Wikipedia:Featured article review/Robert Oppenheimer/archive1

The following is an archived discussion of a featured article review. Please do not modify it. Further comments should be made on the article's talk page or at Wikipedia talk:Featured article review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was removed 07:55, 5 April 2007.

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Robert Oppenheimer

Review commentary

Original author aware. Messages left at Biography and Physics. LuciferMorgan 03:08, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

I'm proposing a review of Robert Oppenheimer's featured status because I don't think it meets the Featured article criteria, specifically 1c (sourcing) and 1d (neutrality). With regards to sourcing, there are entire sections (several paragraphs long) that are without citations. I'm not saying there needs to be a ref tag every other sentence, but sections like #Security hearings, regarding the more controversial events of his life, certainly need to cite their sources. That section is also clearly not neutral in its defense of Oppenheimer against the government, and will need a touchup to make sure the sides are represented equally. Finally, the #Legacy section is mostly unreferenced, and contains hints of original research. Other thoughts? Picaroon 21:35, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

I can add references without difficulty, but in any case, there is no neutrality issue re: the government side of things, it is a very solid account of how it is depicted in the relevant scholarly literature. I suspect things look un-neutral to you, or like original research, because you are not familiar with the relevant literature, but in any case I can add more citations if that is desired. I see a total of one sentence with a "citation needed" tag though so it might help if you determined which of the things you think need to be referenced. Large sections don't have footnotes, correct, but that is because they are very general and well-known and the information can frankly be found in any of the large-scale biographies of Oppenheimer referenced at the bottom. --Fastfission 04:36, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

I went through, btw, and added a few extra references for most everything that stuck out to me as needing one. Feel free to add fact tags to anything you want further references for, it is quite easy to for someone who knows the literature to do and there are a number of us who edit the article. --Fastfission 16:39, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Yes, I am unfamiliar with the literature; if I was familiar with the books cited, I'd have been able to fix up the parts I disagree with myself and remove the things which are more the views of the various Wikipedians than concrete, attributable facts found in books. However, as I'm unfamiliar with the literature (and don't want to make major changes in a way that might wreck the article in the view of somone knowledgeable like yourself), I can only say that things like the very first sentence of #Legacy stand out as a synthesis of opinions towards him. While these attitudes themselves are certainly sourcable, is the sentence "Robert Oppenheimer's life is usually seen to highlight a number of cultural and historical trends in the transformation of science from the 1920s through the 1950s" attributable to a source? Other things I wonder about sources for are "As a cultured, intellectual, theoretical physicist who became a disciplined military organizer, Oppenheimer represented the shift away from the idea that scientists had their "head in the clouds" and that knowledge on such previously esoteric subjects as the composition of the atomic nucleus had no "real-world" applications" and "When Oppenheimer was ejected from his position of political influence in 1954, he symbolized for many the folly of scientists thinking they could control how others would use their research. Oppenheimer has been seen as symbolizing the dilemmas involving the moral responsibility of the scientist in the nuclear world."

With regards to the neutrality of the #Security hearings section: as someone who knows little about Oppenheimer, I come across with the view that the elements in the government were cruel and revenge-driven. The opinion of scientists who supported Oppenheimer is presented, but I don't see anything about contemporary opinions from supporters of Hoover's stance. Granted, this may be because McCarthyism is out of fashion, but has there really been no one looking back on the hearings with the opinion the government did the right thing? Picaroon 21:10, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Yes, these ideas are attributable to sources. Historians and scholars can be quiet synthetic you know -- none of the language used in the article is at all uncommon to historical accounts; if you want perfunctory references then just let me know and I'll add them in. The literature is in fact full of such comments -- any of the introductions to the biographies of Oppenheimer contain the statements you ask about up there. Are there individual sources? No -- these are statements about Oppenheimer which are common to many of the books cited in the article, including but not limited to the volumes by Bird & Sherwin, Carson & Hollinger, Schweber, and McMillan.

I've never read anything relevant (i.e. not just crazy) that thinks the government did the right thing. As for it being revenge-driven, that's pretty much the case. The article gives all the weight to the government story that there is: that Oppenheimer was inconsistent, that he sometimes lied to security officials, that he had previous left-wing connections, that his stance on the H-bomb was not as hawkish as Strauss and Teller would have liked. In the end that's all the government side adds up to. As the article states in that section his security clearance would have expired in days anyway; it is well-established in the historical scholarship (see, i.e. the McMillan book) that the case against Oppenheimer was formulated by a number of either bitter (Strauss) or unstable (Borden) individuals who were just trying to tarnish his reputation because they disagreed with his personal and political opinions. Oppenheimer was, of course, no saint, but the article points that out with candor you would not find in most popular writings (try reading anything else about Oppenheimer from a more "mainstream" source and you'll see how relatively sober our article is; it doesn't make him out to be a martyr and in fact offers rather critical discussion of the "martyr" designation).

I don't want to say just that you don't know what you're talking about, but I do want to urge that this is an article which has been gone over pretty carefully by a number of people, one of which (myself) is what I would call a certified academic expert on the topic. It is actually a far more balanced and perceptive article than you would likely find on the internet, steering quite clear of hagiography (which is what one normally finds in the case of Oppenheimer).

Anyway, if you want more references, or you want some of the specific statements to be converted into quotes from others, that's fine with me, just mark the passages you want and I'll substitute them. I don't think this needs a FAR though. --Fastfission 00:13, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

While I'm not a person who tends to inflate their knowledge of a subject - I make no secret that I'm no expert on Oppenheimer, or, in fact, even remotely knowledgeable about related subjects like the Manhattan Project, Hoover, and McCarthyism - I do think my observations have been things that would've snagged this had it been an FA nowadays, and were consistent with the guidelines laid out in Featured article criteria. Opinions that are widely held and facts that are widely acknowledged in the physics community still need be clearly sourced and attributabed to sources for lay-people, like me and the rest of the general audience who reads the article. The several passages mentioned above are things I'd appreciate it if you could dredge up citations for, as is the '"wounded animal"' sentence at the beginning of #Final years - does the tourist brochure cited really say that? (And no, I'm not going to quibble about whether the tourist brochure is a reliable source, even though I suspect it isn't!) If you'd like me to withdraw this request and list the specific things I'm wondering about on the article talk page instead, I'm open to doing so. Picaroon 00:47, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

OK, well I'm happy to provide references, as I said. Some are quick and easy, some require a bit of selection of something which is indicative of the general trends summarized, but it's not a hard thing to do. --Fastfission 23:50, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

• Comments Footnotes need a lot of cleanup of formatting. I started, but there's a lot to do. Book references would be easier to follow if they were listed last name of author first, alphabetically, and then only referred to in the Footnotes with Author (year), p. and a page number. Page numbers aren't given on most book refs in the Notes. Is "Non-scientific by Oppenheimer" supposed to be listed in References, or should that be a Works section? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:26, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

Obviously it would be nice if it were standardized though I think this is a minor quibble and not worth really going over as part of a FAR. --Fastfission 23:50, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

• • More: em-dashes should be used consistently (space around them or not). There is unattributed opinion and quotes—example: Many people thought that Oppenheimer's discoveries and research were not commensurate with his inherent abilities and talents. Weasly unattributed statements;—example: Some scientists and historians have speculated ... Book sources don't have page numbers. Full dates need to be wiki-linked. Tony or Deckiller might want to look at the prose. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:42, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

FARC commentary

Suggested FA criteria concerns are referencing (1c) and POV (1d). Marskell 08:36, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

• Is anyone still working on this? There are many cite tags, many more needed. Goodness that first paragraph in Scientific work is long. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 23:02, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

• Remove unless the prose is fixed. It's mostly well-written, so is worth the effort to attain professional standards. Here are random examples from the top of why a copy-edit throughout is required. I suppose this alone is not enough to require removal, but it should be added to other reasons, if they are not addressed.
  • There are many links, most of high value. That is why an attempt should be made to delink the trivial ones, such as "English", "New York City", "Europe", "chemistry" and "horseback riding". The page looks very messy and is unnecessarily hard to read spattered with that much blue. Why is one "1953" linked?
  • "Oppenheimer was known for being a quick study"?
  • "citing it later as one of the most influential books to shape his philosophy of life"—Bit excessive; try: "citing it later as one of the books that shaped his philosophy of life".
  • "was encouraged to go to Europe for future study"—not past study?
  • "eminent but aging J.J. Thomson"—I wonder why the ageing thing is relevant; I'm ageing too.
  • "Ph.D." then "Ph. D."—Why not get rid of those dots, anyway?
  • "at the young age of 22"—Remove "young".
  • A few stubby paragraphs that impose unnecessary chopiness on the text. Tony 23:43, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
• Remove per citation needed tags and prose glitches. These prose deficiencies may influence the POV problems as well. POV often boils down to excessive and flowery adjective use. — Deckiller 03:23, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
• Remove, 1a and 1c. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:41, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
• Remove per 1a and 1c. Jay32183 20:05, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
• Remove per above. LuciferMorgan 22:30, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
• Remove per 1c, unless citations are provided.--Yannismarou 12:55, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article review. No further edits should be made to this page.