Wikipedia:WikiProject History of Science

This is the page for the History of Science WikiProject. If you would like to participate, add your name to list of participants below. Be sure to check out the discussion page as well.

Project overview

This project focuses on creating and improving content related to the history of science. This will include (historical aspects of) the philosophy of science, as well as history of technology, mathematics and medicine. The project will also work on improving the categorization of History of Science-related articles and maintaining Portal:History of science.

To do

• Identify unmarked history of science stubs and add {{sci-hist-stub}} to them, or expand history of science stubs into full articles.

• Grab your favorite reference work and identify missing articles on notable scientists for the Missing scientist articles list, and/or create articles for them.

• Improve this page and make it more useful for potential history of science editors and project members.

• Invite active editors who write for history of science-related articles to join the project.

• Add the project template {{HistSci}} to the talk pages of history of science articles, and modify the template if you feel it can be improved.

• See also:

Writing and Editing needs

Other suggested projects

Open tasks

Participants

• Ragesoss (talk · contribs) -- physical sciences, biological sciences, technology
• dantheox (talk · contribs)
• Xuanwu (talk · contribs)
• Fastfission (talk · contribs) -- esp. modern physical and biological sciences
• Linas (talk · contribs) -- limited to history of physics
• Pjacobi (talk · contribs)
• -- history of physics and medicine
• Heron (talk · contribs)
• Ancheta Wis (talk · contribs)
• -- physics, materials science, electrical engineering
• -- history of philosophy and science in the Middle Ages
• -- esp. chemistry, thermodynamics, biology
• Jon Awbrey (talk · contribs) -- logic, math, pragmatism, psych, semiotics.
• AppleRaven (talk · contribs) -- US Astronomy and Astronomical Observatories
• deeptrivia (talk · contribs) -- mechanics, physics, engineering, thermodynamics, mathematics. I'll also help ensure that the perspective remains global rather than Eurocentric.
• -- Industrial Revolution
• -- biology esp. botany and genetics
• -- biology, esp. translations of German articles
• Joke137 (talk · contribs) -- cosmology, particle physics, general relativity. I don't know much, but I do what I can.
• JackyR (talk · contribs) -- whatever I can remember from college HPS, but I might be good on local Cambridge stuff.
• KSchutte (talk · contribs) -- history of natural philosophy, psychology, neuroscience
• Peterlewis (talk · contribs) -- history of engineering
• Lacatosias (talk · contribs) -- history of physics, math, logic.
• Cugel (talk · contribs) -- psychology (anything to do with the scientific discipline)
• Leinad-Z (talk · contribs) -- esp. medieval science, and the relationship between science and religion.
• Sayeth (talk · contribs) -- biology, esp. neuroscience and molecular biology
• Carboxen (talk · contribs) -- history of chemistry and geology, translations from German

Current goals

Current goals for the project include:

• Identify and create missing history of science content
• Improve the categorization and organization of history of science material
  • Proposed reorganization of history of science categories: Category talk:History of science--ragesoss 01:37, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
• Gather interest and participation in a history of science community within Wikipedia, including a History of Science Collaboration project
• Maintain and improve the History of Science Portal.

Images

• Create as many free-to-distribute history of science related images as possible, as high a quality as possible. Wikipedia's identity and value could be substantially raised by this, I think. Without meaning to toot my own horn, the sorts of things I have in mind are the Image:Ptolemaic elements.svg, Image:Rutherford gold foil experiment results.svg, and Image:Nuclear fission.svg (some of them look small here, but they can be enlarged to arbitrarily large sizes because they are saved as svg vector files). I'm happy to help with this in any way I can when I have the time, and very interested in suggestions for future illustrations. --Fastfission 01:23, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

Suggestions:

• The Tychonic System, a more legible and informative version of Image:Tychonian.gif

• Done. --Fastfission 00:45, 28 January 2006 (UTC)

See also WP:RI

Possible projects

• Populate the new Category:History of earth science. Earth science is also a dead link in the history of science box on pages like History of science. Furthermore, the closest thing to a history of geology or history of earth science article is historical geology, which has very little content.--ragesoss 02:57, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

• Turn Johannes Kepler into a feature-quality article. (This is my personal goal, but any help would be appreciated. My draft in progress is here).--ragesoss 05:51, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

• Fix history of astronomy. In particular, add content to the empty Mesopotamia section and rewrite (and retitle) the "Physics marries astronomy" section, which is just plain wrong as written.--ragesoss 21:04, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

• Reorganize Hipparchus (astronomer). This page is far too long given what's known about Hipparchus, and his relative importance. I've begun this process, but there's a lot more work to do. --Dantheox 07:05, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

• Improve categorization on Wikimedia Commons for History of Science material. Most History of Science images are very poorly categorized, making it very difficult to find all the files on a given topic actually present. Starting from those Wikipedia articles with links to related Commons material, a search for that term on Commons typically reveals many additional images. And many needed categories do not even exist.--ragesoss 03:14, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

Writing and Editing

Articles in need of expansion

• Timeline of scientific discoveries - needs a lot of expansion and improvement; each time you work on another subject, check to see if relevant discoveries are present in the timeline
• History of materials science
• Atomic theory
• Theodosius Dobzhansky
• Lise Meitner
• Natural philosophy
• Natural history - very bare, with some dubious information
• History of biology - amazingly bare, and doesn't connect to any other HoS articles
• History of genetics - expand timelines into prose
• Heredity - is currently very poor, very short, and does not go back into concepts of heredity before the late 19th century in any appreciable sense.
• Max Delbrück
• History of zoology, post-Darwin - partly from EB 1911, in bad shape; needs copyediting as well
• History of zoology (before Darwin) - partly from EB 1911, in bad shape; needs copyediting as well
• The relationship between religion and science - partially historical. Needs a stronger framework, discussion of different models for the relationship (conflict thesis, NOMA, etc.) and either a link to a historical main article or a signficant expansion of the historical part.
• science studies
• Silent Spring - needs section on historical significance, and better description of its contents; the only two sections of prose after the intro are currently Criticism and Vindication?, neither of which has much, if anything, worth keeping.
• History of science in the Renaissance (links from history of science box)
• History of molecular biology (see also molecular biology and Molecular structure of Nucleic Acids

Requested Articles

Missing scientist articles

• History of earth science (links from history of science box)
• Patronage in the Renaissance (see Patronage)
• Book of Nature
• Aristotelian Physics

• Would this be "Aristotle's views on what we today call physics"? We have an article on Aristotle's Physics but I'm not sure that's what is meant. --Fastfission 18:31, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

• As in (I assume), the system of physics based on Aristotle's work, that was common in some form basically until Newton. Natural motion, natural place and the elements, violent motion, etc.--ragesoss 21:12, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

• Aristotelian Mechanics (maybe just one of these, I'm not sure of the relationship)
• Conflict thesis (aka, warfare model, Draper-White thesis) - The idea of a war between science and religion, which common in the historiography of sciece from the late 19th to the mid-20th centuries, and is still common among non-historians.

Articles in need of heavy copyediting

• Gottfried Leibnitz - hagiographic, massively too big and still growing
• Atomism
• Nuclear arms race
• Scientific Revolution
• Galileo affair
• Genealogy of Theoretical Physicists, survived AfD, but needs work
• John Harrison - lots of decent text, but needs structure

Related Pages

WikiProjects

• Science WikiProject
  • Years in science WikiProject
• History WikiProject
• Futures Studies WikiProject
• Biography of Academics WikiProject
• Wikiproject Philosophy

Portals

• Science portal
• History portal
• Techology portal
• Medicine portal
• Scientific Method portal
• Mind and Brain portal

Collaborations

• Science COTW
• Medicine COTW
• Biography COTW

Votes, Polls and Candidacies

History of science-related material that is being voted on or discussed elsewhere on Wikipedia:

• Articles for Deletion
  • (none)

Collaborations

• Collaboration of the Week
  • History of art (current collaboration) - could use some info on scientific illustration
• Article Improvement Drive
  • Contact lens (current collaboration) - history section is very history of science-oriented
  • Human Genome Project
• Science COTW
  • Natural selection (current collaboration) - article is significantly historical
• Mathematics COTW
  • Algebra (current collaboration) - has a history section that could be made significant
• Philosophy COTW
  • Empiricism
• Biography COTW
  • Thomas Hunt Morgan - he ought to have an FA, really, and there are many good sources available
• Core Topics COTW
  • Technology
• French Translation Project
  • The Value of Science - a book by Henri Poincaré; it's a Featured Article in French

Featured content

• Article candidates
  • Gregorian calendar
• Topic candidates
  • Nuclear weapons
• Picture candidates
  • Image:Haeckel Batrachia.jpg
• List candidates
  • Timeline of first orbital launches by nationality