Today's front page article is Georg Cantor, a slight difference from the Bus Uncle.

This has an association with the Runcorn ban. You don't put an article on the front page until it is reasonably stable (which is pretty absurd, because as soon as it gets there it gets hundreds of edits). Now there had been a long-running dispute there in which Runcorn and others had played a lead role. Was Cantor an ethnic Jew (there was no suggestion that he was a practising one)? Yes, say the Jewish Encyclopedia, the Encyclopaedia Judaica, the Jewish Chronicle, the Jewish Year Book and his only full-length biography. Yes, he said himself, as did his brother. What's the argument? Someone found one article that said he wasn't, hence (according to Wikipedia logic) you couldn't say he was. Now a lot of people wanted it as a featured article, so one side or other of the argument had to be silenced.

I'm quite happy to be corrected here, but the problem is that googling makes it seem doubtful that he was jewish. I have no idea, and so would defer to those who had an idea. But others will defer to the mighty google...

Just check the references that were in earlier versions of the article; I've outlined them above. The biography is by Eric Temple Bell.

I've no intention of checking the references, because I believe you as an authority on the subject, and don't really care either way. I'm trying to make the point that most Wikipedians haven't a clue (they've probably never heard of either set theory or Gottingen) and so will do a quick google on the matter, which seems to be against him being Jewish.

And so the crowd shows its wisdom!

Another manifestation of the Quantum Encyclopedia Effect. At the exact moment I clicked the link on the article this is what I got for the first paragraph:



Yep, the wisdom of crowds in action.

This makes me wonder whether Unrepentant Caballist Vandal is Trovatore or one of the other editors of that article. I did a simple Google search

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=%22...22+jewish&meta=

That casts very little doubt. The first link is www.jinfo.org/Philosophers.html, which offers abundant, well-referenced evidence on his ancestry. The second link is Wikipedia. The third is JSTOR, which cannot be read by non-subscribers but the summary says non-committally "Here they face the question of Cantor's Jewish ancestry, which is taken up in con-".

The fourth link notes that someone in the 1930s could come to no conclusion one way or the other; in the highly charged atmosphere of the time, he may easily have fudged it to protect Cantor's surviving relatives.

The next link is to the Amazon page of a recent book that, as the Jinfo link above notes, proves that Cantor was Jewish. One of the reviewers of the book refers to "Cantor's debatably Jewish heritage", but of course Amazon reviews are just blogs, not reliable sources.

Happy New Year to other Jewish editors.

This makes me wonder if you can read.

This is not the wisdom of crowds; it's the lack of wisdom of one stubborn guy called Raul654, who has long resisted the many editors, including myself, who have urged semi-protection of any FA on the day that it is on the main page. If this was decided democratically, there's no doubt that general semi-protection of these articles would be instituted.

Don't really care either way, except for that little matter of properly documenting historical facts, but Eric Temple Bell is somewhat notorious for the nescience fixion of his biographies, and all good historians would demand other sources for anything he wrote. Then again, one of the only modes of verification less trustworthy would probably be Trial by Google, just barely above a Ouija Board.

But where the hecque do they think he got that biz about ?É ???

Jonny

Do you have a source for that?


Damn right, EK. And I could tell you some horror stories. But as we know: The core philosophy of WP doctrine is Irresponsibility.

Some FAs on the main page get hit harder than others, but it's clear they all suffer from being featured on the front page. None of the FAs I've worked on have been improved in any way by going on the main page, and most have been hopelessly vandalized for 24 hours. I just don't understand the reason for not semi-protecting them. Who really thinks that an article with in-line citations and formatted references and footnotes is going to be improved by drive-by IP editors?

Who really thinks that having in-line citations and formatted references and footnotes is synonymous with being a good NPOV article?

Perhaps FA articles on the main page could be worthy experiments for the flagged versions software (if it ever gets off the ground)?