Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Alhazen/1

Alhazen

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Result: Delist per comments below. The article contains unsourced or unattributed opinion and weak prose and hence does not meet several GA criteria, including 1, 2 and 4. Good luck to those improving it. Geometry guy 20:36, 14 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

There are two problems with this article.

It lacks stability, as there is an ongoing edit war about the insignificant question of Alhazen's nationality: is he a Persian or an Arab?
It has many excessive claims of his significance as a scholar, reflecting the problems raised at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Jagged 85.

This is an important article, and deserves to be returned to Good Article status, but at the present, it falls far short. SteveMcCluskey (talk) 00:08, 26 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The edit war about Alhazen's ethnicity has recently heated up; see this edit summary. --SteveMcCluskey (talk) 14:48, 28 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: I see the section legacy has the usual glorifying spin, but could you quickly point out some of the more serious issues contents-wise? Regards Gun Powder Ma (talk) 01:03, 27 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for looking at this. I haven't given this article the thorough attention it deserves, but one passage caught my attention: "He also discovered a result similar to Snell's law of sines, but did not quantify it and derive the law mathematically." One of the two sources he cited, an educational article on use of historical examples in the teaching of optics, cites a reprint of David Lindberg's "The Cause of Refraction in Medieval Optics" as saying Alhazen's theory was "suspiciously Cartesian." (p 28) Unfortunately, this tertiary source missed Lindberg's footnote (p. 29, n. 23) where he questioned the Cartesian interpretation of Alhazen.

The crucial miscitation, however, is where the article cites Sabra's Theories of Light in support of Alhazen's anticipation of Snell's law. No page is cited, but Sabra says this on p. 96 in a discussion of Descartes' Explanation of Refraction: "Ibn al-Haytham assumes [Sabra's italics] that the resistance acts particularly in the direction of the component parallel to the surface." He continues on p. 97 "Now let us suppose that Ibn al-Haytham moved one step further and assumed the increase in the parallel velocity to be in a constant ratio. His assumption would have [led to Snell's law].... He did not, however, take that step." In sum, both Sabra and Lindberg question the idea that Alhazen found "a result similar to Snell's law of sines" while the editor (Jagged 85) interpreted them as supporting that claim.

My point is not that I have found all the problems with this article; I am concerned that, given the problematic source of these edits, this article should not be listed as a Good Article until it is completely reviewed. --SteveMcCluskey (talk) 03:46, 27 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Concur: Agree to delist the article. 759 edits by the main contributor (Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Jagged 85), three time as much as the next 10 contributors taken together, are in my book sufficient indirect evidence that there must be serious misinterpretations interwoven into the text. I believe delisting the article would give future editors more latitude and incentive in improving/rewriting the article. Gun Powder Ma (talk) 10:34, 27 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Delist. It is a shame to see the extent of this problem in what might otherwise be such an interesting range of articles. hamiltonstone (talk) 23:26, 30 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]