Talk:Nikola Tesla

GA concerns

I am concerned that this article no longer meets the good article criteria. Some of my concerns are below:

• There is uncited text throughout the article, including the entire "Legacy and honors" section
• At over 10,000 words, it is recommended at WP:TOOBIG that parts of the article be spun out and the text reduced.
• Some sections that can be removed are "Appearance", "Sleep habits", and "Working and dining habits": these sections are usually considered too much detail. The "Patents" section is also probably not necessary and can be incorporated into the "Legacy" section or removed.

Is anyone willing to address these concerns, or should this go to WP:GAR? Z1720 (talk) 19:17, 23 August 2024 (UTC)

Hello. I agree that those sections should be removed, especially the three sections. They seem interesting but give no actual insight and have no encyclopedic value. They appear to be far too subjective. I would not mind if there is a GAR since there have been concerns about the article for a while now. StephenMacky1 (talk) 11:37, 24 August 2024 (UTC)

It's worth noting that the "Appearance", "Sleep habits", and "Working and dining habits" sections are frequently sourced to a 1944 and 1894 source—these sections could be cut just from sourcing that poor. Aza24 (talk) 00:18, 25 August 2024 (UTC)

Based on the above, I am removing the three sections listed. Z1720 (talk) 18:13, 27 August 2024 (UTC)

lead sentence style details

I noticed that one of the earlier discussions I contributed to (here) was archived, and it was also in a thread littered with random arguments from an editor since blocked, so I wanted to restart this clean. I definitely don't want to discuss this from the perspective of whatever biased axe-grinding.

The lead sentence right now has parentheses with a partial English pronunciation, Serbian spelling, Serbian pronunciation, and also the dates of birth and death with Old Style date for birth too. This is a bit intense, and it doesn't necessarily match the guidelines from MOS:LEADREL and similar. I figure most readers these days skip over all this, but we might want to consider thinking about it a bit for those readers who don't.

Shouldn't we include the pronunciation of the given name as well? It doesn't seem hard to guess, and these days there's even more people like that popular in parts of the English-speaking world, but it might not be entirely obvious to the average English reader. For example, while a lot of people these days have heard of Nikola Jokić, that still is a subset of the total audience, and in turn in that case I also hear a lot of people in the press pronounce that oddly. It seems to be most commonly pronounced NI-co-luh, and the most common weird one is ni-CO-la. I hesitate to just call the latter flat out wrong as a foreigner, but it makes it sound like the feminine name Nicola and it deviates a lot from the original Serbian pronunciation, so it's confusing at the very least.

At the same time, I don't know IPA very well to be able to write this down. Can someone contribute that? Maybe sourced to a Tesla biography audio book of some sort?

The inclusion of Serbian Cyrillic spelling and pronunciation is inherently relevant because it's the native one to the topic. The pronunciation is particularly helpful to supplement the partial English one; if the former matter is attended to, this becomes less important. MOS:LEADLANG would allow us to move this part to an annotation.

The Serbian spelling can be useful for readers as there's a lot of coverage in reliable sources in Serbian and in turn in Cyrillic (there's also Serbian Latin which matches English Latin to the letter). The relevance of the latter to the average English reader is somewhat hard to judge - because we have a decent coverage of Tesla in English reliable sources, it's less likely the readers will encounter foreign sources, but we still typically keep this inline. Previously I was thinking of comparing with the examples of other people with Serbian Cyrillic name spellings, so I found Tito which has 1/3rd of the readership, and the aforementioned Jokić has spiky but increasingly 1:1 comparable readership. Another spiky example is Novak Djokovic where there's the same, plus Latin with diacritics (because that one deviates substantially), but also a hatnote and length cleanup tags, so it's unclear whether that's a great example.

Outside of biographies, examples with similar readership include Serbia where there's two long lists and everything is moved to annotations, and Yugoslavia where there's a big list of items inline and then an annotation with much more items. It's a mixed bag, and none of these articles seem to be GA class, so who knows if this topic was ever fully reviewed. I noticed the Serbia article was nominated as GA, and I also checked the Croatia article which has similar traffic, and that one is a delisted GA, which uses a lot of these terms inline in parentheses, and has an annotation at the end of the second set.

(Page view statistics for all of the above, using the logarithmic scale is necessary to smooth out the spikes)

The Old Style date of birth seems puzzling, and I can't tell how this is relevant. Do biographers discuss this matter? I can't seem to even find it mentioned in the two citations that support the matching sentence in the early years section, Cheney and O'Neill. I tried using Google Books search on the Carlson book, and didn't find it either. Because June 28 is Vidovdan, this sounds like some sort of a weird talking point. I'd definitely move the mention of the Old Style date to an annotation, and in turn request a citation for that. For example:

Nikola Tesla ([...] 10 July 1856 – 7 January 1943) was a [...].

Notes

--Joy (talk) 09:41, 4 September 2024 (UTC)

The Old Style date can be removed if it lacks a reliable source. I encountered it in a circular source which is not sufficient. StephenMacky1 (talk) 13:39, 4 September 2024 (UTC)

Pointless reversal

This isn't a valid argument, @Theonewithreason. Linking those two terms definitely violates MOS:GEOLINK (as I mentioned in this edit summary). Thedarkknightli (talk) 05:14, 21 September 2024 (UTC)

I would leave one specific link, such as Belgrade, Serbia, because that's the first time this term is introduced in the article and the average English reader would benefit from it - even if it's a national capital we can't really assume it to be immediately well-known as it's still typically in a foreign country and not every encyclopedia reader is a geography enthusiast. --Joy (talk) 07:01, 21 September 2024 (UTC)

From WP:GEOLINK, "For a geographical location expressed as a sequence of two or more territorial units, link only the first unit."

It gives bad examples (modified to match our context) like "Belgrade, Serbia" (ie 2 links)

and good examples like "Belgrade, Serbia" and "Belgrade, Serbia" (ie single link covering one or both parts).

Not sure why you think having no link is covered by WP:GEOLINK.  Stepho  talk  09:41, 21 September 2024 (UTC)

I think he wants only the museum link to be left in, because by the same logic it's the most specific one.

meta:Research:Wikipedia clickstream for this article in August says we had 3.4k clicks from here to the museum article and 150 clicks from here to the Belgrade article. It isn't a huge amount but it does help demonstrate the usefulness of the link for at least some viewers. --Joy (talk) 09:43, 21 September 2024 (UTC)

Hmm, interesting point of view. I would not consider Nikola Tesla Museum as a geographical location. He could call in MOS:SEAOFBLUE but either way I'd say that the usefulness outweighs the awkwardness of linking to both "Nikola Tesla Museum" and "Belgrade, Serbia".  Stepho  talk  09:59, 21 September 2024 (UTC)