Talk:M. C. Escher

Semi-protected edit request on 27 March 2023

Under section titled “Mathematically Inspired Work”, please change the word “disconnect” in “Escher's work is inescapably mathematical. This has caused a disconnect…” to the word “disconnection”. “Disconnect” is a verb; “disconnection” is the noun that should be used here. 2600:6C4E:1400:BBE:C141:7192:2FB0:E635 (talk) 04:26, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

Thanks. However in the USA, Merriam-Webster for instance lists it also as a noun, with definition and example, and it gives a specific sense which is correctly used here. In the UK, Cambridge Dictionary does the same. Chiswick Chap (talk) 07:44, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

Counterchange symmetry or antisymmetry

Unless others disagree, I propose to add a link from "counterchange symmetry or antisymmetry" in the Legacy: in mathematics and science section, to the newly created article Dichromatic symmetry. GreatStellatedDodecahedron (talk) 13:06, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

Seems good! Chiswick Chap (talk) 13:58, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

Non-free images, and the reverting of good-faith edits

This revert has no basis on the grounds of Wikipedia's guidelines, far less on copyright law and even less on basic editorial standards. The argument that an article on an artist may only obliquely point to said artist's own works is nonsense if a single hyperlink to the same website is deemed acceptable. Pinging Chiswick Chap (talk · contribs) as more of a courtesy that I was afforded: I don't appreciate large swatches of productive edits being summarily reverted without so much as a ping, and will be restoring the edited content sans a very good argument to the contrary. If a couple of image tags need to be left out then so be it but reverting the entire thing was egrecious. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 00:08, 17 September 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for discussing, and I appreciate it feels uncomfortable to have edits reverted, part of the reason we have WP:BRD. It is always difficult to explain everything in an edit comment; reviewing mine, it did its best to give the principal reasons, but I'll explain in more detail here. I can say at once that I'm sure your changes were in good faith and well-intentioned.

The purpose of Wikipedia is to help readers as much as possible within the constraints of the law.

Escher's images are still in copyright, so the law here is that of copyright, and we are constrained to make "minimal" use of non-free images.

I agree with the implication of your comments that it would be nice to present a rich selection of Escher's images, were that possible. Unfortunately that's a challenge in the Wikipedia environment.

This article contains 5 non-free images, and many editors become increasingly active when articles contain rather more than that. As I said in my edit comment, non-free images run a greatly increased risk of deletion when there are more than a very few in an article. This, I can say from experience, is true even with carefully hand-crafted Non-Free Usage Rationales accompanying well-chosen images supported by multiple reliable sources in both text and image captions.

I therefore chose to make what you call the idiotic decision not to include many of his mast famous works in this article but instead just point at them with a footnote. That decision, it will be seen, allows the article to discuss and link to several key Escher works, while avoiding falling foul of the NFUR system. Your proposed changes removed the guidance to readers as to where they could find the images under discussion.

In addition, the proposed changes destroyed the grouping of related influences on Escher, and proposed not [to include] that of other artists who allegedly inspired it. The inclusion and grouping of those reliably-cited influences (hardly simply "allegedly", then, and certainly not an editorial opinion) allow readers to see the historical mathematical artworks that Escher studied, and to judge for themselves what effect they had on his work. I believe that most readers will find the comparison and the evidence persuasive, and the arrangement of these historic images encyclopedic.

I am slightly mystified about the unneeded whitespace remark. If the article is viewed at something resembling normal page width (or on any mobile device), there is no whitespace at all. If the article is viewed in broad landscape format then there is exactly one place where any whitespace appears, namely beside the "Forerunners of Escher identified by J. L. Locher" group in the "Mathematically inspired work" section. This is much less than the areas of whitespace that readers of art books will be familiar with, and it has the desirable effect of keeping the images within the confines of that section of text.

Another change was to make the caption of File:Escher Alhambra Tessellation Sketch.jpg an unmanageable 73 words long, forming a column of text longer than the height of the image. That is at least unusual as an image caption, and I believe most readers and editors would find the use of a footnote for the more specialist details there a more workable solution rather than an unneeded footnote as asserted.

Overall, the proposed changes destroyed over 1200 bytes of formally reviewed material from the article. I do not suppose that the article is perfect as it stands, but it is workable and well-structured, and the rapid changes, as I've explained, did several sorts of damage all at once. If the revert removed some small improvement I'm sorry for it, but WP:BRD or not, we should not be making such drastic changes to mature articles without consensus. All the best, Chiswick Chap (talk) 07:50, 17 September 2024 (UTC)

Apologies for some of the tone.

I must admit it's been a while since I specifically parsed the wording of WP:NFC and am fairly astonished to discover that it suggests that an artist's most famous work shouldn't even be included in low resolution on their biographies if it's still in copyright. This is a truly maximalist position which IMO damages the encyclopedia. But by the strict wording, any not-yet-free artwork that has its own page should never be linked to elsewhere. I dare say this is incredibly unevenly enforced.

The knock-on effect of that leads to a very weird situation where by the whims of copyright law we are able to include images that inspired the subject at will, but none of his own. I suggest that the average reader is going to be deeply confused upon reading an article about a famour artist and encountering large amounts of images of artwork, almost none of which is by the subject. This effect really needs to be considered in a high-quality article.

With regards to the rest of it:

• Whitespace seems to be a case where the parser has improved. It used to be the case that leaving blank lines above e.g. {{further}} would insert line breaks into the page source. This looks to have been resolved. I still personally favour at least keeping this consistent within articles but it no longer results in unsightly artifacts.
• The article's present use of footnotes is idiosyncratic and self-referential. If the caption on the Alhambra sketch is too long then it should be discussed in more detail in the article body, rather than forcing the reader to scan all over the place. Likewise, footnotes are being used as pseudo-references (for his birth name) and then as rather pointless self-references for the redirected images (such as by linking to Drawing Hands in the article prose and then immediately adding a footnote linking to it again, when it is of course implied that an article on a particular piece of art will have that art on it).

I'll tackle these in smaller and hopefully less contentious chunks. Thanks for the reply; I'm sure we can come to an accommodation here. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 13:10, 17 September 2024 (UTC)

There is very little that can be done without reducing value to the reader on one side, or attracting the copyright police on the other For instance, we can't add Escher images to any sort of gallery, table, or list: the most that can be attempted is a dual image (one of his with NFUR, and an influence, say), but even that would be open to challenge, and the NFUR would need very careful crafting with a specially convincing source. I think the best bet would be an image demonstrated to be obviously necessary but that isn't on Wiki at all yet. The effort to achieve that is large, the difference to the article small, and all of it could be nugatory. The article is indeed of high quality at the moment, and introducing Wiki-controversial elements could easily be counterproductive, leaving the article worse than before. Chiswick Chap (talk) 01:53, 18 September 2024 (UTC)