Talk:Galileo Galilei

Article Checklist for "Galileo Galilei"

Workgroup category or categories	Astronomy Workgroup [Categories OK]
Article status	Developing article: beyond a stub, but incomplete
Underlinked article?	Yes
Basic cleanup done?	Yes
Checklist last edited by	Daniel Drake 13:07, 5 April 2007 (CDT)

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NOTE:As of the time of this posting, and as a proposed policy henceforth, the content of the article Galileo Galilei is submitted and licensed to Citizendium under its standard terms, by the author or authors. It is not under license (such as GFDL) from Wikipedia or other sources. For further information see under New start. Daniel Drake 13:34, 5 April 2007 (CDT)

Imported from Wikipedia for a preliminary version, which will require a good deal of work.

Requesting a moratorium on changes while I do initial Citizendium import fixups and make some of the most badly needed changes to the text.

The version selected is the one that was current at the end of June, 2004[1], the product of some 6+ months of work after it was given Featured Article status. Since that time many improvements have been made in the Wikipedia text, but on balance it has become more flabby and poorly organized, and more argumentative (in a generally non-scholarly way), rather than less. Hence this semi-arbitrary choice of a starting point. Daniel Drake 11:27, 1 April 2007 (CDT)

[Omitting irrelevant rant against the software.]

Added the Wikipedia template to the end of text. Now, do I go on checking the Wikipedia-cotent box (which seems to be on by default) with every submission of new content? Have inquired on a more relevant talk page now. Daniel Drake 11:27, 1 April 2007 (CDT)

Modified the intro, on the theory that Galileo's claims to fame are strong enough without asking for priority wars over who was the real father of this or that, or whether he was The First to do real experimentation, or one of the first, or one Western Johnny-come-lately in exerimentation, etc. Those disputes belong elsewhere.

However, it really ought to have nods to a few things that a new reader will actually be interested in: heliocentrism, telescopes, fights with the Inquisition, and real, quantitative physics. Let's work these in, as briefly and neutrally as possible. Daniel Drake 00:33, 2 April 2007 (CDT)

New start

I have deleted all Wikipedia material, and then created a stub, with a minimal intro and section headings. A large part of what I'll submit in the near future will be material previously submitted to Wikipedia, in the approximate period from July 2003 to January 2006; this is licensed to Citizendium under my own rights (non-exclusive in this case) to my work. Section headings and organization, in case there are any worries about look and feel, are also my own product.

Anyone submitting material from Wikipedia (or other sources) is urged to use the History features to verify that only the author's own submissions are used here. It would also be useful to note in the Discussion page any material that duplicates that on another site. Daniel Drake 13:34, 5 April 2007 (CDT)

I've tried to work up the introduction along the lines mentioned above: speak of the stuff that will be of interest to a non-specialist who wanders in here, and put little else in. What can we do to improve it without making it top-heavy with detail? (Obviously the "moratorium" I requested at first is a dead issue for the sections that now have some contents.) --Daniel Drake 02:45, 6 April 2007 (CDT)

Citation style

Here is the current way of organizing the citations and bibliographic data.

At the end of the article is a section "Notes and references" with a subsection "Works cited".

Under the Notes heading is the <references/> item. An citation in a footnote may be a fully expanded citation, e.g.

• Settle, Thomas B. (1961). "An Experiment in the History of Science". Science, 133:19-23.

or a reference to a full citation given in the Works-cited section:

• Drake (1978); pp. 137-143

The latter is intended for works that will be cited repeatedly but not identically: references to a book, specifying different pages.

The citations that aren't fully expanded in the notes appear, of course, in "Works cited", along with whatever other citations one may want to list:

• Drake, Stillman (1978). Galileo At Work. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-16226-5

The section "external references" would also be reduced to a subsection in this system. This is an unusual organization, but it seems a logical grouping, and it has the advantage that one can edit the section and see all its subsections at once, making it easier to coordinate them without doing a whole-article edit.

Any comments? We'll see how it works out in practice. Daniel Drake 02:04, 7 April 2007 (CDT)

The Church

Here's the opening part of the most godawful controversial section. It will be followed by subsections chronologically arranged, making a very long piece.

It begins and ends with remarks on controversy, because this is less tedious than tagging nearly every sentence with "(There is controversy about this.)". The idea is to keep it as brief as possible -- obviously it is already too long -- while mentioning pretty much everything that people have heard about the business and keeping to historical data with minimal interpretation and perhaps no discussion at all of the specific controversies.

The reader who wants to argue the matter, or just wants more information, will go to the much longer treatment that will follow in several subsections. I propose that we minimize or eliminate citations in the intro; every topic covered there will be expanded later, and the curious reader will go to it and find the necessary footnotes.

Let's see if this can be made to work. Daniel Drake 16:17, 8 April 2007 (CDT)