the peasant from Cracow region, Jan Wnek, occupies an important position. One must keep in mind that the possibility of stealing the secret of flying from birds was believed by people since the times of Aristotle and Pliny..."
  • http://www.zabno.pl/?strona=00149
    • This webpage says that the Muzeum im. Jana Wnęka w Odporyszowie, the Jan Wnęk Museum, was founded in 1978. The article could add this bit.
  • The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern World writes that "The Pole Jan Wnek developed a controllable glider in 1866, which was improved upon by others." This one sentence is the totality of Wnek's presence in that encyclopedia.
    • This assertion is from a very strong source but it is countered by other sources saying that none of Wnek's experiments were continued or developed further.

One of the biggest problems I see is that the few sources paying any attention to this guy are all positive. The fact that he is not in very many encyclopedias is critical—he is hardly a blip on history's radar. What is needed is to emphasize that Wnęk's story is only based on hearsay. The main sources all confirm this very negative fact, but they give a positive presentation. Binksternet (talk) 18:06, 22 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Congratulations! I'll follow up & blow away as much guff as I can. Incidentally I would (this is depressing) be very wary of OUP reference sources. I have library card access to these: my first experience of them (other than the DNB & OED) was last week. I wanted to see what they had to say about the airship R101: their 96 word entry devoted 5 of them to the erroneous statement that it was designed by Barnes Wallace. I've made a start on bracketing all the flight stuff as hearsay, but you can only say alleged so many times.TheLongTone (talk) 18:24, 22 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
There's also WP:ATTRIBUTEPOV, allowing us to write "Seweryn says", "Minorski says" or "Wałęga says". Binksternet (talk) 18:40, 22 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
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