User talk:JohnD'Alembert

Hi, I am new to Wikipedia but found some errors and would like some help fixing them. I am a UK academic specializing in the history of ancient Greek philosophy and science.

Several Wikipedia pages confused and conflated two different people. There was a Belgian politician named Charles A. L. Graux (1837 – 1910). There was a French classicist named Charles Graux (1852 -- 1882). The Frenchmen was an expert on stichometry but had no Wikipedia pages. The English, French, and Dutch Wikipedia pages mistakenly asserted that the politician was also an expert in stichometry, no doubt because of the shared name.

I have done the following: 1. I deleted the remarks about stichometry on the English, French, and Dutch Wikipedia changes about the politician. 2. I created an article about the French classicist (my account is new and my draft is waiting for review).

I need help with the following problems.

The article about the politician has an ambiguous title. It is called 'Charles Graux' but should be 'Charles A. L. Graux.' How can I change the title of the page? Do I have to wait until my article is approved and posted before I can create a disambugation page? (can’t disambiguate only one page!) But will my article post if it has the same title as the politican's page? (catch 22?) I have looked through a half dozen books but can find no confirmation of the classicist’s middle names or middle initials (some online catalogs call him 'Charles Henri Graux' but I do not see the 'Henri' in any 19th century source, including his biography. Thus I think the classicist will have to remain plain 'Charles Graux.' Is that right?

Hi, John,

I can probably help you out. You've got the Charles Graux article in your sandbox. (I think this is probably because you don't yet have the necessary credentials to create new articles?)

If so, I can move it into Wikipedia proper. I think in terms of naming, we can have:

Charles Graux - the article for the classicist

Charles Alexandre Louis Graux- the article for the politician (another page, Charles A. L. Graux, would point people here as well)

Charles Graux (disambiguation) - an index to point people to the right place if they've mixed up their Charles Graux's.

This assumes that the classicist is much more famous than the politician. If that's not the case, the articles would be:

Charles Graux - a disambiguation page to point people to the right place if they've mixed up their Charles Graux's.

Charles Graux (politician)

Charles Graux (classicist)

The jargon here for this at Wikipedia is "disambiguation", and an overview of our disambiguation guidelines is at Wikipedia:Disambiguation. It's probably quite foreboding as a newbie. I'm already familiar with it, I only mention it for your future reading pleasure.

I think the article on the politician probably needs better references, but that can come later. - Nunh-huh 17:49, 12 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

THANKS FOR THE QUICK HELP! That sounds great. The politician is probably better known in Belgium and the classicist to scholars: I'm not sure who is more famous, so your second approach sounds good. Yes, the article is in my sandbox and submitted for review but I saw a note saying something about it taking four days to vet a new account. Figuring all this out took me a full day. I'd like to see it up an running. Thanks. JohnD'Alembert (talk) 19:03, 12 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I'd be doing an end round around whatever review process you're involved in, but I've looked at the article and it's just fine for main-space. I shall make it so, then. -Nunh-huh 19:20, 12 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

OK, that should do it. The new article folk will likely still have a look at it and make suggestions. In any case, if you have any questions just drop a note at my talk page. I'm especially pleased when I'm able to help someone fix inaccuracies like this. - Nunh-huh 19:41, 12 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

P.S.: The pages are at:

Charles A. L. Graux. - Nunh-huh 19:43, 12 September 2014 (UTC)[reply

]

P.P.S. Monsieur Jean le Rond d'Alembert, you may wish to play with the footnotes at Charles Graux (classicist) a bit, as ibids and op. cit.s are considered officially too confusing to be used here. Well, that, and they can be easily "broken" by future editors, so they're discouraged. If you want help with named references, just give a shout.- Nunh-huh 20:12, 12 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks very much! That looks super (and my kids are more impressed that I'm a Wikipedia author than with my merely academic work). As per Nunh-huh's recommendations, I have taken out all the ibids and the op. cit. Great introduction to helping out here. JohnD'Alembert (talk) 11:53, 13 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, I answer here your question on Jonahan Groß' discussion page at german kanguage Wikipedia. The "Interwiki link" was already set. Since a year, we use for this the new project Wikidata (Martin Schanz there). New articles need to be listed there. If you're not sure how to make it - as you see, there are very fast people who do it, if needed ;). A tutorial how it works you find here. Best regards and thanks for your translation! (Jonathan has written a lot of such good articles - if you want, you could spend a lot time doing such things! ;)). Marcus Cyron (talk) 22:16, 14 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, John. You were halfway there on the translation template you placed on the talk page, and I've finished it up. To give you a fuller explanation than you apparently got at first, you should put the {{Translated page}} template on the talk page of the translated article. But you also need to add two parameters to it, separated by "pipe" characters (|). So in this case, you'd add "de" (the language code of the project it was translated from, in this case German) and you'd add the exact title of the article in that project (which in this case is the same as this article). So you would use: {{Translated page|de|Martin Schanz}}. - Nunh-huh 05:10, 15 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, thanks for your translations of those two articles. I've changed the link in the Martin Schanz article to Charles Graux (classicist) who wrote the essay Nouvelles recherches sur la stichometrie (Revue de philologie, de littérature et d'histoire anciennes N.S. 2 (1878) 97-143). I've also added an interwiki link to the German Wikipedia at the English Charles Graux article.

Are you going to make more translations? I'm looking forward to it. Best, Jonathan Groß (talk) 07:35, 15 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks to Marcus Cyron, Nunh-huh, and Jonathoan Groß. I now see how to use the translation template. As per the suggestion, I will add some more references to the English Schanz article. Yes, I will do some more translations in this area. I'm writing a book on some aspects of Greek mathematics and Plato and noticed some holes in the English Wikipedia. Thanks very much to everyone for educating me in real time! JohnD'Alembert (talk) 09:22, 15 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, John. Generally, to find information about the parameters for any template, you'd look at the template page. For example, for {{Template:Translated_page}}, you'd go to Template:Translated_page, and hope that the information there was informative. It's pretty good, for this template.

The version identifier of the revision of the source page from which the translation was derived. (To find this, select the history of the source page, and click on the date that corresponds to that revision. The resulting page will have a URL that ends with a number, e.g. ...oldid=123456789. That number is the version identifier.)

So, in the German Wikipedia, you'd click on the history tab of the article, and get:

Assuming you've translated the last version, it will be the one at the top, so you'd click on "Vorherige" there, and get a page that looks like this:

This gives you the version identifier, and the url (which will be in the url bar of the browser)

You follow a similar process on the English page to get the version number that you inserted your translation into, in this case, 626397677.

So if you indeed translated the last version, the template would be {{translated page|de|Theodor Birt|version=127728691|insertversion= 626397677}}, producing the final template on this page.

This page contains a translation of Theodor Birt from de.wikipedia.

- Nunh-huh 01:16, 21 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I couldn't have explained this better. Thanks, Nunh-huh. Jonathan Groß (talk) 09:05, 21 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, again, Nunh-huh and Jonathan Groß that should do it. I'll go to the page now. JohnD'Alembert (talk) 12:28, 21 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. Wikipedia appreciates your help. We noticed though that when you edited Theodor Birt, you added links pointing to the disambiguation pages Paul Friedlander, Kurt Wolff and Charles Graux. Such links are almost always unintended, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of "Did you mean..." article titles. Read the FAQ • Join us at the DPL WikiProject.

It's OK to remove this message. Also, to stop receiving these messages, follow these opt-out instructions. Thanks, DPL bot (talk) 09:16, 24 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

John, I've tidied those up (I thought I had gotten rid of any Charles Graux problems, so was all prepared to get disgruntled at the DPL bot, but in fact I had missed one.) For future reference, here's a shortcut way to disambiguate. If, for example, you have [[Paul Friedlander]] in an article, and you want it to point to [[Paul Friedlander (philologist)]], you'll want the wiki markup in the article to be [[Paul Friedlander (philologist)|Paul Friedlander]]. But if you simply type [[Paul Friedlander (philologist)|]], it will be expanded to the correct form when the page is saved… that is, ending with the pipe character "|" will result in the link being repeated without the parenthesized part, which is usually what you want to do in running text. - Nunh-huh 18:16, 24 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Nunh-huh! Yes, that was a stupid mistake. I'll check that in the future. Thanks for tidying that up. JohnD'Alembert (talk) 18:42, 24 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Nunh-huh, thanks for all your tutoring. I've one more question for you. I've revised and expanded the article on stichometry that was a 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica article. I've added some nice pictures but notice that when I put the picture on the left of the page my blockquotes lose their indenting (and so look like regular text rather than quotations). Is there an easy way to fix this? The blockquote template page doesn't help. I googled "blockquote indenting" and found a Teahouse discussion where they had a similar problem, but did not suggest an easy way to fix. I moved one picture back to the right, but can you help me out again? JohnD'Alembert (talk) 13:29, 26 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure I can figure it out, but it would be easier if you give me a link to the page where the block quotes are the way you want them, and one to a version where you don't. Perhaps a workaround would be to use a template-based solution rather than the HTML-based <blockquote></blockquote>. For example, Template:bq where the parameters passed are the text to be quoted, and other more obscure parameters that can be left out.

So {{bq|text=The investigations of the recently deceased Charles Graux, taken all too prematurely from the world of scholarship, have made it henceforth inalterably certain that the standard line (the ''stichos'') of the ancients was a unit of spatial length equal to the hexameter. Theodor Birt has rightly erected his shrewd and persuasive ''The Nature of the Ancient Book'' upon this foundation.<ref>H. Diels, 'Stichometrisches,' ''Hermes'', vol. 17, no. 3, 1882, p. 377.</ref>}} produces:

The investigations of the recently deceased Charles Graux, taken all too prematurely from the world of scholarship, have made it henceforth inalterably certain that the standard line (the stichos) of the ancients was a unit of spatial length equal to the hexameter. Theodor Birt has rightly erected his shrewd and persuasive The Nature of the Ancient Book upon this foundation.^[1]

- Nunh-huh 18:44, 26 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, I'm SireWonton. JohnD'Alembert, thanks for creating

I've just tagged the page, using our page curation tools, as having some issues to fix. Well, I think I made a mistake. I removed the inappropriate tags. I think maybe it would be too deep for the normal reader though. Could we work on making it easier to read? Thanks!

The tags can be removed by you or another editor once the issues they mention are addressed. If you have questions, you can leave a comment on

Thanks for all that! I didn't know I should add those myself. I followed your advice and added a banner to my other recent article. I'll do that in future, JohnD'Alembert (talk) 10:27, 16 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@BlueMist Hi, I have a question about the article on Plato's

Thanks, John. I'm looking forward to your much needed improvements to Wikipedia, and will help any way I can. BlueMist (talk) 13:17, 10 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@JohnD'Alembert: Please have a look at it again.—♦♦ AMBER^(ЯʘCK) 10:16, 29 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

John, the nomination has just been marked for closure. If you see this before it closes, you might be able to save it if you respond there right away. BlueMoonset (talk) 08:06, 6 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Hey John, I share your interest in philosophy, or like to think I do, though most pages on here are already covered by those much more seasoned than I. One I've expanded is

Hi

Theory of Forms but, yes, I agree that the History of Logic article needs help. If you make revisions, I'll look them over, JohnD'Alembert (talk) 14:53, 26 February 2016 (UTC)[reply

]

Yes I've recently made several edits, not just in the ancient section either. Zeller looks fine to me. Take your time by all means - especially with Plato (I often find myself agreeing with those who find him second to none). Do you think there is any answer to my question? The invention of logic, if there be such a thing, is often attributed to Parmenides or Zeno, i. e. the Eleatics. It seems reasonable to me to say Parmenides' problem of nonbeing is the original logical puzzle. If it is not, then surely Zeno's paradoxes. Yet, of course in logic one sees logos, and that's from Herakleitos, on the other side of the issue and the Greek world. It seems misguided to pass over Herakleitos in silence, yet I imagine many logic histories would find him too obscure to tackle. In fact Herakleitos seems to me to say something like only our language provides unity and form to the world, which otherwise is a mess of fiery opposites and contradiction. Cake (talk) 21:12, 26 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, Cake, yes, Heraclitus is too obscure to tackle. Guthrie's History of Greek Philosophy has a list showing that logos had some 15 different meanings (sentence, reason, story, ratio, etc.). So you're right Heraclitus's emphasis on logos is important to the history of logic, but good luck trying to say more than that. (I really like the paper by Cherniss in his Selected Papers which gives a still valuable schematic interpretation of the whole of Pre-S philosophy and discusses your question.) There is much new work on the birth of logic in Plato and Aristotle. I'm not an expert here, but I think that Aristotle's syllogism rather clearly comes from the genus-species relation between Forms in Plato, and that this transition is the key moment in the birth of what we call logic. You're right to say (as Cherniss does too) that the Eleatic paradoxes focused attention on the strategies used in arguments, but the study of this as a general 'meta-system' of thought or logic begins in Plato and Aristotle, I think. Does that make sense? Thanks, JohnD'Alembert (talk) 09:47, 27 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I do wish I had a better understanding of nous (something like the higher functions of the mind, maybe Insight) and logos (something like the reasonable aspects of language) more than any of the other philosophical terms kept in the original Greek for lack of translation. I must look at Cherniss. Of course, it is true to say Aristotle is the inventor of logic in any strict sense. You are probably also right to connect the logic and his Platonic influence to the genus-species-differentia talk. But Plato himself of course is reconciling Parmenides and Herakleitos, and it almost seems one can measure ancient philosophical insight by its ability to tie things back to Thales. I suppose my biggest issue is with how one can make various profound statements on the history of logic with the Eleatics and Pythagoras, yet it is difficult to make any statements on the one actually speaking on logos. If I were to say "that argument over there is a case of special pleading. Arguments are valid if the form is valid, not the content" one can hear the echo of Pythagoras. If I similarly say "hush about your empirical objections, just look at the argument" and transparently so if I say (wrongly) "P is not must always be false or meaningless." I echo Parmenides. Where one hears echoes of Herakleitos, I am not as confident in interpretation, but I figure there must be examples. I would say "Listen not to me, but to the logos" is your first statement of the ad-hominem fallacy, and the "way up is the way down" points to a more general case one instance of which is e. g. the interplay between deduction and induction. I do wonder if Herakleitos would somewhat agree with Aristotle's matter-form distinction, seeing the logos as like the form, the 'logical' part, while the matter is fiery nonsense. Also, the way Anaximander thinks something like justice is laid out in perishing into the indefinite, but Herakleitos sees the dialectic tension of justice in everything. The real world has already perished into the indefinite, so to speak. The Ionian back-and-forth goes something like: Thales says all is one definite substance; Anaximander says all is indefinite; Anaximenes says all is one indefinite substance; Herakleitos says all is indefinite substance. I imagine our lack of understanding with Herakleitos is partly a function of our lack of understanding of Anaximander. Spengler is one for insight on matters such as these (I know of no better person to explicate why the problem of incommensurables was such a thunderclap for the Greeks), and I have never read his thesis on Herakleitos. Cake (talk) 12:14, 27 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, again, Cake, thanks for all that. I will watch-list the history of logic page and let you know what I make of your final conclusions. I'm not an expert on Pre-S phil but, as I said, I think you'll find much to ponder in that Cherniss article which connects them all in the kind of narrative you are aiming at. Luck, JohnD'Alembert (talk) 07:55, 1 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Your edits of

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This article is on a list of articles to be mass deleted because it was created with the translation tool. I vehemently disagree with the mass-delete (although some of the other articles on the list are pretty bad). In any event, I will mark this article as to be kept -- it seems like a very fine article to me -- but you might want to check on it, back it up and maybe comment on the mass-delete issue. I am currently outvoted. Elinruby (talk) 07:34, 10 April 2017 (UTC) Link to discussion: Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/CXT/Pages_to_review#901-1000[reply]

You did fine work on the Cherniss article, JohnD'Alembert, but I have proposed a change to one section and would welcome your comments. —Blanchette (talk) 23:55, 1 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

	The Writer's Barnstar
	That's great to find an academic here :) Carvalhar (talk) 11:57, 16 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I'd like to ask for help on how to start a Wiki Project and then an Ancient Philosophy Task Force, but at the Wikipedia in Portuguese. I tried searching for info, but a project doesn't seem common at Wiki PT and many pages were last edited on 2010. Could you explain me how to create it and make a call to others interested in Ancient Philosophy? I tried to create a new project, but i got only access denied. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Carvalhar (talk • contribs) 12:33, 16 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]