Talk:The Measure of Reality

B-class review

This review is transcluded from Talk:The Measure of Reality/B-class review. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: SMcCandlish (talk · contribs) 05:50, 28 November 2024 (UTC)

I was asked at User talk:SMcCandlish to suggest revisions with regard to this article. Rather than just go edit it, I'll treat this like a WP:GAN review and suggest revisions, but with regard to the WP:B-CLASS criteria instead of the GA criteria (plus some WP:MOS and code cleanup quibbles). I've numbered all the points for easy reference in response.

1. Given that this is about a European topic, that pre-dates American English, it would be more apporopriate to switch the MOS:ENGVAR to British spelling (and date format, and any other conventions that might apply). Not required, but recommendable for a case like this. The article already has {{Use British English|date=March 2024}} but it not actually complying. It also has {{Use dmy dates|cs1-dates=l|date=March 2024}} but is not complying (in at least one spot, namely twice inside the Dutton citation with MDY dates).
2. The lead reads rather informally, isn't as fact-packed as it could be, and has an awkward structure implying that someone in particular quantified things in Western civilization.

   I would change it to: 'The Measure of Reality: Quantification in Western Europe, 1250-1600 is a 1997 nonfiction historiography and macrohistory book by Alfred W. Crosby, about the role of quantification in Western civilization. It is published by Cambridge University Press.'

   The publisher is the least important element here, and many major nonfiction works end up with multiple publishers in multiple countries. The lead should, in a couple of sentences perhaps, also summarize the premise[s] of the work. See MOS:LEAD on what a lead section should do in an encyclopedia article versus something like a magazine piece; our kind of lead is a summary, not a teaser. Between the reviews already cited, it should be fairly easy to write up a nutshell description of what the book is about.

3. 'the “whys” and “hows”' → 'the "whys" and "hows'", per MOS:CURLY. However, this may be too slangish/breezy anyway. It would be more encyclopedic to say something like 'examines the origins and effects of quantitative thinking in post-medieval European history', or whatever it is that we're trying to highlight.
4. 'European colonial domination' – Like all major topics about which some readers may lack deep understanding, this should be linked, probably to History of colonialism for lack of a better target. I'm surprised that we don't have a specifically focused article instead of a redirect at European colonialism. Actually, if we use the European colonialism redirect instead of its History of colonialism present target, then this article would happily already link to the former when someone gets around to writing it.
5. 'the rest of the world' should be something like 'much of the rest of the world'; Europe did not colonize all of it.
6. 'a shift in mentalité' – Don't use a foreignism when a native-English equivalent will do: 'a shift in mentality'. Do link it, since this word has multiple meanings and in our case it fortunately goes to exactly the one intended here: mindset. Aside: when it is important to use a non-English term, put it in Template:Lang per MOS:FOREIGN: {{lang|la|in forma pauperis}}.

   Additional observation: In going over the reviews, it becomes clear that Crosby's idea of a societal mentality also integrates elements of worldview, so that term and link would be good to work into this article somewhere; I'm not sure where the best place is for it; that might be clearer after a revision based on my comments here. An additional thought: If the sources indicate to us that Crosby is using mentalité consistently with a special meaning, that conflicts with or isn't entirely encompassed by mentality AKA mindset, then we should introduce and explain this term more explicitly as his, e.g. '... a shift in mindset and worldview, which Crosby collectively terms mentalité'.

7. vauthors=((Matthews, J. R.)) – First, Vancouver format is hard-coded as requiring (to just make up some names for example): "Matthews JR, Johnson PDB, Cheng X, Smith-Jones B" format of names: no spaces or dots are used in initials, and a comma is never used except to separate authors. The misuse here of ((...)) markup to force acceptance of non-Vanc. formatting in a Vanc. citation is against WP:CITESTYLE by mixing citation styles. Second, Vanc. citations are "reader-hateful" and should not be used except in an article that is already well-established in that format consistently, and even then an argument could be made on the talk page to change to a more reader-friendly alternative (probably WP:CS1). Vanc. a bad idea because it hides information from the reader (full author names) that is useful for both evaluating the quality of the source and even finding it in the first place through searching. Vanc. format isn't even appropriate at all except for certain topics in which it is prevalent in the source material in the field and dominant among professionals from that field who may be the main editors of our article. The citations in this article should be done in the same format as 99.x% of the rest of our article: |last=Matthews|first=J. Ronald, or for multiple authors |last1=Matthews|first1=J. Rosser|last2=Johnson|first2=Philip D. B.|last3=Cheng|first3=Xin-hua..., matching the author names as given in the publication and not abbreviating them (e.g. |last=Stokes|first=Gale, etc.) If editors at this page really, really, really insist on Vanc., then it has to be |vauthors=Matthews JR and |vauthors=Matthews JR, Johnson PDB, Cheng X to comply with the requirements of that format.
8. <ref name="Swetz"/> – A trivial point, but this is better done as <ref name="Swetz" /> (it will be compatible with more off-site parsers/reusers of our content). Same goes for using <br /> instead of <br/> or <br>, the last of which even breaks our own internal syntax highlighter.
9. Also trivial: Putting citation code in the format | parameter1=value1 | parameter2=value2 | ... serves no purpose and makes citations harder to human-parse. Prefer |parameter1=value1 |parameter2=value2 |...; a single space between parameters markedly helps code readabilty, but spacing individual "micro-elements" like  |  and  =  does not. If one tries to impose the excessively spaced version (or a totally unspaced one), a script is likely to replace it with the conventionally spaced version later anyway, so it would be pointless.
10. |title=Alfred W. Crosby. The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250–1600. New York: Cambridge University Press. 1997. Pp. xii, 245. $24.95 – The title of a major work like a book inside the title of a minor work like a review article still takes italics. And there is no reason to include all this marketing information simply because the reviewer did; titles can be shortened with "..." (or truncated without "..." at a subtitle boundary) when the excess detail is not helpful to our readers. E.g.: |title=Alfred W. Crosby. The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250–1600 ...
11. Same issue in title parameters of other citations; where they mention the reviewed book's title, that title goes in italics.
12. [[History_of_Athens#Antiquity |Athenian ]] – Messy coding like that isn't helpful. Use [[History of Athens#Antiquity|Athenian]].
13. 'The book is divided into three section , where' – Grammar and spacing errors: 'The book is divided into three sections, where'.
14. 'the first introduces a new view of time and space as a continuum that could be subdivided and segmented' – This is claiming that Crosby has introduced "a new vew of time and space" which is almost certainly not the case. I'm not sure what this segment is really trying to say but it needs revision; this is perhaps the one "needs revision" part for which I'm not sure what to suggest as a replacement, since I have not read the book in question, and the reviews I have read didn't specifically address this.
15. 'assisted by the application of the Hindu–Arabic' – The Hindu–Arabic what? I suspect this is supposed to read 'assisted by the application of the Hindu–Arabic numeral system', judging from the close (perhaps too close in parts) paraphrasal of some material from Swetz.
16. 'The third and final part present the' – Grammar: 'The third and final part presents the'. (It's one part, with two modifiers, not plural parts.) Actually, drop "and final"; we've just told the reader there are only 3 parts, so they do not need to be brow-beaten about it.
17. "mature 'New Model of European Reality', as established on visualization and quantification" – Concepts, doctrines, etc. do not go in "scare quotes". When quotation marks are used on WP, they are double ("), except for the special cases covered at MOS:SINGLE. Theories, models, etc., etc., do not take capitalization on Wikipedia. The "as" in the original serves no semantic purpose. And it's not entirely clear what is meant here anyway. Is this a term conventionally used in the field? Is it a term Crosby invented?

    If the latter, as I suspect (after going over several reviews in detail), this should read in total something like the following, adding in a few extra bits from Swetz's material (so cite him here also) 'The third part presents the maturation of what Crosby describes as the new model of European reality, established on visualization and quantification as well as a linear and analytical but unbounded view of history driven by "progress", versus what he terms the venerable model, a more qualitative, experiential, and boundedly cyclical worldview inherited from classical antiquity.'

18. 'Crosby adopt the metaphor' - Same grammar error again: 'Crosby adopts the metaphor'. There seems to be a recurrent struggle with plurality agreement in this material.
19. 'influx of the Aristotelian corpus into the Latin West' – Concepts like these need to be linked. Here, Aristotelian corpus can be linked directly. It wasn't clear to me at first what was meant by the latter term in this context; Latin West redirects to Greek East and Latin West, an overview of terminology that isn't very helpful for this purpose (and which turns out to be chronologically wrong). I bothered looking, and the works of Aristotle entered the Western sphere via seizure and transport to Rome in 86 BC and transcription and translation there c. 60 BC, which is before the Roman Empire, centuries before the Western and Eastern Roman Empire split, and of course before post-Roman Europe, so the correct link would probably be [[Roman Republic|Latin West]].
20. 'providing the "oxygen and combustibles" that was then made into fire by "the shift to the visual" operated by composers, painters, and bookkeepers' – Plurality error again (should be 'that were then made into'). The text (in the state I'm responding to it here) is also mix-and-matching conflicting uses of quotation marks, first as "scare quotes" around a metaphor, then not using them with the other half of the metaphor, then using them contrarily for direct quotation of a novel phrase of the author. And that's not really how "operated" is used.

    Try: 'providing the "oxygen and combustibles" that were then "made into fire" by composers, painters, and bookkeepers in what Crosby describes as a "shift to the visual".' Here we make it clearer than the third part in quotation marks is an actual quotation, not a scare-quoted metaphor.

21. 'The ingredients of this revolution in visualization and quantification were thus' – Not how "thus" is used. Synonymous with "ergo", it indicates that this conclusion necessarily follows from the given premise. But Croby's premise is actually novel, and contradictory of a lot of other scholarship that sees other factors as more important to the rise of the West.

    We need to be clear about this (and include more links): 'The ingredients of this revolution in visualization and quantification were, in Crosby's analysis, the birth of polyphonic music at the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, the development of perspective in the paintings of the Italian Renaissance, and the adoption of double-entry bookkeeping among 14th-century Italian accountants.' Use "14th-century", per MOS:NUMERAL (use numerals not words for numbers 10+) and MOS:HYPHEN (hyphenate compound modifiers).

22. A non-style concern, rather an WP:NPOV one: The above seems like a bordering-on-WP:FRINGE position to me, as perspective and polyphony have nothing concrete to do with colonialism, which was motivated by hunger for land; greed for precious metals, cheap labor, larger consumer markets, and other resources; and a desire to proselytize religion. Meanwhile, various aspects of financial bookkeeping were adopted from the Arabs and from China. At present, this article's coverage of critical response is too thin, and is actually overshadowed by pointless block-quotation of a promotional blurb off the back cover. I'll attempt to address some of this below, though this article really needs more sources, and more modern ones; many are available (see GScholar link below).
23. "The Measure of Reality is praised as 'a pleasant and informative book' surveying some of the trends of quantification in European society during the period 1250–1600, and for the breadth of the author's scholarship." – Problematic in multiple ways. Most importantly, WP cannot make a claim this broad about a work unless it represents the overwhelming critical consensus among a broad body of critical response. For a minor work like this with little coverage, we have to attribute praises and criticisms more specifically; who these reactions are coming from matters as much as what their specific wording was (actually more, since their wording can be paraphrased by us). Book titles go in italics. Wikipedia does not use single-quote marks like this. "Is praised" isn't how verb tense works in English on such a matter (it implies an ongoing/active situation; for a general critical consensus, which has now become rather historical, "has been praised" would work better, while here we need specifics, so "was praised by ..." is what we need). And we have no need to brow-beat our readers again with what the date-range subject of the book is.

    So, try something like: 'The Measure of Reality was praised, in the journal Historia Mathematica by mathematician Frank Swetz, as "a pleasant and informative book" surveying some of the trends of quantification in European society during the period; and, by both Swetz and (in Magill's Book Reviews) by Barbara Hauser, for the breadth of the author's scholarship.' Cite Swetz again here. (His exact words were "Alfred Crosby's writing encompasses a broad and impressive sweep of scholarship", which echoes Hauser's sentiment.) However, Swetz had criticisms that are worth adding on after this: 'Swetz was in some measure critical, especially of the lack of depth and detail on pre-modern measurement systems; and of Crosby not very deeply exploring the idea of modern European worldview being shaped by measurement.' (Because this last bit from Swetz mirrors the review from Wilson, the revision of the latter below makes brief cross-reference to Swetz.)

24. The Hauser review that's been skimmed over here provides (despite being quite short) significant detail about the nature of the work, so we should quote that instead of the back-cover blurb. I would suggest this:

    'Hauser noted especially the book's recurrent theme in Crosby's work of conflict between the religious and sacred (more in Europe's past) and the secular (more in its future). Her summary of the book's theme: {{block quote|[Crosby] describes the far-reaching effects of breaking things into standard units: goods and labor into units of money, music into units of pitch and duration, one's place in this world into units of latitude and longitude, and intellectual and emotional expression into units of words and sentences on a printed page.}}'

25. For the Swetz citation, the author's name is wrong. Can add |url=https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/82067585.pdf (it'a a different URL than that provided by the DOI, so it's not redundant, and is some extra proof against link-rot). The excessive title can be reduced to |title=The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250–1600. By Alfred W. Crosby ....
26. For the Hauser citation, correct the work title: |journal=Magill Book Reviews. It's not "Magill's", though it is "Magill's" in the later citation to Magill's Literary Annual 1998. This source is very hard to find; it appears to have no DOI, and no publicly accessible URL, even for a preview. Do add to the citation: |id=EBSCOhost accession number: 460262, which appears to be the only persistent identifier of any kind for it. This will only be of use to people who can get some kind of access to the EBSCOhost database, but it's better than nothing at all.
27. 'A reviewer takes issue with Crosby's program as reported in the dusk jacket of the volume:' – WP:WEASEL: specify the reviewer or at least the reviewing publication for something like this, especially when it comes to the reader being able to take a criticism or a praise seriously. "Program[me]" isn't really used this way in English, at least not conventionally; it implies a plan of action not of analysis (i.e. political administrations have programs, scholars do not). We have no interest in any kind in quoting a promotional blurb on the back cover (and Brooks's review is responsive to the content of the book anyway, not the blurb on it). Use the same verb tense for all review matters. (The work that is the subject of our article conventionally takes a "perpetual present"; review materials are better given in past tense because they are snaphots in time of a particular reviewer's position, and doing this also helps distinguish in our material whether we are talking about reviewer content or the subject's content.) Use clearer language. "By way of" is uselessly long when "in" will do. Don't mix and match styles of specifying origin cultures (and parenthetical isn't a very intuitive approach at all; I see that it was copy-pasted in this form verbatim from Brooks, and that's not how we do things, per WP:COPYRIGHT policy). "From ... to ..." constructions only work well with two values. "All the way to" makes no sense in this construction, since it does not provide a linear progression culminating in something. Saying "geometry, and measuring space" is redundant. Put the examples in chronological order. Brooks actually provides a short quotable statement of the FRINGE nature of Crosby's argument, and it is valuable to include, especially as it presents this criticism directly without WP having to summarize it. The Brooks material includes additional quite specific criticisms that are also worth mentioning.

    So, for this segment, try something like: "Science historian Randall C. Brooks took issue with the book's premise, holding that Crosby discounts what previous societies achieved in mathematics and in measuring space, time, and weights, including: subdivision of geometry into in 360 degrees and time into 60-minute hours in Babylonia; introduction of zero in Classical India; the tholos (a bureau for the registering of weights and scales) in ancient Athens; the Pythagorean theorem of Ionian Greece; the Julian calendar of Rome; and a wealth of other measurment systems and tools originating anciently and often in the Middle East and Asia. According to Brooks: "For historians who have argued that [Western] achievements are based on the works and discoveries of our predecessors, Crosby's ideas will be difficult to accept." Brooks also called out errors of fact and judgement, such as implying the invention of the pipe organ in the 15th century when it really dates to the Roman Republic in the first centuries BC; and relying on Johannes Kepler as an authority on early music when, in Brooks's words, the "otherwise scientifically astute gentleman is ... considered a crackpot" on music theory."'

28. For the Brooks citation, add |url=https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/MCR/article/download/17760/19035/22857
29. "For another reviewer while the thesis upheld by Crosby is still in need of a full demonstration the book is deserving and 'full of curious lore that encourages readers to look more closely at the habits of thought on which their way of life is built.'" Commas would required in a construction like this (after "reviewer" and again after "demonstration"). But again, it's not proper encyclopedic writing to speak of just some random "another reviewer"; who they are and published where actually matters, at least for a subject like this (less for something like a movie review or other pop-culture stuff). Quotation marks again: use double. "Deserving" is rather meaningless; deserving of what, for/from whom? "Still" doesn't make sense for a review dating to 1998. Wilson also had some important criticisms.

    I would suggest: 'For John D. Wilson in Magill's Literary Annual, while the thesis upheld by Crosby was in need of a full demonstration (probably by later writers), the book was nevertheless "enjoyable and highly stimulating ... full of curious lore that encourages readers to look more closely at the habits of thought on which their way of life is built." However, Wilson (like Swetz) felt that Crosby did not really systematically argue his premise, but rather devoted most of the work to exploring examples of quantitative and visual developments without explaining their centrality to a putative new European world-view. Wilson also disputed some of Crosby's specific claims, such as that rhythmic complexity in music requires late-Western-style time quantification and notation.'

30. The page numbering in the Wilson citation is wrong. Should be |pages=555–557
31. Wilson points out that visualization and the transition from oral to written culture have as much to do with quantification, per se, in Crosby's thesis, and we should integrate that better into the description of the book (no need to quote Wilson directly on that; he's just summarizing the nature of the work). Same with Hauser, so cite both reviews for the visualization and quantification summary points.
32. When using block quotes, they do not take quotation marks, only the indentation provided by the template (see MOS:BQ). Just FYI, the |text= parameter name is not needed when the material being quoted does not contain the "=" character. A book title given inside a quote takes italics, and we'd do other text-formatting normalization, per MOS:CONFORM, as appropriate. This is at least correctly formatted in that citations do not go inside the block quote, not being part of the quoted material, and instead go at the end of the introduction to the quote.
33. 'The work of Crosby is quoted in reviews of Macrohistory in parallel with authors such as Jared Diamond and David Landes' – Issues: This article is not about the work of Crosby in general, but this book in particular. Academic and research subjects like macrohistory do not take capitalization (MOS:DOCTCAPS). This is also too much of a "people are doing it" broad-sweep claim to have only a single instance as the source.

    Substantial revision: 'In a 2001 literature review of then-recent macrohistory works, in The American Historical Review historian Gale Stokes examines The Measure of Reality along with thematically similar works, including Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) by Jared Diamond, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1998) by David Landes, ReOrient (1998) by Andre Gunder Frank, and The Great Divergence (2000) by Kenneth Pomeranz, among others. While conceding that scholars are split when it comes to the methodological value of macrohistorical approaches at all, he divides these works into two general schools of thought on the rise of Europe since the Renaissance: that there was something intrinsically or situationally special about European society, versus that Europe simply "lucked into" a period of dominance through resource acquisition and exploitation at a greater rate than in Asia. Stokes classified Crosby in the first camp, and pointed out that anthropologist Jack Goody, in East in the West (1996) has held that quantification technologies were not uniquely European, but developments from China through India to the Mediterranean since the Bronze Age. Crosby's model stands out in holding European quantification to have become a progressively accelerating cultural habit.'

34. The Stokes citation has bad formatting: |publisher=[Oxford University Press, American Historical Association] should be |publisher=Oxford University Press / American Historical Association. Publishers do not go in square brackets. And multiple publishers should not be separated by commas or it implies that the first is a division/department of the second.
35. What's especially still missing is modern (like post-2015) assessment of this work, versus shortly-after-publication reviewer reactions. There's a wealth of additional material available [1][2]; that which isn't available there in full text might be through WP:The Wikipedia Library to editors who qualify for it.
36. |issn= should just be removed from all these citations. ISSNs serve no source-finding purpose except for obscure publications. The ISSN only identifies the journal, not a volume, issue, or article. So, for any citation in which we already have a URL, DOI, or other more specific identifier, the ISSN is simply useless clutter.
37. Actually add |issn=0890-7722 to the Hauser citation. It is the only obscure publication here, and (as noted above) this particular source is remarkably difficult to track down by any means. The only way I was able to find it was through a The Wikipedia Library account login to EBSCOHost, and it took multiple search attempts with different databases there, and particular search strings, to find it at all.
38. The Sutton citation being orphaned in the "External links" section serves no purpose. This should be read and something useful (for our purposes) from it integrated into our article with Sutton cited as the source.
39. The first "External links" item should, as usual, have the book title in italics.
40. Remove * [[Macrohistory]] from "See also". We do not include in that section terms that have already been prominently linked in the main article text (see MOS:SEEALSO).
41. Use valid ISBN formatting in every citation. I'm seeing things like "978-089356298 4", mix-and-matching the hyphenated and spaced formats (and only partially doing either), which is not allowed by the ISBN spec. It can be hyphenated, spaced, or neither. There is no consensus on Wikipedia to prefer one over the others, just to be consistent within the same article. Since this article is otherwise using the hyphenated form (and the hyphens go in specific places), fix this ISBN to: 978-0-893-56298-4.

To summarize the B-class criteria and where this article presently stands with regard to them:

1. Proper inline reference citations: Reasonable selection so far, but with formatting problems, and all the sourcing is old, despite the availability of newer review materials.
2. Reasonably covers the topic, without obvious omissions or inaccuracies: Even the description of the subject (especially in the lead) needs some work, and the coverage here is entirely flattering so far, despite significant criticisms being prevalent in the sources.
3. Article has a defined structure: Good to go on that, though the "See also" and "External links" sections aren't being used entirely right.
4. Reasonably well-written: Needs work. There are frequent grammatical errors and several clarity issues to resolve.
5. Contains supporting materials where appropriate: Passable. Has an infobox, and that seems to be about all that's needed, though including the cover image would be appropriate (this will be a WP:NONFREE image, and including one has various licensing and fair-use-rationale steps to take). See the article on the similar book Guns, Germs, and Steel for ways to expand the infobox a little, and for a general idea of how to develop this article further in exploring the themes and content (and reactions to them), to get toward a GA-class article (though that one hasn't actually been through that process yet for some reason).
6. Presents its content in an appropriately understandable way: Good in this regard; it is neither too technical nor dumbed-down.

 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:50, 28 November 2024 (UTC)