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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by EEng (talk | contribs) at 04:39, 13 November 2013 (→This page's code is horrible: add section heading that won't give editor excuse to focus on section heading rather than fact that his position is stubbornly delusional nonsense). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

	Phineas Gage was a Natural sciences good articles nominee, but did not meet the good article criteria at the time. There may be suggestions below for improving the article. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.
Article milestones Date Process Result December 20, 2005 Good article nominee Listed June 14, 2007 Good article reassessment Delisted June 19, 2013 Good article nominee Not listed A fact from this article was featured on Misplaced Pages's Main Page in the "On this day..." column on September 13, 2012. Current status: Former good article nominee

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Archives

Archive #1, through January 2009 Archive #2, through March 2013 Archive #3, through May 2013

Fast review by User:Garrondo

Great article!

I read the whole thing, was drawn in and was fascinated, really fantastic. It's appropriate for subject. Should be featured. Shame so many people don't recognize talented and quality work, commercial encyclopedia's would pay good money for this. The comments above about "cold" writing being required at Misplaced Pages is just lol. In fact Misplaced Pages is 95% awful writing (myself included) so when we see actual rare good work, the crowd can't stand it because it sets off the rest to look so bad and amateur. Anyway, don't take my word, look at the user reviews at the bottom of the page, and article view statistics. People love this article. Green Cardamom (talk) 03:38, 13 September 2011 (UTC)

Yes. A lot of that "professional" quality comes from the work of EEng in 2008-2010. This article was once rated a "Good Article" (in 2007), but was delisted in 2008, before EEng started working on it. It might be worth renominating -- however EEng has not edited since March of this year, so would probably not be available to deal with issues that arise. I could probably take care of minor stuff, but I'm definitely far from an expert on Gage. Looie496 (talk) 15:29, 13 September 2011 (UTC)

I'm sorry to say I just got out after six months in prison (they block Misplaced Pages) so it's comforting to find such friendly voices here on the outside. (Just kidding about being in prison -- you didn't really believe that, did you?) I can't deny I'm tickled by the praise for the article above and below. I did put a lot of work into it, but it's no false modesty when I say that it was others (Garrondo especially) that did the essential work of putting it together in the first place. If I'd started it on my own from scratch it wouldn't be nearly as good. EEng (talk) 01:09, 16 September 2011 (UTC)

Just stating for the record that it was me who missed the "just kidding" part. You are all, therefore, warned as to the competency of my editing! --Tryptofish (talk) 18:14, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

P.S. I'm amazed at how little (relatively) the article has changed while I've been gone, but of course I'm gonna look it all over now. Y'all please let me know if I you think I do something unwise. EEng (talk) 01:35, 16 September 2011 (UTC)

I echo the praise. Far too many Misplaced Pages articles are cold and sterile (if sometimes littered by the leftovers of earlier POV wars). The passion in this one makes it much more informative and interesting. Where such passion would get in the way of objectivity and NPOV, it of course would need to be toned down. And it's unrealistic to assume that all of our articles will ever get such treatment. But let's not tone it down in a search for anodyne consistency of style. I respect that there are a range of criteria for this, but as far as I am concerned, this is more deserving of being a Featured Article than many others we have. Martinp (talk) 17:10, 13 September 2011 (UTC)

Yes. Very interesting read about a very interesting man. The author(s) of this article certainly did him justice. By the way, does anyone else thing that Phineas Gage bears a striking resemblence to Christopher Reeve? Van Vidrine (talk) 19:17, 13 September 2011 (UTC)

The resemblance to Reeve is frequently commented on. Search for Reeve (see esp. the July 24 comment). EEng (talk) 01:09, 16 September 2011 (UTC)

Comments

I see this excellent article has been the subject of numerous comments already so I'll try and keep this relatively brief. I should also say at the start that I haven't consulted any of the secondary sources cited in the article so my comments should be read under the presumption of my own ignorance (I could probably get most of the articles cited but I'm less certain I could locate Macmillan's book-length treatment).

Coverage: As a reader, the one item I'm left dissatisfied about is the coverage of the manner in which the Gage case was used to advance or support theories relating to cerebral localisation or other aspects of psychology, behaviour and brain function. As it stands this is limited to a brief mention of a 19th century dispute in regard to localisation theories and Antonio Damasio's hypothesis linking the frontal lobes to emotions and decision making. Note D indicates that Harlow's (1868) account was, at least until 1974, the second most cited source in 20th century psychological texts. I would like a better sense of what theories or hypotheses Gage's case was used to illustrate or support, however erroneously.

Style: In regard to the writing style, I should preface my remarks by stating that it is excellent overall and I wouldn't favour changes that are likely to render it less engaging. However, I feel there is at times an overuse of both parentheses and dashes. I think, personally, these should be used somewhat more judiciously. Dashes are useful in lending a particularly emphasis to a section of text but retain that effect only when used sparingly. Parentheses, used to clarify a point or term, I'd really only include when absolutely necessary. Otherwise, if overused, both dashes and parentheses can lend something of juddering effect to the reading experience. In regard to the use of dashes, I think that this is most evident in the lead where in many instances I would advocate the use of commas instead. If say, you removed about half of the dashes, the text they are removed from may flow better whereas their effect where they are retained would be greatly enhanced. Similarly with the use of parentheses, some should probably be retained but many, I think, should not and the information would be more easily digested if commas were substituted for brackets or if new sentences were introduced. In fact, in some instances notes could be used.

Footnote 38 should follow the bracket, no?

Note C: I'd actually like to see some of this note integrated into the main text (esp. "The leading feature of this case is its improbability ... This is the sort of accident that happens in the pantomime at the theater, not elsewhere").

Note K: "Contrary to common reports" - assuming this observation is derived from Macmillan, why would it need a separate citation?

An excellent article overall. Will it be nominated for Good or Featured article status? FiachraByrne (talk)

GAN, McMillian and Gage

First of all I want to say that I greatly admire the work done by EEng in this article, which has led it to probably become a great piece, with fine writting and really good documentation. However, I have stated several times that while McMillian is probably a great source, it is not a definitive one, and certainly there is no consensus with his position regarding the well-doing of Gage.

In the section above EEng said: Just for the record though, it turns out Gage did not function "badly", but actually quite well. This comment defines exactly the problem I find with several parts of the article, since it clearly overstates the importance of McMillian theories: it would certainly be more accurate to say that it has been proposed by an investigator that he did quite well, or that some evidence points towards him doing better than previously thought.

I find all sections till the "theoretical use and misuse" very balanced, but from it (included) to the end of the article I believe that some undue weight is given to McMillian, giving the impression that there is consensus on his theories. I find specially troublesome the "use of the case" section, where only a few lines are given on how the case has been used along the history of neurology. However, this section should probably be one of the most important ones in the article, since independently of how truly was the case of Gage he has been an icon used for over a 100 years to explain frontal lobe disorders. This section should explain how has he become such an icon, and it certainly should give minimal importance to McMillian. Moreover, the article should also make clear that many of the problems that at some point have been proposed that he suffered are consistent with frontal brain injuries and that the MRI and neurological knowledge on the prognosis of other similar cases point towards him certainly suffering some kind of cognitive problems for the remaining of his life.

EEng has stated several times that he only has basic knowledge on neurology and neuroanatomy, and he recently indicated in other article that he was involved in the preparation of one of McMillians works. While none of the two facts actually invalidate his huge acomplishments in this article, they may be hindering the advance of the article in what I think are the final stages towards GA and even FA and work with other editors is probably the only way of moving forward from this point.

In summary: I do not think right now the article is up to GA status although it is probably close, with only some (not huge) problems in balance of content along the full article (McMillians importance should be down-toned at some points) (criterium 3) and an (important) lack of content in another section (criterium 4).

I have been involved in the article, so my evaluation does not count as the requiered review for GAN, but I hope that nevertheless is taken into account.

--Garrondo (talk) 07:40, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

Some editors know from earlier discussions that I am the second author of Reference #20, and first author mentioned in Note Z, of . I prefer not to broadcast this because (a) I do not want to be seen as playing the "expert card" and (2) my professional work requires that any internet presence connected to my real-life identity be extremely low-profile. I ask that other editors help keep it that way by referring to my identity only obliquely. (I'm not in the CIA or anything, so it's not like you'll be responsible for my death, but it's the nature of my work that everything I write can become the subject of discussion.)

An illuminating question

To get this discussion restarted, let me pose a question which I think will be illuminating:

The article says that Gage died in 1860, citing Macmillan. But most sources () say Gage died in 1861. So how come the article doesn't present this as some kind of controversy, explaining that sources conflict as to the year Gage died? Or should it?

Discussion of this question should encapsulate, in miniature, the larger question Garrondo is raising.

EEng (talk) 02:22, 17 June 2013 (UTC)

I had not seen this after all the edits back and forth on format. I simply do not see your point. I do not see the relevance of McMillian giving a different date. He may or may not be right, we cannot know, but nobody has really discussed Gage's death date over the years (probably few care). As such there is no controversy; whereas many people have make important contributions to neuroscience using him as an example of one theory and the other and such use is by itself relevant and notable.

Once again: I have nothing against McMillian, and he may be 100% right or 100% wrong or somewhere in the middle we cannot know. Future works will go with him or against him, and there is nothing wrong with that. Howevever until them I believe it is a good idea to present his proposals as that, as proposals from an author based on data and his interpretations from that data (that is the problem of history, hardly ever based on hard data). In this sense I have to say that right now the article makes a good job in most sections since it usually presents info attributting it to McMillian and letting the reader decide how much weight he gives to it.

Once said that: even if he is 100% correct is irrelevant. Historical use of Gage's case is notable, and cannot be simply dismissed in a few lines as fully faulty, which is what is more or less done in the use and misuse section right now.

As I have always said: if you really want to improve the article in a neutral tone we could discuss how to do it.

--Garrondo (talk) 14:32, 17 June 2013 (UTC)

Soft hyphens

Extended content

:::::::::The following is copied from User talk:Bender235#Phineas Gage. The edit in question, by Bender235, changed the markup (a) &emdash;, (b) &endash;, and (c) &shy; to (a) a literal em-dash(—), (b) a literal en-dash (–), and (c) a literal soft hyphen, which is nonprinting and invisible in the edit window. What was the purpose of these changes? En- and em-dashes are hard to distinguish in the markup, and soft hyphens improve layout and appearance -- why did you remove them? EEng (talk) 01:52, 29 May 2013 (UTC) Soft hypens are a bit too much Insp. Gadget for Misplaced Pages. If you look at the source of the article then, it is basically unreadable, which is something Misplaced Pages should always avoid. --bender235 (talk) 09:05, 29 May 2013 (UTC) I see. And you changed the mdash/ndash markup to literal mdashes/ndashes because...? EEng (talk) 11:33, 29 May 2013 (UTC) Because User:Cameltrader/Advisor suggested it. And I don't see any reason not to do it. --bender235 (talk) 18:07, 29 May 2013 (UTC) I said why you shouldn't do it in my initial post here: the literal em- and en-dashes are very hard to distinguish in source. So in removing the soft hyphens you impaired the quality of what the reader sees (and summarily discarded a lot of someone's work) in the name of improving what the editor sees -- a tradeoff already made, in the opposite direction, by those who actually edit the article. Then you changed symbolic dashes to literal dashes, which does nothing at all except impair what the editor sees. Please don't make choices about what is or isn't convenient for the article's editors if you're not one of them. EEng (talk) 13:07, 30 May 2013 (UTC) Okay, you better get off the high horse here. I've been editing Misplaced Pages long enough to have an educated opinion on what's convenient for editors and what is not. That soft hyphen overkill you (or whoever) introduced to that article is simply ridiculous. I mean, ...sec&shy;ond, com&shy;pen&shy;sat&shy;ing..., what the hell is that? Could you name any plausible scenario in which it would be necessary for the viewer's browser to break a single word three times? Is there anybody browsing Misplaced Pages with a 10px screen, or what? --bender235 (talk) 13:34, 30 May 2013 (UTC) Brought this case to WP:MOS. And by the way, just because you contributed to a particular article more than I did does not make you its owner. --bender235 (talk) 13:54, 30 May 2013 (UTC) I'm perfectly comfortable up here on my high horse, thank you. Multiple soft hyphens allow a word to be broken at the one best point among several choices. That you think they imply breaking a single word over several lines calls into question your claimed extensive experience. As it turns out your edits didn't even remove the soft hyphens -- what you actually did, using an automated tool you apparently don't understand, was to substitute a literal soft hyphen for each occurence of &shy;, similar to your substitution of — and – for &mdash; and &ndash;. But since literal soft hyphens are nonprinting (except at end-of-line), by doing so you have made it not only (as previously explained) very difficult to visually distinguish an en- from an em-dash in the edit window, you've now made it completely impossible to see where the soft hyphens are. Good work. This article is full of medical terms and majestic 19th-century quotations, making hyphenation very helpful in avoiding unsightly underfilled lines, particularly in narrow captions and multicolumn notes/references. Your argument that readability of source text (seen by less than one editor per day) trumps readability of formatted text (seen by thousands of readers per day) is nonsense. In any event this particular choice, in this particular article, was made (or accepted with no hint of objection) by editors actually working on (or at least monitoring) it. This has nothing to do with ownership -- if you showed any interest in substantive edits to the article that would be quite a different matter from what actually happened i.e. you dropped in to impose your personal ideas of what markup should look like, and moved on. When you gain consensus at MOS for regulations micromanaging soft hyphenation please let us know, assuming the universe has not run cold by then. In the meantime, since you apparently don't know how soft hyphens work, or what the automated tool you're using actually does, think twice before applying the word "ridiculous". EEng (talk) 22:42, 1 June 2013 (UTC) You're barking up the wrong tree. I'll give you a chance to reply at WP:MOS and explain what people there describe as a "joke edit" of yours, before I revert your edit. --bender235 (talk) 13:46, 2 June 2013 (UTC) Please, no more metaphors -- so far you've got me "barking up the wrong tree" while on "the high horse". Your insistence that you are combatting "soft hyphen overkill" is ludicrous since, as already explained above, your edit did not remove the soft hyphens but merely changed them to a form making then impossible to see in the edit window. (That the soft hyphens are still there is easily seen via the hyphenated linebreaks in the live article e.g. in most image captions.) This makes no sense at all. Talk:MOS is for discussion of changes to MOS or of MOS interpretation, not forum-shopped editing disputes unrelated to anything in MOS. Soft hyphens are part of Misplaced Pages markup, and in the absence of guidelines to the contrary they exist to be used according to the consensus of editors of the article in question. I am copying this discussion to Talk:Phineas Gage#Soft hyphens so we can hear if any of them finds soft hyphens as objectionable as you do. EEng (talk) 03:47, 4 June 2013 (UTC) End of copied discussion I would recommend that both of you take a deep breath... The tone of this conversation has not been really productive. Regarding hyphens... I agree with EEng that to change them with literal literal mdashes/ndashes is a bad idea with no positive effects. On the other hand the use of soft hyphens is a tradeoff between readibility of text and accesibility of editing, being the two of them important (this is the encyclopedia that anybody should be able to edit). I have to say that sometimes I have taken a look at the editing text and it does take quite a lot of effort to understand it, so Bender may have a point there. On the other hand in the absence of policy changes in format in an article should be first consensuated. As a conclussion: I would rather not to use them unless in very specific cases since it is true that use is really extensive at several places of the article and they might be contributing to editors not being able to contribute in the article, while their positive effect is a matter of subjective aesthetic preference (I have for example no problems with spaces). --Garrondo (talk) 06:57, 4 June 2013 (UTC) I actually don't want to have this discussion here, but rather with a broader audience on WP:MOS, but let me just reply to this: "Your insistence that you are combatting "soft hyphen overkill" is ludicrous since, as already explained above, your edit did not remove the soft hyphens but merely changed them to a form making then impossible to see in the edit window. (That the soft hyphens are still there is easily seen via the hyphenated linebreaks in the live article e.g. in most image captions.) This makes no sense at all." It makes perfect sense, because the problem with soft hyphens aren't the soft hyphens themselves, but the effect they have on the readability of source code. I mean, lines like inap&shy;pro&shy;priate sex&shy;u&shy;al behav&shy;ior, ina&shy;bil&shy;ity or refus&shy;al are practically unreadable to human eye. Imagine a new editor (or any, for that matter), spotting a typo in this line and wanting to fix it: he/she would most likely have no idea what to do with this mess. Like I said, the problem aren't the soft hyphens themselves. What matters to me is keeping the source code readable. --bender235 (talk) 08:44, 4 June 2013 (UTC) These &shys certainly make the code much harder for the editors. Is it worth this inconvenience in order to give the reader a better article? Sure but I don't agree that this is happening. You might be reducing the blank space at the end of lines but you do so at the expense of breaking words up. A word broken over two lines is harder to read. I could see a use for soft hyphens where the word is very long and/or the space is very narrow but this is not the case here. Also, I believe Bender's suggestion to take the discussion to WT:MOS is quite reasonable; the use (or misuse) of soft hyphens is not just an issue for this article but is relevant for most articles. JIMp talk·cont 13:45, 7 June 2013 (UTC) Well, I think the difference seen in these screenshots does represent giving the reader a better article. Most of the soft hyphens are in captions and notes, where the layout is narrow. I also added them in places I saw bad breaks and underfilled lines, particularly in verbatim quotes not subject to editing anyway. I agree I've never seen any article so generously hyphenated, but so what? I don't buy the idea that soft hyphens are the straw that breaks the markup-complexity camel's back -- the markup in this article, as in any extensively annotated article, is already very complex. (Garrondo, just today in reference to a certain quotation you said "I was going to be bold and move it but I have been unable due to the complex syntax used." Um, but this was after another editor had removed all the soft hyphens -- so should we now remove all the < refs> as well?) Based on the screenshots I hope most can agree that soft hyphens are justified in at least some places. If editors want to discuss particular instances (or classes of instances, or some systematic way of deciding where to soft hyphenate) that's fine, but if not then mass-removal is throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and smacks of WP:IDONTLIKEIT or perhaps WHAT­THE­FUCK'S­ALL­THIS­SHIT­I'VE­NEVER­SEEN­ANYTHING­LIKE­IT­SO­IT­MUST­BE­WRONG. EEng (talk) 02:47, 10 June 2013 (UTC) I'm not convinced. Most articles never use soft hyphens, and they look OK. If long words in narrow columns cause problems now and then, you might sometimes justify a soft hyphen in such words if you can't fix the formatting to not have images on both sides or whatever is causing the squeeze. But the only way to get there is to remove all the soft hyphens and start over. Where did they come from, anyway? You? Dicklyon (talk) 03:57, 10 June 2013 (UTC) Consensus at MOS discussion for this specific articles seems that they are overall unnecessary. Moreover, the theoretical improvement throught their use is quite subjective: personally from the two images you show I find more aesthethically pleasant the first, since I really dislike breaking a word in two and have no problem with double blank spaces. I agree with their removal and then discussing if there are any places where they are essential. Also: my problem with editing is specific to this article which is really, over-marked up (and I think I am an experienced editor). Eliminating the soft hyphens might not be the solution (as you say I would have neither been able to change the quote), but it will certainly make editing easier. In this sense I think that your example using my comment is not really fair. --Garrondo (talk) 07:31, 10 June 2013 (UTC). Thank you, EEng, for the screen shots; I think that they well illustrate my point. Given the choice between the text with overly wide spaces and the one with a broken word, the first seems a whole lot more readable. Of course, this isn't actually the choice we're faced with; WP doesn't adjust spacing to fill the line but leaves a blank space at the end of the line (as far as I'm aware, though I've only checked Chrome, Firefox & Internet Explorer). Either way, though, it seems to me that in general breaking a word up over two lines is too high a price to pay for avoiding a little stray space. On looking at versions of the page with and without soft hyphens, it seems to me that the soft hyphens don't really do much in the way of removing line length inconsistency and the most prominent/noticeable difference is the broken words. When and where soft hyphens may be beneficial is under discussion at WT:MOS; the general consensus is that they are undesirable unless we're dealing with quite long words and/or quite narrow spaces. I don't see either here. Throw out the bathwater, there was no baby in the first place. JIMp talk·cont 07:25, 12 June 2013 (UTC)

Undue weight of first quote

Revision to the introduction

Subject to JVdb's permission, points have been numbered below to ease discussion

• 1. I have made a revision to the Introduction, but only to put it forward. I did like the previous introduction, but maybe it can be simpler, and I hope this will help. If it is reverted, perhaps we can discuss the following and incorporate any that are agreed upon.
• 2. 'now remembered'->'remembered' as he has only ever been 'remembered' for these things.
• 3. +'at the age of 25' as I think it helps the first sentence stand alone - combined with birth and death dates it helps the reader understand he lived many years after the accident.
• 4. Regarding '—at least for a time—', I feel that any recovery he made is best relegated to later in the introduction, as his fame is due to the improbable nature of the physical accident and survival, and the medical interest in the effects. The extent of his recovery was not known until recently, meaning it was not an important aspect of his notability, and in any case the recovery fits within 'effects on his personality and behavior'.
• 5. "no longer Gage" - the sentence was already used 'profound effects'. I think "no longer Gage" can be omitted without loosing too much of the punchiness, and removing it simplifies the sentence considerably.
• 6. I feel that the last paragraph of the introduction, about the daguerreotype and social recovery hypothesis, needed to be more of a summary of the recent findings (the 2008 advert, 2009 daguerreotype, and 2010 portrait) and the impact these findings have had on scholarship and our understanding of the man. Describing the 2009 daguerreotype and not talking about the 2008 advert and 2010 portrait felt a bit imbalanced and odd.
• 7. It would be nice to say something like 'With no new primary sources about Gage having been made public since 18??, there has been three new portraits and a report unearthed since 2008, sparking a scavenger hunt in North and South American.' :-) When was the last 'new' info, prior to 2008?

John Vandenberg 05:26, 13 June 2013 (UTC)

The accident

Subject to JVdb's permission, points have been numbered below (continuing the numbering from previous section) to ease discussion

• 8. I note that we don't have any details about his life before the accident. Did he have brothers or sisters? Who were his parents? Where did they live in New Hampshire, and what type of home did he enjoy? We know of one sister, and that her husband was "D.D. Shattuck, Esq." and we know a little of there whereabouts.
• 9. The nature of the accident feels a bit hard to grasp quickly, due to the interspersion of quotes. A nice tight and clear description of the rod and its trajectory, using modern language, would be a good addition as it would give people something they can easily quote/reuse, afterwhich a few choice quotes could then add colour and details that only have precision in the original words.
• 10. In the process of adding a concise summary of the accident, it might be necessary to drop "the American Crowbar Case" from this section, as it could be mentioned in a section more about the myth rather than the fact. It would be nice to known when this term first appeared, and how it was popularised.
• 11. The ride into town is described by the distance traveled, however I recall the duration of the journey also being recorded, or perhaps it was the time period between accident and being seen by the physician that is known?
• 12. We read that friends attended. Are there any details available about family visiting him in Cavendish? If not, we might revise "his desire to return to his family in New Hampshire" to indicate he had not yet seen his family "his desire to return to in New Hampshire to visit his family".

John Vandenberg 00:27, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

Some comments:

10. Better now?

11. No source gives the time (vs. distance, which is known) of the ride to town. (Oxcart, so a slow ride -- I don't think oxen can be inveigled upon to pick up the pace.) Later... ah, but Williams and Harlow both give time they arrived to treat Gage, which is close to what you've asked for -- now in article. EEng (talk) 05:23, 22 June 2013 (UTC)

12. Harlow's notes (1868) for Sept 14 say Gage "recognizes his mother and uncle", who apparently arrived sometime after 7 am. This is only 14 hrs after the accident, and Lebanon is 30 mi away, so the family must have summoned almost immediately (no telegraph or railroad!), consistent with the idea that Harlow and Williams quickly pronounced the injury mortal. The uncle was likely Calvin Gage (brother of Phineas' father), or possibly some brother of Gage's mother (whose names I forget at the moment. (We've invested substantial time determining where everyone was living at various points in the Gage timeline. Of course all of this is OR, but aren't you impressed?) Anyway... On the whole I don't see how this detail, on its own, adds to the reader's understanding in any useful way, but I have an idea on using it in a note on Harlow's early vs. later prognoses (vs. Gage's prognosis -- from the start he insisted he would recover).

EEng (talk) 05:43, 17 June 2013 (UTC)

Abbreviations in infobox

I don't like having things abbreviated in the infobox; on first use they should be spelled out in full as not everybody will know what they mean. --John (talk) 14:20, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

Not that I expect any further discussion on that at this point, for the record: Sure, not everyone will know that e.g. "N.H." is New Hampshire, but for that matter not everyone will know what "New Hampshire" itself means, either. Space is at something of a premium in infoboxes (though not to quite that extent as in e.g. img captions or some tables) and (I forget where) MOS explicitly endorses abbreviations in places where space is tight. I don't think it's worth it to expand the width of the entire box (at the expense of squeezing the width available for the lead -- or, in the alternative, to have an unsightly linewrap) to accommodate this one long placename "Grafton County, New Hampshire" instead of "Grafton County, N.H." (or "Grafton Co., N.H."), especially when a hover-popup immediately gives a gloss, in addition to the full name being given in the main text. EEng (talk) 00:46, 24 August 2013 (UTC)

Image widths

The apparently randomly varied widths of the images, all down the right hand side, are ugly and distracting. I understand the problem that the indented quotes go wrong if images are as is usual alternated, but I don't see why we need images of four different widths, clumped higgledy-piggledy in rustic fashion near the top of the article, where frankly several of them do not belong. We can work around the indentation problem using :: instead of the quote mechanism (yes, I know, it's klunky), and while it is never possible to have every image exactly where it should ideally be, we can surely do a little better than the mess it is now. Take an objective look at it for yourselves. Chiswick Chap (talk) 21:13, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

BTW, where there's an image at left, :: doesn't work any better than {{quote}} i.e. the presence of the photo at left keeps the quote text from being indented relative to article text proper. EEng (talk) 01:36, 16 June 2013 (UTC)

I agree with this. --John (talk) 21:41, 15 June 2013 (UTC)

It's not my placement and sizing but the result of two other editors' actions . So now I've restored the placement and sizing which obtained for several years, though in a moment I'll change the order a little. EEng (talk) 00:45, 16 June 2013 (UTC)

Per WP:IMGSIZE the images should be at the default size to allow logged-in users to set their own sizes, unless there is a special reason to depart from this. --John (talk) 08:12, 16 June 2013 (UTC)

Better look again at WP:IMGSIZE, which explicitly endorses use of the upright parameter, which multiplies image size relative to the user's Preferences-selected default image size.

• You complained about the uneven img sizes introduced by other editors, I fixed it, and you have twice now returned them to their uneven-sized state. I will now once again restore the uniform sizes.
• I have also moved the iron-through-skull diagram back to the lead, where's it's been for a very long time and where I think it's appropriate. Can we leave of discussion final img placement and sizing until the text is more settled?

EEng (talk) 01:39, 17 June 2013 (UTC)

I'm not sure what's difficult to understand about In general, do not define the size of an image unless there is a good reason to do so: some users have small screens or need to configure their systems to display large text; "forced" large thumbnails can leave little width for text, making reading difficult. Is there a reason you want to force all the images to weird sizes? --John (talk) 20:01, 20 June 2013 (UTC)

And I'm not sure what's difficult to understand about the use of upright is preferred wherever sensible. Once again, you misunderstand the very policy (WP:IMGSIZE) you are quoting: upright=x.x (which the article uses) is not a forced image size -- you may be thinking of XXpx, which is a forced image size. The "weird sizes" of images see in the article at various times have always been the result of you and other editors messing with them. Once again, can we leave discussion of img placement and sizing until the text is more settled? EEng (talk) 01:15, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

Placement of "skull dwg"

I've returned the "skull dwg" to the lead. The arguments against this seem to be:

• "Sandwiching": But the same sandwiching occurs no matter where it's put, since there are enough images at right that essentially the entire right margin is images.
• "If it's at the upper left of the article, then the reader sees it before he knows what the article's about": Images aren't always right next to most appropriate text, and sometimes precede text needed to explain it.

This image is almost iconic for the Gage case, and combining it with the daguerreotype portrait lends almost instant recognition of what's going on.

Thoughts?

EEng (talk) 07:04, 29 June 2013 (UTC)

I think that given that numerous editors have objected to it on aesthetic grounds as well as because it actually obstructs the reading flow of most readers, you might want to move it back down there. I really don't think there is any benefit whatsoever to having it there - whether or not the image is iconic.User:Maunus ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 22:38, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

As I think you know even better than I do, last month's trainwreck was primarily devoted to certain people presenting their personal preferences as policy, the misguided pet grammar peeves of their childhood English instructor Mrs. Snodgrass as fundamental rules of writing, and so on. So with your permission I'd like to start fresh.

So how about this ? That at least answers the "comes before the reader knows what the article is about" issue (though I don't really buy that objection, actually -- every magazine article that opens with a full-page photo on the left page, and the article lead on the right page facing, commits this "offense").

I have some things to say about "sandwiching" but before I do -- what do you think of the new proposed placement?

EEng (talk) 03:03, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

P.S. Good to hear from you again. I have some big changes I've been working on in my sandbox and I hope you'll be available for discussion.

Final comment

WP:SEEALSO and WP:PROSE are worth a look if anybody ever felt like getting this to GA standard. The verbose notes could be trimmed by about 90% as well. Good luck! --John (talk) 18:06, 16 June 2013 (UTC)

As the reviewer, I disagree with your assessment that the current state of MOS compliance or lack thereof should be a hindrance for GA status. I agree that the notes should be trimmed and the prose made clearer, but it is not a requirement for GA.User:Maunus ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 18:13, 16 June 2013 (UTC)

I have just moved one note definition from the infobox to the notes reflist. I will move the rest in a series of edits (please though continue to edit the article as normal). This will make the source correspond more closely to the display and the note text will be easier to review. --Mirokado (talk) 21:00, 16 June 2013 (UTC)

Peace, love, and hapiness

Caption style

One editor changed this caption:

Note partially detached bone flap above forehead

to

There is a partially detached bone flap above the forehead

with the edit summary "Inform don't instruct." I've heard this before -- that it's somehow insulting to "command" the reader to note something -- and I think it's absurd. (By that reasoning, articles shouldn't have a See also section.) Note is a standard, compact way to point something out, and it's silly to bloat the caption this way. Same goes for changing above forehead to above the forehead.

The additional volume of text isn't large in this example, but where space is at a premium even a little bit can matter. Plus, it just sounds weird.

EEng (talk) 02:59, 17 June 2013 (UTC)

MOS:NOTED. And, not to be bitchy, WP:OWN. --John (talk) 13:11, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

It is unreasonable to accuse the main contributor of ownership everytime he or she objects to some modification of their work, particularly when they do so with a sound reasoning and justification. In order to maintain a good editing environment it is necessary that contributors show a modicum of respect for those who have put in the bulk of the work, and it also sometimes require them to defer to the judgment and taste of the main contributer. This kind of respect is in fact written into several of our policies that state that MOS choices of the main contributer should be respected and not changed simply because one's taste is different. If we are to improve this article collaboratively I suggest that we start using the talkpage for reasoned argumentation, and I also suggest that we start focusing more on content and substance and less on issues of aesthetic taste and form.User:Maunus ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 14:18, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

Also you seem to be misapplying MOS:NOTED which is about using editorializing language in texts, and specifically talks about the phrase "note that". It is entirely encyclopedic and not editorializing to use the phrase "note ..." to draw attention to a particular aspect of an image.User:Maunus ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 14:21, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

It's not a case of being different, it's a case of being wrong. Eric Corbett 14:22, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

Well from where I am standing it is a case of respecting the work and choices of a hardworking context contributer of which we have none to many.User:Maunus ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 14:24, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

Not when they're wrong, as in this case. Eric Corbett 14:26, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

In this case "being wrong" is apparently just another way to say "disagreeing with Eric Corbett".User:Maunus ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 14:28, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

You would do yourself a favour by actually reading what WP:NOTED has to say and avoiding personal remarks. Think you can do that? Eric Corbett 14:32, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

You would do Misplaced Pages a favor by finding somewhere else to show off your grand editorship and knowledge of what is right and wrong so that we can get on with reviewing this article in a collegial fashion. You think you can do that? User:Maunus ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 14:46, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

So you can't then. Didn't really think you could. Eric Corbett 14:51, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

You are a funny man.User:Maunus ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 15:02, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

• Three points.
• 1) GAR is peer review. Part of that is unavoidably going to be review by one's peers, and if each suggested improvement is met with "I like it fine the way it is", then yes, that's WP:OWN.
• 2) There is no provision in policy or practice on Misplaced Pages for us "to defer to the judgment and taste of the main contributer (sic)". If you believe otherwise, show us where it is written down.
• 3) MoS says we should not use constructions like "Note that..." I've known that for years. I've pointed out the MoS section that states this. It's an interesting article and I can see a lot of work has gone into it. --John (talk) 16:11, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

1. No that is not WP:OWN. OF course the article writer likes it the way it is because that's why they chose it like that. That is not WP:OWN unless they do so against policy or without good justifications for their choices. 2. Yes there are several places in the MOS where it says to defer to the choice of the main contributer, for example regarding citation style. 3. MOS compliancwe is not and has never been a GA criterion. GAs are not FAs. Noone has objected to writing out contractions like "i've" etc.User:Maunus ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 16:23, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

Gosh what a lot of red herrings in one short post. You should start a fishmongers! We are not talking about citation style. The article does not contain the string "I've" as far as I can see. Are you thinking of a different article? --John (talk) 16:27, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

Ah, I actually misread the last point you made to mean that MOS discouraged contractions like "I've known that for years" sorry about that. MOS discourages use of "note that" in the prose because that is usually editorializing, using "note feature X" in an image caption is something else entirely and is not included in the MOS injunction. IN anycase the MOS is a guideline, not a law, and GA doesn't require compliance. And the point about citation style is to show that YES the MOS does show that when there are several valid style choices the MOS tells us to respect the main contributer. As it should.User:Maunus ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 16:35, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

But that discretion only applies in cases where there are equally valid alternatives, such as in citation style or date formatting. It does not apply with fundamental errors such as directly addressing the reader in an encyclopedia article. Eric Corbett 17:42, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

Caption style: arbitrary break

MOS:NOTED and consensus here are clear that we should not directly instruct the reader to "note" things. We inform, we do not instruct. I am struggling to understand why anyone would revert this back in 5 times! --John (talk) 18:39, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

Could you please give a diff of what you're talking about? EEng (talk) 18:46, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

Which part don't you understand and I can try to explain it to you? --John (talk) 18:52, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

Are you talking about, for example, this edit of mine? EEng (talk) 18:59, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

Hey, well done. That's right. It's the word "note" which is inappropriate. We discussed it quite recently just above and I thought we had agreed not to use it. --John (talk) 19:03, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. I take it that you still haven't noticed that the word "note" doesn't actually appear in the caption? (Look at the actual caption on the rendered page.) EEng (talk) 19:13, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

Hello? Are you still checking whether the word "Note" appears in the caption? EEng (talk) 02:27, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

May I infer from your continued silence that you now understand that the change was indeed appropriate? If I do not hear from you in 24 hours I think I'm justified in assuming the answer is Oops, I wasn't paying attention, and I was wrong. Go ahead. EEng (talk) 06:15, 25 June 2013 (UTC)

Et al.

Edit-warring

Shush up a minute

Birthdate uncertainty

Eccentric formatting

Why would we have line breaks and whitespace in all the refs? I've never seen that before and I wonder what advantage it confers. --John (talk) 07:24, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

At the zoom levels I use I find it particularly annoying, as I have to scroll much more than normal to navigate through the text during an edit. Martinevans123 (talk) 07:30, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

I find it much easier to locate individual sentences / clauses if each sentence / clause typically starts on its own line. Similarly, refs are easier to find when they start on a new line of their own, and it's clearer where it ends (and regular text resumes) if the < /ref> is on its own line also, where it's easy to see.

So what are we to do when different editors have different preferences? Well, one approach to seeing something unusual (which, however, is clearly deliberate) would be to assume that those who have been editing the article for a long time find it helpful, and either just tolerate it or bring it up on Talk. Another approach is for every new arrival to redecorate the premises in the color and style he or she prefers, ignoring the preferences of those already present.

John, in re-removing the linebreaks you simply reverted to "your" last version, without regard for other changes (to text, references, notes, filling in citation pages numbers, correcting quotations) I had made in the meantime -- you just threw those away. That's unacceptable. Furthermore, your edit summary was "MoS compliant vsn; see talk", but as we see here on Talk, this has nothing to do with MOS compliance, but simply personal preference. In other words, you threw away real work in your hurry to make something the reader can't even see look the way you like it, and you justified that with a false appeal to MOS. You, like Malevolent Fatuous, have done this over and over in the last week. Please stop. EEng (talk) 08:06, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

... my pants are not on fire, actually. I guess there's no point adding what Sacks says about Gage. Or of suggesting where better it might fit. You'll just remove it, as it's "one of hundreds". Martinevans123 (talk) 08:28, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

Goodness me. What an arrogant and unhelpful attitude EEng exhibits here. What does it say on the edit screen? Oh yes, Work submitted to Misplaced Pages can be edited, used, and redistributed—by anyone—subject to certain terms and conditions. I suppose you don't think this applies to you? It does though. Your ownership of the article, if allowed to persist, would seriously retard its development. Your writing style isn't nearly as good as you think it is, and your eccentric formatting just looks stupid. So it won't be. There is loads of material that needs to be added here for completeness, as Martin said. If that's painful to you, maybe you just need to get the hell out of the way of those trying to improve the article. I do intend to continue working on the article, and in spite of what your behaviour seems to indicate, you do not own it. Think about it. --John (talk) 08:57, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

Regarding the loads of material that needs to be added...

Absolutely there's lots that needs to be added e.g. re Gage's place in the history of neurology and so on. Who said there wasn't? The problem is that stuff like

He took to travelling, and visited Boston, most of the larger New England towns, and New York, remaining awhile at the latter place at Barnum's, with his iron.

is way easier to to distill for a Misplaced Pages article than is

For Dupuy, the damage was posterior enough to produce both symptoms. Whether Ferrier was responsible for the shift in opinion or not, after his arguments for a more frontal site, no one seems to have referred to Gage in aphasia literature as a negative instance again. Indeed, in a comprehensive review paper appearing soon after Ferrier's reply to Dupuy, Dodds cited the Gage case in relation to the role of the third frontal convolution and the island of Reil only to dismiss it.

Are you volunteering to translate this, and the hundreds of other pages in Macmillan 2000, Barker, and other sources, into article text?

EEng (talk) 12:15, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

Back to the matter at hand

Since it's decidedly a question for those who actually edit the article, I'm proposing to add back (actually, I've added them back already -- hard to explain what they are except by doing it) the visual breaks between sections, to make it easier to maneuver when editing. OK? EEng (talk) 16:47, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

I don't particularly mind if you do this while you are editing the article extensively, but these comments will of course be removed sooner or later. If I edit just one section the source ends with a huge comment with the next section title, which is completely irrelevant in that context. I suggest you remove the comments again at latest before the next GA review.

Symbolic versus literal dashes

Also, as far as dash encoding is concerned: these have several times now been "corrected" to the characters instead of html entities, often by automated tools which always do the change that way. Their occurrence is pretty clear in most articles following MOS:DASH: en-dash for number ranges and in some compound words, surrounded by spaces in sentences: unspaced em-dash only as an alternative to spaced en-dash in sentences. If you yet again go back to html entities you are wasting everybody else's time. Please concentrate on improving the article in substantive ways. Someone is bound to restore the characters without even realising you don't want it and, frankly, most other people do want it. I was in fact going to suggest anyway that you leave the en-dashes since it makes the number ranges much more readable. If you do decide you want to put entities back in, please try just changing the em-dashes this time. --Mirokado (talk) 23:26, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

The reason I prefer the symbolic to the literal is that en-d and em-d are almost impossible to distinguish in the edit window -- maybe it's something about my configuration -- is it different for you? This is precisely why the symbolic markup exists, and MOS:DASH explicitly endorses its use:

Two forms of dash are used on Misplaced Pages: en dash (–) and em dash (—). Type them in as – (–) and — (—) or click on them to the right of the "Insert" tab under the edit window; or see How to make dashes.

It is, therefore, those who go about making such meaningless "corrections" (perhaps because e.g. "html markup consumes more server resources" or similar nonsense) who are wasting people's time.

Anyway, I think I have a resolution: instead of – and — there's {{ndash}} and {{mdash}}. Since these mindless "cleanup" tools seem to have a hardon only for html, not templates, I'm guessing that they will leave this alone. (I understand what you're saying about readability of number ranges, but while smoother-reading source is better, all else being equal, it's more important that it be correct, so unless someone can explain how to make ems and ens distinguishable in the edit window it seems to me the literals are a bad idea.)

EEng (talk) 05:30, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

How about: turn the em-dashes into {{mdash}} and leave the en-dashes as the character. Then you know which are which, the source should stay stable and the number ranges stay legible. --Mirokado (talk) 03:17, 15 July 2013 (UTC)

Look, my editwindow uses monospace, under which hyphen, n, and m come out as - – —. Now, it's generally easy to distinguish mdash from the others, especially all set in a row as here, but even next to each other it takes a moment to tell ndash from hyphen -- and any of them embedded in some random text isn't easy to identify at all. I just don't get why editors should squint and puzzle to determine which type a given example represents. That's whar markup like {{mdash}} and so on is for. This idea that templates/escapes are bad and literal characters are good is just bullshit. EEng (talk) 03:10, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

"Remarkably"

I removed this but I see it's been restored. We don't usually use words like "notably" (as it's self-evident that we are noting it) or "remarkably" (as it's self-evident that we are remarking on it). Why would we do so in this instance? --John (talk) 07:52, 16 June 2013 (UTC)

Because you misunderstand WP:EDITORIAL. (We're talking about .)

• Saying something is remarkably small is little different from saying it's very or unusually small -- though sources are needed to support such adverbs, which is all WP:EDITORIAL calls for.
• The cites in the "First-hand reports" and "Distortion" sections amply support that the remarkability of the smallness of the body of known fact, but for the avoidance of doubt I'll add specific cites on this point.

EEng (talk) 01:23, 17 June 2013 (UTC)

I agree with EEng - this is not editorializing, but simply good varied language. User:Maunus ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 01:37, 17 June 2013 (UTC)

No, it's editorialising. If you really needed this in the article it could be a quote. --John (talk) 20:03, 20 June 2013 (UTC)

Notwithstanding that I provided a note with a quote supporting this passage, you have again removed it. No cognizable reason having been given for doing that, I'll be restoring it. 20:35, 22 June 2013 (UTC)

It's peacockery. --John (talk) 20:53, 22 June 2013 (UTC)

Wait -- a second ago it was WP:EDITORIAL, now it's WP:PEACOCk? Can't you make up your mind? EEng (talk) 03:30, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

Both are subsections of Misplaced Pages:Manual of Style/Words to watch. If I'm confusing you by referring to ideas that are perhaps new to you, I can make it simple to help you. It's shit writing; it sounds like a teenage girl's diary, not an encyclopedia. Does that make it easier to understand? --John (talk) 08:25, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

Stodgy writing

In what universe is went so far as to say in line with our summary style? It sure ain't this one. --John (talk) 09:02, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

Um, what does summary style have to do with it? And in what way do you see the quoted material as "stodgy"? And why is it in red? EEng (talk) 12:16, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

What does it add to the reader's understanding of the subject to include those six words where one would do? --John (talk) 12:56, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

(sigh) Your insistent statements such as ] "We should never use language like this" and "This is a word to avoid" ignore the opening words of WP:Manual_of_Style/Words_to_watch: "There are no forbidden words or expressions on Misplaced Pages, but certain expressions should be used with care, because they may introduce bias." So what matters is whether a particular use appropriately reflects the sources; thus if you wish to continue your campaign to find something "wrong" you'll to have to read the sources cited to compare them to the article. Until you do, you need to stop changing article text to new text with different meaning.

In the instant case, you changed Bigelow went so far as to say to Bigelow said, your edit summary asserting these have the the "same meaning". But they do not, because went so far as to say emphasizes (as do the sources) that Bigelow's presentation of Gage reflected his hostility to phrenology and suspicion of localization, and said does not. Also, without the kineticism of went, you lose the setup for the next paragraph, which describes the "reversal" in thinking represented by Harlow's second report 20 yrs later.

Good writing operates at different levels for different readers:

• An unsophisticated reader may be simply unaware of subtleties of wording apparent to more sophisticated readers.
• What we might call a "semi-sophisticated" reader, realizing that other wordings were possible, may be thereby spurred to learn more by checking out the sources or discussing with others.
• But a "sophomoric" reader, making a similar realization, simply assumes that what he doesn't understand isn't worth understanding, and sets out to unclutter his mind by eliminating it.

So to answer your query, the longer phrasing indeed serves the reader's understanding. I'm restoring it.

EEng (talk) 20:35, 22 June 2013 (UTC)

This phrase only means "Bigelow's presentation of Gage reflected his hostility to phrenology and suspicion of localization" to you. To the rest of us it looks stodgy and constipated. Why not improve the poor witing, now it's been highlighted to you, rather than reverting to went so far as to say? I'd go so far as to say this is childish and unlikely to result in the improvement of the article. --John (talk) 20:57, 22 June 2013 (UTC)

Just putting "said" is clearer. I really don't think that the words you've used explain anything at all about the claim that "Bigelow's presentation of Gage reflected his hostility to phrenology and suspicion of localization." If that is a point that you think needs to be made, you'll have to make it separately. Martinevans123 (talk) 21:12, 22 June 2013 (UTC)

My word, I was worried that the notes section was getting longer than the article. But we now have a hidden note that's longer than many of the visible ones. For whose benefit is all that material? The general article reader? Martinevans123 (talk) 23:01, 22 June 2013 (UTC)

You're referring to the "hidden notes" delimeted by <!​-- and --​> as seen in this diff . I often copy full passages from sources and use the commenting to excerpt it. That lets everyone see that the excerpt is faithful, and allows easy adjustment of the excerpt. In this case likely more of the passage can be used eventually, but that will require some surrounding explanation, and what's shown name is enough for present purposes. EEng (talk) 23:57, 22 June 2013 (UTC)

That's a great idea. I've augmented the text, and added a note, on this point. EEng (talk) 23:57, 22 June 2013 (UTC)

Notes

I don't think I've ever seen so many notes in an article. They now account for 24,103 characters out of 63,757 in the entire article, i.e. about 38%? When you say "likely more of the passage can be used eventually" do you mean hidden notes will be unhidden, or notes will be moved into the article main body, or both? Thanks. Martinevans123 (talk) 08:48, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

Quantity of notes in this article is highly unusual, but that in itself is not bad. I do think that as used they help to make the article more readable, while at the same time they help to avoid original research while using primary sources (or primary and a half, which is the case with most refs on Gage). Similarly, regarding hidden notes, lets take them as the parameter quote on refs, I would say that they improve the article as they probably make eding easier regarding verifibility for all the editors involved. They might be ways of not using them... but as they are here I would not change it when there are much better ways of improving the article. --Garrondo (talk) 13:06, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

On second reading: what I would not do is to cite several times the same note, as if they were refs. They are not, they are editorial notes, and hence I believe that with one time or at most once in each section is enough- I would have them only the first time they are relevant.. If one is interested enough in reading notes, he would have red the full article sequentially with its notes. I would not have 3 times a link to the same ref as is done now for example for note E in use in the distortion section.--Garrondo (talk) 13:14, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

Sacks and others

I have remained aside regarding most style discussions, since I am not sure they are worth it, and the tone of them is far from what should be expected.

On the other hand , recently a line on Sacks has been eliminated.

The line was: "Gage is discussed by British-American neurologist Oliver Sacks in his 1995 book An Anthropologist on Mars." I agree with EEng that as it is, it is not helpful since it does not say how can this mention be relevant. However I do think that inclussion (as I have repeatedly stated) of other uses is indeed a good idea. To include a line on how the case was used by Sacks (and any others) could be helful from my point of view, but a bit more of detail would be needed. I have to say that It's been a time since I red that book so I do not remember how much was the case used, so might be a good idea to discuss if it is really relevant and how to word it first in talkpage. Moreover, I do think that its place would be the use and misuse section, which currently is a misnomer for "misuse according to McMillian". Once again: it seems cracy that only mention of orbitofrontal cortex along the article is in the see also section, with no mention of the last 20 years using the case as an example of frontal lobe injuries.

As an example in case I have not made myself clear I would include something alog the lines: Gage is discussed by Oliver Sacks in his 1995 book An Anthropologist on Mars, in which is portraited as an example of how a frontal lobe damage... (do not think that nationality or even profession is worth mentioning).

--Garrondo (talk) 09:04, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

• Agree. Adding more detail would be better than removing it altogether. --John (talk) 09:08, 21 June 2013 (UTC)
• Agree. I had thought Sacks' notability as a popular writer might recommend him for inclusion. His nationality and profession were context only. He's also discussed Gage in interviews (not really surprising, I guess.) Martinevans123 (talk) 09:48, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

• I think you guys are mixing up different things. Of course the material on Gage's place in the history of neurology etc. ought to be expanded, and one imagines Sacks could be used as source that could be cited for some of that new material -- to the extent Sacks discusses Gage's place in the history of neurology in a serious way (though I doubt it -- most of Sacks' writings are popular, not academic.)

  But to use Sacks' writings as a source (as just mentioned) for something we want the reader to know about Gage is completely different from the article discussing Sacks' writings themselves (which is what the removed passage does). For that we'd need (as a gating requirement, as for any other article content) other sources discussing Sacks' writings as themselves somehow significant to an understanding of Gage -- what sources would that be?

EEng (talk) 11:03, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

The single sentence on Sacks was intended as just a starting place. His work might inform our knowledge of Gage and how his case has been interpreted by neurology. Sorry if you doubt Sacks' "seriousness". Martinevans123 (talk) 11:31, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

But isn't the usual procedure to check what a source says before adding it to an article -- not to add it right off based on speculation on what it "might" say? And I didn't mean to imply that Sacks lacks seriousness in general; but re Gage vs. the history of neurology, you'll find that he doesn't treat that issue in any particularly careful way (which is fine in a popular presentation). EEng (talk) 19:02, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

I must have thought this was a "popular encyclopedia article" into which a popular writer with an article on that book here alreday, might fit, rather than a learned examination of "Gage vs. the history of neurology." I read what Sacks said and thought it was relevant, digestible and accessible. That's all. Martinevans123 (talk) 19:30, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

I'm with EEng on this one actually. I've occasionally mentioned a source directly in an article, but only when other sources have referred to it in turn, usually because they pass comment on it being critically acclaimed, comprehensive or otherwise worthy of note. In other words - is the source itself notable? If it is - put it in the article text, if it isn't, leave it out. Ritchie333 11:52, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

I like that, though I think your particular wording makes it most appropriate for evaluating formal (e.g. scientific/scholarly) publications for inclusion. For popular material I have used various versions of the following, with some success, in similar situations elsewhere:

A fictional, semifictional, or popular portrayal of an article's subject is worth noting or discussing in the article on that subject to the extent that reliable secondary sources demonstrate that the portrayal adds to an understanding of the subject itself or of the subject's place in history or popular perception.

EEng (talk) 12:32, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

One thing that Sacks does say in that book is that it was Ferrier's 1879 Gulstonian lectures that "introduced the Gage case to a worldwide medical community". He doesn't say a lot, but what he does say seems perfectly sound and useful. I think you should take a look. Sacks also contributes quotes the chapter "Phineas Gage: A Case for All Reasons" in C. Code, C.W. Wallesch, A. R. Lecours, and Y. Joanette, (eds.), Classic Cases in Neuropsychology, London: Erlbaum, 1995.

Um, well, no. A Case for All Reasons is Macmillan. As to the statement that Ferrier put Gage on the world stage, that would put Sacks in moderate conflict with Macmillan, which then returns us to the question I tried to raise above with no success. Perhaps you will see the relevance where Garrondo didn't. EEng (talk) 12:48, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

Yes, he quotes from it. It's Chapter 18 in that collection. He also has a long quote from Harlow, that he made 20 years later, about things he had missed. I don't see what's wrong with "moderate conflict" between commentators, or even severe conflict for that matter - I guess that they are competing claims that are each notable. Martinevans123 (talk) 13:12, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

Um, well, yes. --John (talk) 21:34, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

Or is this just the Macmillan show? Martinevans123 (talk) 21:15, 22 June 2013 (UTC)

I would not classify Sacks books exactly as popular, nor would I classify his cases as semi-fictional,. In the specific case of Gage: they are a secondary source (as reflections from Sacks on the case departing from primary sources), from an expert (as a specialized neurologist in clinical neurological cases) but not peer-reviewed. In this sense they are of similar quality to McMillians books such "An odd kind of fame" (as it is also secondary, not-peer reviewed source from an expert). In this sense I do not see the problem with them. The fact that Sacks or any other are opposed to McMillians theories is neither a problem (indeed I would say it is good to balance the article), as I would say that there is no consensus yet on McMillians and his theories. However, my point was not only for Sacks but specially for the many other publications using Gage as an example of orbitofrontal damage (examples: Damasio in more length, Stuss, Fuster, etc...) since none are mentioned enough or in a neutral way. --Garrondo (talk) 12:41, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

Arbitrary break

One of our jobs as editors is to evaluate the reliability of sources, and a given source can have different levels of reliability on different subjects. Sacks, for example, is a brilliant neurologist and I wouldn't think to question what he says about neurology per se (the nature of this or that disease, the state of the treatment art, etc). But Sacks is not a historian of neurology, so let's look at some of the things he says about Gage:

• The article currently says that Gage's accident occurred outside Cavendish, Vermont, but Sacks says it occurred "near Burlington, Vermont" -- 130 miles away. So should we change the article to say, Authorities conflict as whether the accident occurred in Cavendish, or in Burlington?

Discussion: Macmillan supplies dozens of period newspaper reports (some of them in facsimile), three extended medical-journal articles (by physicians who either treated or interviewed Gage), a sworn declaration by the man whose oxcart returned Gage to town after the accident, photographs of the accident site, and much else, all confirming that Cavendish was the scene of the accident. It's obvious Sacks simply mixed up the site of the accident (Cavendish) with the name of Gage's employer (the Rutland and Burlington Railroad). This is not a controversy or a conflict of "theories" -- it's just fact versus misinformation.

• Macmillan says that Gage "soon became the standard against which other injuries to the brain were judged," but Sacks says that Ferrier's "Gulstonian Lectures of 1879 introduced the Gage case to the worldwide medical community". Should the article read, Authorities conflict as to when Gage became well-known to doctors worldwide. Sacks says it was Ferrier's 1879 Gulstonian lectures which "introduced the Gage case to the worldwide medical community", but Macmillan claims that Gage was well known much earlier.?

Discussion: Macmillan 2000 has several chapters analysing medical articles on Gage, including articles whose authors debate the authors of earlier articles, sometimes across international boundaries. Just one page of his endnotes lists at least fourteen medical articles reporting Gage by 1850 and several textbooks by the time of the Civil War, plus articles in which physicians compare their own brain-injury patients to Gage. Without counting carefully, Macmillan cites something like 140 books and articles mentioning Gage before 1878. These include publications throughout the US, Dublin, Edinburgh, London, Paris, and elsewhere.

Ferrier himself (a Brit, let us remember) opens his discussion of Gage by referring to him as the case "known as the 'American Crowbar Case' ... this case, in addition to its importance otherwise, has lately been appealed to by Dr. Dupuy ...", though noting that it "was at one time regarded as a mere 'Yankee invention' ". Ferrier's Gulstonian made Gage famous as a piece of evidence for localization, but Gage per se was already famous. Since Sacks was writing before Macmillan 2000 appeared he can be excused for this error, but it is an error nonetheless.

• Sacks refers to Ferrier's "Gulstonian Lectures of 1879", but Macmillan refers to Ferrier's "Gulstonian Lectures of 1878". Should the article say, Sources disagree as to whether Ferrier gave his Gulstonian Lectures in 1878, or 1879?

Discussion: Ha, ha, just joking. But Sacks is mixing up the year of the Lectures with the year of their publication.

• Sacks says that "by the beginning of 1849 was called 'completely recovered' ".

Discussion: Sacks is quoting the inscription on the tamping iron, which was inscribed at the end of Gage's visit to Bigelow in Boston. Except that was January of 1850, not "early 1849" as Sacks has it.

Sacks' treatment of Gage is not even a page and a half (excluding the extended quote from Harlow) and in that space makes four errors of fact that I could spot right off. Now then... what, sourced to Sacks, is proposed to be added to the article?

So we might want to include this critique of Sack's pitiful non-historical commentary as a non-hidden footnote? At least he got his name right. Martinevans123 (talk) 22:43, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

Changes

In line with discussion above I have made several changes: 1-Put first section in use that section on distortion. For 150 years it has been used, while weight on misuse is mainly from an author in recent years so it fits better chronollogically and also a bit less weight is given. 2-Changed title to "use". Misuse is probably an editorial point of view and it is more neutral for most of the cases (exception is surgery) to say use. 3-Moved paragraph from McMilliams from the opening of the use section to conclussion of the distortion section, since it specifically talks about how much distorted the case has been. I feel it closes really nice this section. 4-Added a line on use as an example of orbitofrontal damage. Right now is a single line with an example reference, but I hope it is a beginning to include futher and better references on the importance of the case in this sense.

--Garrondo (talk) 13:47, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

A version with my changes appears here:. As I was afraid it would occur EEng has reverted it without answering or commenting here (only using edit summaries). I would like to hear other opinions on the two possible reorderings: the one I carried out and the one by EEng (previously existing) as here (as I have later carried out a partial edit that goes halfway between the two.

More specifically I want to hear other's opininions on the following questions (including of course EEng's):

• Do you think that is better to have first the section on distortion or the section on use? I favour the latter as it is more cronollogichal, and also I think than the case is more important because of its use than because of its misuse and distortion. Right now it gives the opposite impression: that its importance for neuroscience comes from its misinterpretation.
• Do you think that starting the paragraph of use with "Beyond the importance of correcting the record of a much-cited case, Macmillan writes, The facts suffer so frightful is to give undue weight to McMillians and give an overall impression that all uses of the case have not been adequate? While I am not sure on what is the solution I would favour a more cronollogichal presentation of the use of the case with only commenting on the misuse on the second place.

--Garrondo (talk) 07:25, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

1. The reasons for my changes are given in my edit summaries, step by step. EEng (talk)

Yes, but still discussion on talk pages is still useful. In this sense it gives the possibility for disscussion in depth, and also for others to be involved, which is what I am seeking now (while nevertheless I value your opinion).--Garrondo (talk) 14:09, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

2. You say that "misuse is probably an editorial point of view" and "I think the case is more important because if its use than because of its misuse and distortion". The last time you and I discussed this you said you had not read the sources, and if that's still true I wonder how you came to those conclusions. We shouldn't be making decisions based on what you think is "probably" in the sources. EEng (talk)

I have not red McMillians, but it is irrelevant to current discussion since I do not doubt on his conclussions. Important thing is that he is a single author with a position not backed up by others. I have red comments from Stuss, Fuster, Damasio, Sacks and other, and what prevails in their discussion of the case it is not the misuse, but the importance as an example. Regarding editorial point of view: I was only refering to the title choice, since in the content of such section you do not have references that say that such authors misused the case. It is said Thus in the nineteenth-century controversy over whether or not the various mental functions are localized in specific regions of the brain, both sides managed to enlist Gage in support of their theories: that is NOT misuse, only differences of perspective.

The section certainly did have references re theoretical misuse, i.e. See Macmillan (2000 passim), Macmillan (2008, p. 831) and Barker (1995) for surveys and discussion of theoretical misuse of Gage. . And there were three direct quotes (Macmillan, Ferrier, Smith, Sacks) and cites to 2 others (Jackson, Dupuy) complaining of e.g. the inexactitude and distortion to which they are subject by men who have some pet theory to support, making the idea of "difference of perspective" silly. To make it more obvious, I've moved more of that material into the main text, and added Kotowicz as well. That gives Macmillan, Barker, and Kotowizc all in agreement on misuse. So it's not just (as you say below) "just one author" -- and these three are absolutely everyone that I know giving an historical evaluation of theoretical use. Do you know of any others? EEng (talk) 06:10, 25 June 2013 (UTC)

3. Surprising as it sounds the distortions and misuses are more important that the "uses". In fact, distortions and misuses are about all there are, because until about 15 years ago there was no clear idea of what Gage had been like after his accident -- it was all just made up. There are a lot of reasons for this but the biggest one is that it was almost impossible to find Harlow's 1868 paper, there being only about a dozen copies worldwide. EEng (talk)

EEng (talk) 11:23, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

Says who? Yes I know... McMillians... Anybody else? Ummm...Would be great to have third parties that say so, until then it will stay as single author proposal and as such we should present it. --Garrondo (talk) 14:09, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

Would it be too much to ask for you to start spelling Macmillan properly? I supplied a long list of such "third parties" to you just two weeks ago , but here they are again, plus more.

• Ammons, Psychological Reports (2001)
• Goldenberg, Cortex (2004)
• Eling Contemporary Psychology (2003): "Macmillan’s study is a colorful picture of how scientists (and subsequently all kinds of people in society) used a particular case to convince others of their own theories."
• Crichton, Lancet (2001)
• Saling, Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry (2001): "a study of the mutations that creep into the historicoclinical record in medicine"
• Long, Neurosurgery Quarterly (2002). "Even some of the most prestigious academic researchers have disseminated erroneous information about this most important injury and its outcome"
• Hayward, Br J for the History of Science (2002): "a stunning example of the ideological use of case histories and their mythological reconstruction."
• Kotowicz "Macmillan scoured all the sources and commentaries on the case and as far as material regarding Gage is concerned this must be a definitive work."
• Marshall, Science (2000): "The definitive account. One of those rare occasions on which one can truly say that further research is not necessary."

In addition, as seen in the material added to the article recently, Barker as well draws on and concurs with Macmillan.

EEng (talk) 06:10, 25 June 2013 (UTC)

Commentaries on a recently published book are not really the source of anything. --Garrondo (talk) 07:01, 25 June 2013 (UTC)

Response to Garrondo on "one author's opinions"

No, reviews certainly do have value in judging sources. But if you wish, let's restrict ourselves to research papers (or in the case of Kihlstrom, a keynote address). Excluding Macmillan's own work, since 2000 there have been only five papers (that I know of) either on the subject of Gage, or at least primarily about him. Here's what they say:

• Kotowicz (2007): "Macmillan scoured all the sources and commentaries on the case and as far as material regarding Gage is concerned this must be a definitive work. ... Most commentators still rely on hearsay and accept what others have said about Gage, namely, that after the accident he became a psychopath ... The psychopath Phineas Gage has now entered scientific folklore" (citing Macmillan 2000)
• Leach, Phineas Gage and the beginnings of neuropsychology (2002): "Gage is unquestionably one of the most famous patients in neurological history, a fixture in neurological textbooks and the subject of many papers. (Regrettably these often err in their assertions about him, principally because they neglect the original Harlow reports.)" (citing Macmillan 2000)
• Ratiu (2004): "Accounts of Gage’s behavior and psychic functions following his trauma are few and sketchy, and appear inconsistent with his subsequent employment as a coach driver in Chile (Macmillan, 2000). ... Macmillan (2000) has shown that the record of how Phineas Gage’s character changed after the accident must be considered with caution..."
• Van Horn (2012): "Macmillan has noted that many reports on Gage's behavioral changes are anecdotal, largely in error, and that what we formally know of Mr. Gage's post-accident life comes largely from the follow-up report of Harlow according to which Gage, despite the description of him having some early difficulties, appeared to adjust moderately well for someone experiencing such a profound injury."
• Kihlstrom (2010). Social neuroscience: The footprints of Phineas Gage. Social Cognition, 28, 757-782 "As Malcolm Macmillan has cogently demonstrated, many modern commentators exaggerate the extent of Gage's personality change, perhaps engaging in a kind of retrospective reconstruction based on what we now know, or think we do, about the role of the frontal cortex in self-regulation."

An example from before Macmillan 2000 was published (citing Macmillan's earlier work) is

• Barker (1995): "The checkered history of the case may serve today as a cautionary whisper."

Then there's Sacks, whose short treatment refers to the "interpretations and misinterpretations, from 1848 to the present" of Gage, also citing Macmillan. The two other sources you've mentioned (Stuss, Fuster) cover Gage in two to four sentences, basically only reciting vaguely the standard story; since they are works on neurology, not the history of neurology, you wouldn't expect more from them.

So Macmillan's work is not "just one author's theories". Every paper on Gage since Macmillan 2000 was published cites Macmillan not just with approval but with enthusiasm.

EEng (talk) 07:11, 30 June 2013 (UTC)

Commentary of good bye

I have found difficult to work with editor involved in the article over the years; which I have recently discovered is one of the authors of the papers he cites one and again. Several editors have over the years said similar critiques on the content of the article, namely that it is too much centred on Macmillians theories, and not enough coverage of 150 years on theories on Gage is given. A blatant example of this is that until this week there was no mention or orbitofrontal cortex, and only a line on Damasio in the article.

This said: I am not fond of working in highly debated articles, where I have to fight for every comma I add. The stress and time are not worth it. So as of today I do not think I would add a single line in this article for a few years. See you around. --Garrondo (talk) 07:01, 25 June 2013 (UTC)

Sorry to hear that, Garrondo. It's always useful to have a debate, even if one fails to get in all the changes one wants. I think even Macmillan uses the occasional comma. And maybe rather controversual italics, et al. Martinevans123 (talk) 09:10, 25 June 2013 (UTC)

No one's ever stopped you from mentioning the orbitofrontal. And if by "critiques of the article" you mean your idea that Macmillan is a lone apostate, see above . I am sorry to see you go. EEng (talk) 07:11, 30 June 2013 (UTC)

Citations

I have tweaked a few citations so the presentation is uniform (and the cite templates generate consistent metadata). I also completed the Bramwell (1888) citation using {{cite doi}} since that is a convenient way of getting a correct citation with any relevant urls. It is fairly easy to substitute the expanded {{cite journal}} if editors prefer that, but I have left cite doi for now as it is one way of keeping the article source uncluttered. --Mirokado (talk) 14:41, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

EEng has added a brief comment so we can keep track of cite doi references in the source. That seems like a good idea so I have updated the second cite doi similarly.

Searching for Ratiu while checking that change, I now notice that the same citation had in fact already appeared inside another reference and a related link as yet another external link elsewhere. This reference and its associated links are very valuable resources (the video clips worked for me once I had enabled cookies and scripts for NEMJ) but illustrate the difficulties of maintaining the rather complex net of references, citations, extra links and notes within this article. In the particular case of this reference, I think it is essential to improve the linkages to help both the reader navigate around the article and us maintain it. I will make some changes just for this reference and closely related links and then report back here. We can then discuss them as necessary. --Mirokado (talk) 17:21, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

The link to the video had presumably been changed: now corrected. I have created citation anchors for "Ratiu et al." and the video itself and used them elsewhere in the article. There may be more related tweaks needed, but I can't do any more tonight.

The citation list is easier to read if is a series of (possibly nested) bullet points, so I would like to bullet the two citations in the "Ratiu et al." list item.

This use of explicit citation anchors works nicely when the citation link is to arbitrary content, but there are much better ways of generating links between more structured inline references and their citation, if we decide we want to do this more generally. --Mirokado (talk) 00:15, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

Improving the citation/reference/notes/whatever-they-are system

I will continue with relatively minor citation maintenance and tidying tangles like the above if I notice them. These moves towards consistency will help when checking all the reference-citation relationships for self-consistency, I will ask about any non-obvious issues. --Mirokado (talk) 21:16, 28 June 2013 (UTC)

It will still be relatively difficult for the reader to skip back and forth between citations and the references in this rather complex article, so I would like to introduce links between the existing inline citations and shortened footnotes and the corresponding citations. There is a well-developed set of templates which supports this. The result would have a very similar presentation but with wikilinks added. This would count as "changing the citation style", see WP:CITEVAR, so should not be done just for the sake of it and only with consensus. I will wait for comments before making any such changes. --Mirokado (talk) 21:16, 28 June 2013 (UTC)

Your work so far has really improved things, thanks! As to what you say just above...

1. I don't think you're proposing (at least I hope you're not proposing) to introduce Harvard-style refs to the main article text. I find those very intrusive.

2. What I think you're suggesting is to e.g. in this note make Fleischman (2002) into a link to, I guess, the Fleischman entry in the "Sources and further reading" section lower down. Yes? However, there are so many options and flavors to the templates you pointed to that I'm unclear on how exactly this would work. Can you explain a bit more, or point to an article that's set up the way you have in mind?

3. There are two aspects of the current setup I feel strongly should be retained (subject to someone showing me I'm thinking about it all wrong, of course):

• Separation of Notes from References: Notes give you actual additional information, whereas References are just for "If you don't believe me, here's where you can look it up!" I think it's very helpful for the reader, when he runs into a superscript letter or number, whether on clicking the superscript he'll get a fun additional quotation or whatever, or just find some stuffy scholarly apparatus. (Maybe "References" should be renamed "Citations", however.)
• Subdivision of Sources: Especially since this is a subject that's frequently covered in school and college courses, I think it's useful to separate sources for specialists vs. those for nonspecialists.

4. There's also a technique I've used with success in another article -- see and note the superscripts like this , which means page 23 of the reference. This worked well in that article because there were many refs to scattered single pages of a given work -- not sure it has much application here, but thought I'd throw it into the mix

5. Something else I discovered how to do in Sacred Cod is to have Notes which themselves carry their own Refs (like here ). I think this may have application in this article, and in fact might be an alternative to your original suggestion of Harvard refs being linked (if I'm understanding your idea correctly).

• In fact, that's the reason for the {{#tag:ref }} syntax -- you can't have <ref></ref> inside of another <ref></ref> but you can have a ref inside {{#tag:ref }}.
• However, this doesn't seem to work here in this article -- I think it's because we moved the Notes text into the Notes section itself, instead of their being out in the main article text, but I'm not sure and maybe I'm looking at it wrong. Can you see if you can figure out what's going on?

If any of this doesn't make sense, please ask me to clarify.

1. Dummy ref

EEng (talk) 06:21, 29 June 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the response.

• First two points, correct: I am not suggesting changing the appearance of reference callouts in the main text of the article. Wherever there is something like "Author (year)" (in the notes and references lists), there would be a link to the corresponding full citation. Thus, apart from the links, no significant change to the article or notes presentation. I provide an example below.
• Agree with both the points you find particularly important: separation of notes for the reason you state and subdivision of sources again for the reason you state (that subdivision makes it a bit more difficult to find a particular citation without links though which is a motivation for doing this).

My fear was that this apparatus automatically generates the source list (in alphabetical order or something), but I see now that's not a problem. EEng (talk)

• The {{rp}} method you mention in Sacred Cod is most suited to the case where there are many references to different page ranges in the same work. It works nicely in Sacred Cod where about half the inline references relate to the same citation. I don't think it would be so necessary here, but the transformation needed to use it would be easy if we decide otherwise.

It's interesting to contrast the subject matter (and consequently the nature and use of the sources) in Cod vs Gage. You're right this technique has little applicability here, but potentially it has some applicability. My fear is that where the callouts (as you call them -- good term) are long e.g. :123-456 then they become visually intrusive. As an experiment I'm gonna try applying it in a few places. EEng (talk)

• The support for <ref> is not recursive, but <ref>s can be placed inside inline definitions of {{#tag:ref}} containers as you have mentioned (although somebody did discover that you can have a single <ref> inside one {{#tag:ref}} in a reflist, provided that occurs before any other <ref> definitions in the reflist). At the time we separated notes from main content in the source here, there were no inline reference callouts in the notes, so I think we can live without introducing them now and the benefits of having so many notes separated in the source outweigh any possible gain otherwise. In any case I think Author (year) or similar is OK for notes.

Again here, it's useful to contrast the nature of the material at Sacred Cod vs. here. At Sacred Cod the notes material is just straight narrative or quotes which need only simply support in the form of e.g. cite to a newspaper article -- superscript callout works well for that (remember, we're talking about inside of Notes). But in Gage many/most of the notes need to explicitly call out who it is that's being quoted etc., so a Harvard-like system makes more sense. So I agree not much of a loss for Notes to not be able to contain superscript callouts to Refs. EEng (talk)

For an example of this method retrofitted successfully to an existing article, please see Anne McCaffrey (permalink) where, for example, Pringle 1985 is linked to the full citation both from note e and reference 45. That article happens not to have parentheses around the years, that is just a case of choosing which related template to invoke. (That article also illustrates that we are not restricted to author names: we had to use a book title to avoid confusion between mother and son).

Genie (feral child) uses it too, though the refs list seems like there ought to be able to compact it some way -- I don't think we have that problem here either. EEng (talk)

--Mirokado (talk) 16:04, 29 June 2013 (UTC)

It's great to run into someone whose self-esteem isn't founded on imagined mastery of whether et al. goes in italics or not, and I think we have similar outlooks on how to best serve the reader. As mentioned I'm doing a little experiment and then I'll have some other questions/thoughts.

In the meantime, what do you think of the little orange and black padlocks in the Sources? They're supposed to go at the end of each entry, of course, but I think they're kind of cute, and also it catches the reader's attention with the fact that he/she can view the source. (Where a book had "limited preview") on Googlebooks I counted that as "open".)

EEng (talk) 02:25, 30 June 2013 (UTC)

Well, this was the experiment. Not sure if it accomplished much. I think even long superscripts are fine when they come at the end of a paragraph (e.g. end of Accident section), but not so good when they're in the middle of a paragraph (e.g. First-hand reports of mental changes section). I'd like to leave it this way for now while we think it over, OK?

In the meantime, I have a question: suppose we wanted to change the Sources section so that each entry is something like a ref i.e. each entry is numbered or lettered or something and can be referenced by superscript callouts elsewhere. But as already mentioned we want to control the order in which the entries are listed -- not have them come out in the order they are first referenced in the article. Is there some way to define a set of refs (like we do in Notes) and force them all to be omitted in order? The only way I can think of is maybe some kind of dummy invocation of all the entries, in the order desired, at the very start of the article, plus some hack to throw away the superscripts generated by those callouts. Get what I mean?

Also, what do you think of the External Video box?

EEng (talk) 04:13, 2 July 2013 (UTC)

Citations, part 2

Responses to questions:

• Little orange and black padlocks: probably better after the citation, they clutter up first author's surname otherwise. But we can wait for other comments...

What I would really have liked is for the little padlocks to take the place of the bullets, but anyway, even if we decided we liked it this way sooner or later some knowitalls would show up and tell us that the future of Misplaced Pages is threatened by such deviancy. So with your permission I'll just migrate them to their intended position at the end of each entry.

• Experiment with rp: fine to leave it for now, but I have to say I am not all that keen, the alternation of linked and unlinked numbers seems a bit clumsy.

Hmmm. Don't see why "alternation" is a problem -- what bothers me is the visual gap the long/multiple ones create. (Where that's a problem they can be moved back to References.) But as we've already discussed I'm not so thrilled either, as things stand.

• Sources section like refs: I don't think that would be practicable, it would be another level of recursion for the ref software. Also, having the citations in some sort of predictable order (normally alphabetical by surnames, increasing year) makes it easier for someone to inspect the sources used independently of their occurrence in the article.

I must not have been clear. I definitely want to maintain keeping the Sources in an arbitrary order we specify, like you said. But instead of a bullet list, I want to express them as {{Reflist|refs= }} like the Notes are; this way the usual <ref name=foo/> can be used to generate the familiar superscript callouts from the main text to individual Sources entries. And there would be the usual abcde backlinks too.

Why? Consider this Ref . It's an unnecessary steppingstone. If the Source entries could be named in e.g. <ref group=sources name=Barker> then the superscript callouts in the text would point straight to the Source, instead of going through an intermediate Ref. (Where needed rp would be used too, to generate colon-pagenumber next to the linked callout, though, for the nth time, neither of us is so hot on this currently.)

The technical issue is this. As you no doubt know, reflist outputs entries in the order they're first cited, regardless of the order in which they are listed in the refs= list. What we need is an option or something that simply directs that the order of output should , instead, follow the order of definition in refs=. This has nothing to do with recursion -- the apparatus as it is clearly has a fairly elaborate internal structure which, when it comes time to output refs, is traversed or sorted, and it shouldn't be any big deal to traverse or sort in some other order. (It's clearly not some simple FIFO structure that can't work any other way.)

Of course just because the internal structures are present doesn't mean it's easy to get at them, add appropriate syntax, and so on. I doubt seriously this will go anywhere, but I sense you might know the kind of editors who might be inspired to add such a feature.

Note also that the Sources list interjects these little subheads e.g. For specialists and I guess the refs= would have to allow normal text to be interspersed among the entries in the reflist.

• The external video box is fine in principle: a bit like the sound files which sometimes appear in composers' articles. Something else to consider in more detail when specifically reviewing image etc disposition.

Well, the complaint we're gonna get is that it's an external link, but if you read the documentation Template_talk:External_media#Bad_idea it's pretty convincing that there are times it should be used. In Gags's case it's pretty have to envision the path of the iron through his head, and this video really helps, so it's appropriate it be linked right there at the point where the accident is described.

Regarding Genie: that is an interesting and in some senses very sad article. I will probably comment on that talk page a bit later. It illustrates one of the benefits of having the automated link between reference and citation. --Mirokado (talk) 18:45, 2 July 2013 (UTC)

The editor working on it is a great guy, and has been at it hammer and tongs for about 6 months now. If you see a way you can help improves the refs or anything drop him a line on the article's Talk.

Thanks for your continued interest. More later.

(later) I figured out (I think) how to do the weird thing I described above. Whether it's worth the trouble, or not, or is even something we'll want to use in the end, or not, we'll see. But now I've got this under my skin, so I wanna see what happens. I'll set it up in my sandbox (maybe tmw or even later).

EEng (talk) 05:38, 3 July 2013 (UTC)

Oh, what a waste of time that was. Forget it.

I say, I say, I say: why are manhole covers round? --Mirokado (talk) 00:38, 4 July 2013 (UTC)

Sorry, missed this until now. That's an old one. You usually hear two answers: (1) it allows the cover can be moved by rolling (instead of carrying/dragging); (b) it's the only shape such that the cover can't fall into the hole. EEng (talk) 14:11, 6 July 2013 (UTC)

Nope, far too serious (but both undoubtedly correct). "I say, I say, I say" (for which I find no article) introduces a traditional English joke form, with a response from the hearer and the answer. In this case:

(response) I don't know, why are manhole covers round?

(answer) Have you ever tried to play Tiddlywinks with square manhole covers?

(and, "playing Tiddlywinks with manhole covers" is also a traditional phrase used to mean "doing nothing in particular") --Mirokado (talk) 22:14, 6 July 2013 (UTC)

All right then, let's go back to the live article. I made some changes to Sources, exploiting a nifty feature of refbegin. What do you think? EEng (talk) 23:45, 3 July 2013 (UTC)

Har. Sorry to spoil your fun, but I don't think the extra indentation brings the intended benefit. It further squashes anything indented by nested bullets, the bullets guide the eye to the next item anyway and anyone using a screen reader will never notice. I did try removing the column width restriction but did not think that helped as much as I had hoped. --Mirokado (talk) 00:31, 4 July 2013 (UTC)

For those tuning in late, we're talking about this (using hanging indents) vs. this (using bullets). Are you saying you prefer bullets to handing indents overall, or does your description of drawbacks apply only to the two entries (Macmillan 2000, Ratiu) that have subsidiary entries?

• If you're saying you prefer bullets overall, I agree that bullets guide the eye to each successive item, but each name is sandwiched by other stuff linewrapped from the entries above and below, so when you're looking for a particular name the eye has to stop to focus on each one before moving on, whereas with outdents the eye just skims right down. This is, after all, why bibliographies in books are formatted this way. I asked a coupla friends to try it and they agree.

  Having said that, it's only fair to point out that if a 1-column, instead of multicolumn, fmt is used, then most of the entries are only one line anyway, so you end up with a very similar "skim down to find" situation anyway -- the lefthand vertical strip of screen contains only names, uninterrupted by other non-name information. But the single-column layout looks really, really ragged to me. Here again, I propose we let this sit while we think it over for a few days? (BTW, I repeat that I enjoy working with someone who likes to sweat these kinds of details.)

• If you're saying that the subsidiary items (Macmillan 2000, Ratiu) look awful, I agree. (This partly depends on accidents of linewrapping as a function of screen size and zoom setting.) Maybe if you experiment a bit you'll hit on some syntax I haven't thought of -- no matter what I do it seems to want to add a second hanging indent.

As far as the lock icons are concerned: Misplaced Pages's ethos is the provision of freely available information, so an icon saying "this links to freely-available information" is mostly redundant. I think it would be more effective to have the extra icon only for firewalled links.

But the reality is that much external material, especially the kind found in these kinds of sources (e.g. New England Journal of Medicine) is usually unfree, and by pointing out that it's available readers may be encouraged to follow links that they otherwise might not bother with, thinking they'll get blocked. It is a bit odd-looking with all that orange, though.

--Mirokado (talk) 00:31, 4 July 2013 (UTC)

Question: The way you set up the links to the Ratiu entry -- using span id="Ratiu-et-al-2004" and so on -- any reason that couldn't have been done using {{wikicite | ref=Ratiu-et-al-2004 and so on (see Template:Wikicite)?

EEng (talk) 05:02, 4 July 2013 (UTC)

None at all as far as I know. I had forgotten about that one, we used it on Dragonflight and related articles. It would be tidier, I think. --Mirokado (talk) 19:13, 4 July 2013 (UTC)

Citations, part 3

OK, now I have another question, referring to this permalinked version ("Extent of brain damage" section) . When you hover (or when I hover, anyway -- who knows that Preferences or browser setting might affect this) over any of the superscript callouts e.g. K or 13 you get a nifty popup with the note or cite content. But in the text Ratiu et al. (2004, based on CT scans of Gage's skull etc etc, the word Ratiu is linked, but when you hover over that link the popup you get is just the beginning of the main article, instead of the Sources entry the link points to.

I tried looking at the rendered html to see what was going on but it gave me a headache. I tried setting up the link with wikicite instead of your div syntax, but it doesn't seem to make any difference -- didn't try that hard, however. Is there some way to make the popups work as desired in this case? Is there maybe something in all those Harvard templates that will do the trick?

EEng (talk) 21:33, 6 July 2013 (UTC)

Don't know, but I see the same behaviour as you. I will have a look tomorrow, a bit late for me to start now. --Mirokado (talk) 21:51, 6 July 2013 (UTC)

The popup I see with the cite content is part of the navigation popups addon functionality. I'm not sure what triggers the difference in behaviour with different links. I have tried various updates to the article source with no effect. With popups disabled, I still get a differing behaviour of the vanilla popups between the two links (using Firefox). Viewing the links as an IP using Chrome I see no popups. It seems clear that we should not waste too much time trying to diddle the article source for this, but it may be sensible to try to nail down the difference and propose an improvement to the popups tool or whatever. If I get any further I will report back here. --Mirokado (talk) 15:01, 7 July 2013 (UTC)

I agree. Though not essential, the popup feature is nice and I didn't want to lose it through the choice of one or another other ref template family -- apparently editors create templates with willy-nilly features that happen to occur to them, so maybe one has popups and another doesn't. But as you say it's so confused what's due to intended functionality vs. which browser vs. preference settings (logged in? IP?) vs. some random whoknowswhat that it's not a good investment of time to worry about it now.

I posted a query at WP:Village_pump_(technical)#Controlling_order_of_reflist but not much luck. Not sure I'm making clear to them (or even you) what I'm after so I'm going to mock something up. I've got the bit in my teeth now.

Side point: In converting parameterized cite templates to cite doi, I've noticed a non-obvious problem: often the old cite had a url to full text, but the doi cite gives url to the PMID entry instead (which in retrospect is not surprising) so the full-text url needs to be manually edited back into the doi template. I'll take care of these in this article but thought you should know for your work elsewhere.

EEng (talk) 16:04, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

Citations, 4

I have carried out the borderline-insane idea I attempted abortively a few days ago. It's in my sandbox here (permalink). (The few entries left in References section are meant to be migrated either to Sources or Notes, so ignore them.) See if you can figure out what's going on -- see the <! -- comment at the head of the source, and don't overlook the "trunc" template. Also, within the Sources section search for <br> to find a subsidiary hack.

Though I hate the hacks I really like the result, and believe it or not I propose we take it live into the article. If the template/referencing cognoscenti don't like it, let them provide a way of controlling the order of reference lists in a sane way. Look it over and tell me what you think. EEng (talk) 03:33, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

Certainly interesting and works nicely with the exception of the extra backlink which you mention and the unstructured way of adding the source-type separators (the <br> you mention). I would use the sandbox as an example to propose the necessary (tidied up) functionality to the referencing support, rather than using that example in a live article. --Mirokado (talk) 08:55, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

See WP:Village_pump_(technical)#Controlling_order_of_reflist. I've been through this kind of thing with these two before -- they seem very fixated on explaining why you shouldn't want to do whatever it is you're asking for. (this actually wasn't the end of the thread -- the rest of the discussion was an argument over whether or not the original question had been answered promptly or not). EEng (talk) 12:12, 10 July 2013 (UTC)

I've continued pursuing the direct-link-to-bibliography approach in my sandbox (permalink above, but go forward a few edits to see how far I've gotten).

• I think it really improves (and shortens) certain of the Notes to substitute superscript callouts for the current Harvard refs e.g. Note O in becomes .
• We discussed before the problem of refs within refs, and if I'm reading that discussion properly if a Note is going to contain a ref then that Note can't be in a refs= list, but must be out in the main article text. So as seen in the examples just noted certain Notes have been moved back to the main text.
• As before there are still a few References which haven't been migrated elsewhere. Eventually they'll all be Notes.

I'm coming to the conclusion that the benefits to the reader of streamlining the presentation of cites outweighs the strangeness of the spurious backlink in each Sources entry. As seen at the Village Pump discussion I'll make a Wikimedia request for a non-hacked way to control order of reflist entries, but that will likely take a long time, and I don't think we should wait. Would that be OK? EEng (talk) 04:38, 11 July 2013 (UTC)

Well it is already clear that I would try not to use "unconventional trickery" in a live article: someone is bound to change it to something else sooner or later. I'm not going to argue with you about it though. --Mirokado (talk) 23:09, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

We've had such a lovely collaboration so far -- no reason to spoil it now. By bringing it live I hope one of the following things will happen:

• Someone will show us a way to get the result we want using standard facilities without the embarrassing side effects e.g. spurious backlinks
• Someone will be inspired to add these features to the standard facilities

I've been trying to entice people to look in my sandbox (which sounds sort of vulgar, I'll admit) without success. I think taking it live is the only way to get enough exposure to enough people so that we find someone who can help.

There will likely be gnashing of teeth and tearing out of hair, but I'll deal with that. I'm not asking you to agree that this is a good way of getting the lovely sources list and other benefits -- I just ask that you agree that these are benefits worth pursuing, even if there's only a not-so-good way of getting them now, so that instead of people being indignant they should be tolerant long enough for us to find a longterm solution. How would that be? EEng (talk) 01:58, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

By "not going to argue" I meant that I won't go on about, or repeat myself over, this particular issue. Yes I agree that what you would like to achieve is worthwhile, having indeed looked at the sandbox. --Mirokado (talk) 21:01, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

Extensively revised

I'm about to post a new version I've been working on for some weeks in my sandbox -- sandbox was needed because the extensive changes to the cites/notes made it impossible to keep it in a presentable state at all times.

• I believe I have incorporated all changes to the live article made during the sandbox work
• My intent was to just make a huge change to the citation system, but one thing led to another and there are many new images, quotes boxes, and so on.
• Along the way I may have inadvertently reversed changes others made during the recent GA review. Certainly I have reverted lots of those changes in the past, but always with edit summaries or Talk comment to discuss/explain. It's not my intent to use this huge revision to slip in changes others might be concerned about, without explanatory comment. Therefore I'll be comparing this new version to the one just prior to see if I made any changes inadvertently, but that will take a few days. (I want to get the cite and other changes visible for others to see without waiting for this, though.)

• There are several technical innovations which I am not completely happy with, but I hope others might come along and offer better ways to achieve the same results:
  • Using the < ref > machinery to create an alphabetized Sources list. Unhappy aspects of this:
    • It uses an an appalling hack (if you look at the source you'll see an explanatory comment very near the top) to force the entries into author/date order
    • The a link in each Source's backlink list (a b c d etc.) is spurious.
  • Similarly using the < ref > machinery to number the figures and provide a way of referring to those numbers in the text. Unhappy aspects:
    • None of the e.g. "" links actually do anything
    • The "" etc. labeling in the captions, and in the text references to the figures, have weird sizes and vertical alignment.

Please be gentle. EEng (talk) 18:27, 27 July 2013 (UTC)

The two most problematical aspects of these changes are the Fig. links and the fixed-width quote boxes side-by-side with images.

• The Fig. links don't work because they all jump to the elided Fig. reflist, which means (on my Firefox on Linux at least) that the link does nothing. I don't in any case see the point of numbering all the figures if there is not a list of figures. Please see Misplaced Pages:Ignored feature requests#Numbering and Referencing Equations, Figures, and Tables for a generic request relating to this. Note the red warning at the top of that page!! This is something that would need to be done properly or not at all in my view. Even just jumping to a link in the caption would not be good enough here, the image itself might well not be on-screen depending on the browser implementation.

I knew the links wouldn't when I set out to do it this way. I wanted to demonstrate automatic numbering of figs etc. and this is the best I could do. The article is on 160 watchlists and as I said before, I'm hoping someone might be inspired to invent/discover a cleaner way to do these things.

• You have at present a use case for jumping to Fig. 9 from several block quotes. From the point of view of the reader I don't think that these repeated links to the front page of the paper add very much value. I would be inclined to have the image where it is and link to it from the citation too. I imagine I can do that without having to touch the Fig. stuff so I will have a go.

Yeah, originally I had the "see fig" only in the quote box immediately next to the page image -- then I thought it might look better for all the quote boxes to be consistent. Part of what's going on is that I wanted to help readers get closer to the full-text page images of Harlow 1868 available by clicking on the image of the cover page. (I've now emphasized this here though -- yes I know -- we're not supposed to say "click here" because that doesn't make sense in hardcopy yada yada yada -- don't we have any way to give alternate text for online vs. hardcopy? Anyway, I'm just trying to explore new ideas...) However, there's already a path to full text via the "Sources" entry so the click-on-cover-image is sort of redundant. But then, this is the key source for the whole Gage case, and unusually interesting for readers to see. On the other hand... Also... But we must not forget... There are a lot of arguments both ways. Anyway, whether in particular there are "See fig. X" in the quote boxes isn't central -- certainly there are places in the text one might want to say "See fig X" so the question is how to make such things work. BTW, maybe it's not obvious but I don't really care whether the "See Fig X" is or isn't a link which takes you to the fig when clicked -- I'd be fine with it not being a link, but its being a link is a side effect of using the < ref > machinery to automatically number the figures. EEng (talk) 20:32, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

• Quote blocks and images: these don't behave well with intermediate window widths. Just try with a non-maximised browser window and steadily reduce the width. You will find widths where the block is on its own and the image pushed below it on the right. A well-designed presentation looks reasonable at (nearly) all widths.

I was aware of this as well but thought I'd found a happy medium. The problem is there's no way to say, "Here's an image; put it at right, setting its width however you would normally according to its parameters. OK, now here's a quote box; set its width to whatever width is left over between the left margin and the image." At least, if there is a way to do that, I can't figure it out. Again, this is the sort of thing I hope some wizard will come by and solve for us. I chose the quote box widths (expressed as % of screen width) so that the collision does not occur under these circumstances:

• 125% zoom
• Screen width = cheapo narrow screen a friend has
• User-preference for default thumbnail with = 220px (which is the "default default", I believe)

...though having said that I seem to get collisions under those circumstances anyway, so maybe there's some variable I'm not controlling. For now I'll cut the quote box % width more (quote boxes don't look so good if too narrow, but it's still better than the collision which forces the image down). An alternative is to have the quote box be 100% width, with the img below the quote box, at the right margin, but those very wide quote boxes look AWFUL. EEng (talk) 20:32, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

Now resolved, I believe -- see EEng (talk)

You really do need to remove the Fig. stuff. Perhaps create a small user-space page illustrating what you would like to see, have a look in Mediawiki Bugzilla for any related feature requests and create one if you cannot find anything. As far as the quote boxes are concerned, some sort of substantial improvement is necessary, not sure what I can suggest at present. --Mirokado (talk) 16:29, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

• In the short term I'd like to leave it all for a few weeks, messy as it is, in hopes some wizard will see our plight and show us better ways.
• In the mid-term (assuming no wizard-savior appears) after a few weeks I agree the figure numbering is too weird (the links go nowhere, the vertical alignment is off) and it will have to be removed -- the text can always just say "See Figure" and the reader can look around for the figure. I think the Sources system, though hacked internally, looks good to the reader and can stay, the only issue being the mysterious a backlink which goes nowhere -- I don't see anyone losing sleep over that.
• In the long term, sooner or later (though maybe not during yours and my lifetimes) there will be wonderful facilities for doing all this cleanly.

EEng (talk) 20:32, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

P.S. I want to thank you for taking the time to look this stuff over and discuss. EEng (talk) 05:13, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Minor problem

Quote box - image interaction

To my unutterable astonishment this change pretty much fixes the problems re interaction between quote boxes on left and images on right. (The change is simpler than the diff makes it seem -- all that's going on is (a) the image needs to be moved before the quote box, and (b) in the quote box make align = center and get rid of width entirely. (A hack I used earlier for the formatting the "It is due to science" attribution also had to be removed.) Remaining problems:

• A bit of the quote box peeks out just above the image. This can probably be fixed via some tinkering with the pad/border/spacing parameters of the images.
• Where the quoted text (or the source attribution) in the quote box contains superscript Note/Source callouts, that messes up the vertical alignment where it didn't (?) before. This is seen most particularly in the "It is due to science" quote. (There's also a problem with the horizontal justification of that particular attribution -- due to removal of the hack mentioned above -- but that's a different problem which I think can be fixed.)
• Only the left "bigquote" is visible -- the right one is overlaid by the img. Where there's the limerick instead of an image, the right bigquote is visible "behind" the limerick. Likely the bigquotes should be turned off (which can be done via a param in quote box template.)

Any thoughts on either of the two bulleted issues above would be appreciated. EEng (talk) 01:45, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

I can only really comment on the second one; the article does look better with the bigquotes turned off. It definitely looked a little strange to see one display one way and the others sans the right quote. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 00:12, 17 August 2013 (UTC)

Layout

The article is currently a layout disaster. It looks like the worst of the internet anno 1997.User:Maunus ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 18:04, 1 September 2013 (UTC)

I appreciate your putting it so diplomatically, but now tell us what you really think.

I too am less than happy with the layout, though I wouldn't go so far as "disaster". I'm particularly troubled by the map in the first section, which I feel should be large enough so that major labels (e.g. street names) are legible at 100% zoom, but this in turn causes a problem with too little article text in that section relative to img size -- see at 100% zoom. Here is an unusual solution I tried involving moving the caption to the left of the image instead of below (though unfortunately I can only figure out how to do that at the top of the image, not near its bottom). We could use some good ideas on that.

Other than that, what problems do you see? Ideas?

EEng (talk) 00:05, 2 September 2013 (UTC)

If you can get the caption left of the image I can see that working, I agree it's best to have the street names visible at 100%. If there was a way to lower the quote boxes a bit so they're not slightly over the images that'd be good, but if not I don't really see a better way to do it than the current way. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 19:29, 7 September 2013 (UTC)

The sliver of quotebox above the images comes from something deep within the automated formatting, out of reach to us mortals -- probably related to vertical separating space automatically inserted above and below each image. As to the caption on the large map, I've tried various ways of floating it, but they all look awful at one or another zoom level / window size. I'm not sure what Maunus meant in his comment about 1997 -- maybe the colors of the quoteboxes and other elements? I take it you don't see any problems there? EEng (talk)

The article is way over illustrated at this point. It is also way over quoted. The amount of quotes coupled with the amount of illustrations makes the layout chaotic and makes the actual text which should be the main bulk of the article disappear. Furthermore the quotes often repeat material that is already in the text and serves no purpose for the reader, the fact that the quotes are ugly colored and overlap with the images doesnt help (sometimes the quotes even have image/video inside them), the panorama pictures that break up sections further decomposes the reading flow, the fact that the quotes being the sections means that the reader doesnt know what the quote is about before starting to read the section. I would recommend removing all of the blockquotes that arent absolutely essential in that they convey something that it is not possible to paraphase in the prose body. There should not be a block quote in every section, and they should never open the section. And I would recommend moving half of the images to a gallery at the end of the article and loosing some altogether there are currently three different pictures of his skull with the rod through it plus a cavalcade of four of the skull on it own, and the portraits is repeated three times, and there are two different images of his skull with the brain lesion marked in, and one with just the brain without the lesion. And I would get rid of the image sandwich in the lead. User:Maunus ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 14:56, 8 September 2013 (UTC)

Preparing for GA

I helped out during the GA process a while back, and was quite surprised to see all this today. The article contains more than enough well-cited fact to clear GA, but it has evidently become bogged down because there is now too much material. It looks like a labour of love, and I understand how painful it can be to let go of something of that kind. However, for GA an article has to address "the main aspects of the topic" - just once, without excessive detail. The article as it now stands tells what is essentially a simple, sad story - a man has a terrible accident, survives, but is permanently changed - with too many images, too many restatements, too many quibblings, and as Maunus says above, too many quotations. The simple story has become cluttered by all the embroiderings. The test for any piece of writing (not just here on WP) is whether an item moves the story forward (towards greater clarity) or not. Many items here fail that test. A short clear article on Phineas Gage could pass GA immediately. Chiswick Chap (talk) 08:28, 22 September 2013 (UTC)

Indeed it is a labor of love -- glad that shows. I think the pullquotes are entirely appropriate (if unusual) but to focus discussion I've removed them.

Gage's is not a sad story -- quite the opposite. He had (yes) a terrible accident, he (yes) survived, but (no) he was not permanently changed -- at least not in the way he was almost always presented historically. If Gage had been presented in a completely factual way over the last 150 years (but of course science is rarely so dispassionate) there would be no embroiderings to untangle -- but they are there, they are a permanent aspect of the case, and they need to be addressed in the article. Indeed in understanding Gage as an episode in the history of science, the embroiderings are as important, if not more important, than the facts on Gage himself.

What specifically do you feel doesn't belong? EEng (talk) 21:18, 22 September 2013 (UTC)

: For the record here is the version before I removed the pullquotes (as mentioned above), and... in evaluating layout, please make sure you're viewing at zoom=100% -- I recently realized that some new annoying "feature" of IE decides to set zoom=125%, which makes the images look somewhat overwhelming. EEng (talk)

I wouldn't like to get involved in editing here, and certainly not in controversy. However, since you ask, I'd say there should be just one of each kind of image, so two of Gage holding his iron is one too many, for example. The article should be left with say four or five images in all, with a pointer to a gallery page on Commons for the rest. I'd suggest the text should be roughly halved in length, divided into something like Accident, Recovery, His later life, Post-mortem studies, In popular culture, i.e. a simple comprehensible chronological arrangement. The footnotes should be reduced to 1/10 of their current length. Key points from the disputes about Gage should each be summarized simply and plainly in a sentence (with multiple refs if many voices). The vital thing is simplicity. Chiswick Chap (talk) 07:08, 23 September 2013 (UTC)

• "The article should be left with say four or five images in all" Why? There are 17 images in the article currently. Along with the second portrait, which 11 others would you omit, and why?
• "I'd suggest the text should be roughly halved in length" Each detail, sentence, paragraph, or section can be discussed as worth including or not, and that may result in a long or short article. But I can't conceive of how a particular overall length, per se, can be set out as a desideratum.
• "divided into something like Accident, Recovery, His later life, Post-mortem studies, In popular culture, i.e. a simple comprehensible chronological arrangement" Um, it is divided pretty much like that: Background; Accident; Subsequent life; Death; Brain damage and mental changes (including theoretical use i.e. his place the history of neurology). What should be changed?
• "The footnotes should be reduced to 1/10 of their current length." The prior point re text length applies doubly to notes, which are outside the flow of the article and no bother to anyone who doesn't wish to consult them. Their whole point is to hold material which may be of interest to some, but not most. What possible benefit is there to limiting them?
• "Key points from the disputes about Gage should each be summarized simply and plainly in a sentence (with multiple refs if many voices)." Gage's mental changes are the reason he's in the index of most every textbook on neurology and psychology, so separating up-to-date discussion of them from defunct rehashes is critical; this is not a simple matter and cannot be done in a sentence. Since almost all this change has come in the last 25 years and will contradict what older readers learned in school it's important to be clear who the voices are on either side.

EEng (talk) 03:23, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

While a short and clear article might pass GA easily, I wouldn't like to see useful information removed in order to achieve it. This page receives 50,000 pageviews per month, and I assume a decent percentage of those are students who are studying Gage-they want detail that isnt in their textbook. Special:ArticleFeedbackv5/Phineas_Gage shows readers want more information (select 'All comments' in the drop down list). I see EEng has recently re-enabled feedback, which I think is a good use of the tool. It will be interesting to see what they say (if anything). Regarding the prose, I think some of the footnotes could be rewritten as prose, and I am sure that will be necessary before this article is given WP:FA (but we are not there yet ;-)) Regarding images, again we should be including the images that help understanding, and also images that stimulate the reader to keep reading. I think we could drop the burial record without removing any encyclopedic information, and I have set it up as a transcription project on Wikisource. I would like to hear views about whether File:Frontal lobe animation.gif conveys additional information than provided by File:Simulated Connectivity Damage of Phineas Gage 4 vanHorn PathwaysDamaged.jpg. I am neutral about the picture of John Martyn Harlow being included, but the rest of the images all seem quite appropriate to me. Have I missed any that need to be discussed? John Vandenberg 06:48, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

Another thing requested in feedback, BTW, was more images.

• I like the burial record because (first) it's the sort of thing readers find intriguing (fancy 19th-c penmanship, column headed "nativity", and so on) and (second) it's the proof Gage died in 1860, not 1861. However, I've moved it out of the main text, down adjacent to the note on the 1860/61 issue.
• As to Harlow's portrait, this advice from WP:MOSCAP reinforces JVDB's point above:

The caption should lead the reader into the article. For example, in History of the Peerage, a caption for Image:William I of England.jpg might say "William of Normandy overthrew the Anglo-Saxon monarchs, bringing a new style of government." Then the reader gets curious about that new form of government and reads text to learn what it is.

So one of the reasons I like having Harlow's img in the article is the caption: "Physician John Martyn Harlow, who attended Gage after his accident and obtained his skull for study after his death." However, there are one or two Notes focused on Harlow, and his portrait could be moved there if editors feel it overloads the main text (where it's paired with the coverpage of Harlow 1868, which I think is nice).

• BTW, the MOS advice just quoted puts to rest an idea I've seen propounded over and over -- that an image must not precede the text that discusses whatever it shows, lest the reader be confused. So, for example, the Background section has a map showing "Harlow's home and surgery", even though Harlow isn't mentioned until the end of the next section. Readers are smart enough to say, "I wonder who this Harlow is -- I'll keep reading!"
• Between "rotating brain" and "simulated connectivity" (Figs 9 and 13 here ) I'd take "rotating". Unfortunately "rotating" shows the entire left F.L., which is why the caption clarifies that only the forward portion was damaged. Meanwhile, in "simulated" the colored regions represent pathway bundles that were interrupted, but in each instance coloring the entire interrupted bundle, full length end to end, well beyond the point of interruption (i.e. beyond the area of damage from the iron). Especially for laymen I think this tends to confuse the area of actual physical damage, and it's not easy to explain this. I think this isn't a problem if both imgs are shown, but I wouldn't want "simulated" alone.

Also, JVDB, any thoughts about the treatment of distortion / misuse? Chiswick Chap seems to object to the generous use of quotations. But modern sources' condemnation of earlier distortions -- "grotesque fabrication", "myth of Gage the psychopath", "commitment to the frontal lobe doctrine of emotions shapes how Gage is described", "retrospective reconstruction based on what we now know, or think we do, about the role of the frontal cortex" -- is so intense that there's no way to reflect it properly without quoting it -- I don't know how to adequately paraphrase "grotesque fabrication".

EEng (talk) 00:38, 25 September 2013 (UTC)

Regarding the burial record, Macmillan (2000) is the source for 1861, and that is all that is needed. We don't need, or want primary sources. That is the domain of Wikisource.

Regarding the map of Caven­dish, I think the background section could include a short background to Harlow. This resolves the image-before-text problem, which is significant. We live in a digital world; the reader wants to click something to find more. On mobile phones, later sections are not visible by default. The link needs to be underneath the first mention. Also, Harlow is central to Gage, as his publications formed much of the original myths. While addressing ordering issues, note that Bigelow is also mentioned before the link to his bio.

I think I have commented on the number of quotations previously. To me, the quotes in the 'Theoretical use, misuse, and nonuse' section are the most useful quotes in the entire article, with the large quote of Harlow's 1868 report being a very close second. I have trimmed one quote in 'Initial treatment', and think the other quote in that subsection is more text than is useful. I don't like the quote in 'Death and subsequent travels', as it avoids clarity about the facts and the voice being spoke in ('Apparently..') - the facts, as best we know them, should be summarised in prose, and a smaller quote used (if any). John Vandenberg 05:17, 27 September 2013 (UTC)

This page's code is horrible

Who exactly is responsible for the code that is on this page? Is someone purposely trying to break Misplaced Pages's code and make it illegible? ChrisGualtieri (talk) 05:27, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

Someone want to explain this "shy" template stuff to me? I just removed ALL of them and it didn't negatively impact the page. ChrisGualtieri (talk) 05:33, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

Converted all refs... need to fix them now. ChrisGualtieri (talk) 06:01, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

Removed this mess. I can't figure out how, why or what half of this is supposed to do. Anyone care to explain?

Wow... ChrisGualtieri (talk) 06:06, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

Alright. Almost done, I think. Then the duplicated references need to be swapped in to complete it. ChrisGualtieri (talk) 07:57, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

Ugh... still something is broken. ChrisGualtieri (talk) 08:06, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

Finally fixed. In short, I had to undo and redo it to ensure that the references were still in the format that was preferred, but I stripped away this fake referencing system that negatively impacted the page and was at best superficial. I stripped out the "Fig" and "see fig" lines because the images are themselves captioned and clear. I also got rid of the font size and micromanagement of the images which causes them to clash in the browser. I removed the long image of the rod because the image did absolutely nothing - it was illegible. The external video is now in the external links. Some other tweaks were done, but the article is not constantly trying to force itself to some browser specification to compensate for some "zoom" issue on the writer's system. ChrisGualtieri (talk) 14:05, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

You "fixed" nothing. What you did is declare your own ignorance ("I can't figure out how, why or what half of this is supposed to do" -- above) and then, apparently believing that all editors should live within your personal intellectual radius, simply destroyed whatever you didn't comprehend (see Philistinism).

In the process you made a mess of the sources, randomly reassigning them to the wrong groups. You removed the image sizes so that Gage's tiny-faced portrait and an illegible postage-stamp map now abut a fearsomely gigantic skull. "The external video is now in the external links" -- why? The "External video" template was created to make external content accessible at the point in the text most helpful to the reader.

The article as you left it ends with Cite error: There are <ref group=upper-alpha> tags or {{efn-ua}} templates on this page, but the references will not show without a etc etc warning. In fact, of your 100 edits, hardly a single one didn't have literally dozens of red ERROR messages throughout. Don't you even review before saving? During the eight hours you tried to teach yourself markup syntax about 600 people visited the article -- have you no respect for them?

The "awful" code example in the collapse box above is really several examples which you, in your inexperience, jumbled together into a gigantic mass, without the linebreaks present in the actual code to show structure -- again, it would help if you previewed before saving. These code examples are, for example, an image with a footnote, and an imagemap. Nested templates can be complex, but if such constructions frighten you, perhaps you should spend less time running mindless scripts that shift whitespace around and more time actually contributing content.

If you think the presentation of the material should be changed, then fine -- discuss it. If you think the presentation of the material is achieved in a hack-ish way, then fine -- suggest better ways of achieving the presentation. But don't just make a mess of the article because you can't be bothered to understand what's going one.

EEng (talk) 07:15, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

Regarding the tamping iron image

No opinion on the code structure but I do think the article is better without figure 16 because you can't read the inscription and just ends up as a distraction. Ward20 (talk) 09:10, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

As see at WP:Graphics_Lab/Photography_workshop#Extract_legible_inscription_from_portrait_of_Phineas_Gage we're working in getting a more legible image. If that doesn't work out then probably the image should be cropped to the portion which is (barely) legible (the region around the hand) and rotated horizontally. I really hope you will continue to participate in the conversation, since you seem to have a medical background and these discussions could really use that. EEng (talk) 10:44, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

When time permits I will have a look at the sources to see if I can help. I read Toga and it was very interesting but the medical part was pretty esoteric. Ward20 (talk) 20:46, 12 November 2013 (UTC)

Arbitrary break

EENG. You made a post discussing how the page was constantly broken on PDF outputs. The markup you instituted is responsible for that, but it also goes and breaks my browser as well. There is absolutely no reason to keep massive invis tags reiterating a section's name, nor is there a good reason to micromanage the font size - it is not even consistent. You can restore it if you want, but the end result of your coding is a page that is horribly inefficient and filled with needless invis tags and so many comments as to suggest that this is more of your private publication draft instead of a Misplaced Pages article. Rather than place sources inline, you make invisible marks saying that "this covers this and that covers this" but didn't do them inline for the infobox. Your quick to make mention of slanderous claims of abuse when it is patently false - a BLP issue if the subject was alive - but even still, there is no need for it to be seen every time you go to edit the page. I tried to fix that which was broken - if you don't like it, restore it, but your way is needlessly complex and will always mess up the pdf or even regular printing of the article. ChrisGualtieri (talk) 13:51, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

Everything you're saying is nonsense.

• "You made a post discussing how the page was constantly broken on PDF outputs. The markup you instituted is responsible for that...your way is needlessly complex and will always mess up the pdf or even regular printing of the article." As already explained to you here, the article version from July 2012, which has none of the markup you complain about, doesn't render properly into pdf either. Apparently the pdf converter can't handle multiple citation groups, footnotes within image captions, or other standard features. Go here to try it yourself. Your version of the article suffers from the very same pdf-rendering problems, so "my" markup is not responsible, and what you're saying is nonsense.
• "it also goes and breaks my browser as well" In that same post I mentioned that I have checked the article in IE, Chrome, Safari, and Firefox with no problems. I asked what browser you're using and what problems you're seeing, but you didn't answer. (There was a problem -- which affected other articles too -- under a version of IE10 released about three months ago, but those disappear under IE11.)
• "It is not helpful to have small text made even smaller, that is a WP:ACCESS issue." A few of the ===-level sections are just a single paragraph, which look silly with 135% headlines. By applying "size 76%" to these headlines they are returned to 100%. So what you're saying is nonsense: there's no "small text made even smaller" and no WP:ACCESS issue.
• "There is absolutely no reason to keep massive invis tags reiterating a section's name" You're talking about the strings like <!--======Death======--> (except with a lot more ='s) at the top-level section breaks. These are simply visual aids to locating the various sections while editing. What's wrong with that?
• "nor is there a good reason to micromanage the font size - it is not even consistent." I see no inconsistencies. What are you talking about?
• "Rather than place sources inline, you make invisible marks saying that "this covers this and that covers this" but didn't do them inline for the infobox" Example: The infobox says Gage died "in or near San Francisco", with a cite. In the markup I added a note <!--cite covers death date, place, chk covers "or near"--> as a reminder to doublecheck that the cited source really does support the or near qualification. Many editors wouldn't have worried about it, but I'm very careful about sourcing. You're trying to make that look like a bad thing, and as usual that's nonsense.
• "Your quick to make mention of slanderous claims of abuse when it is patently false - a BLP issue if the subject was alive - but even still, there is no need for it to be seen every time you go to edit the page." What the fuck are you talking about?
• "filled with needless invis tags and so many comments as to suggest that this is more of your private publication draft instead of a Misplaced Pages article" Internal notes such as <!--get direct cite from Warren catalog on taper length--> and <!--need pg# for cite--> are completely appropriate. What the fuck is your problem?
• the end result of your coding is a page that is horribly inefficient" Your delusion that an article's markup affects some kind of "efficiency" (of Wikimedia servers, I guess) is your biggest nonsense of all. It's the same delusion that compels you to make thousands of meaningless edits that (for example) do nothing but change {{disambig}} to {{disambiguation}}. When another editor asked you to explain why you were doing this, you replied "Increase in speed and gets pages off the checklist once and for all." . You actually believe that? You have no idea what you're talking about.

I'd be gentler except that you've apparently been told over and over to cut this shit out. Educate yourself and stop cluttering up article histories and watchlists with meaningless edits solving nonexistent "efficiency" problems.

EEng (talk) 10:44, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

By an amazing coincidence your AWB access has just been revoked for the behavior I mention above. EEng (talk) 02:00, 12 November 2013 (UTC)

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