Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Edmund Ætheling/1
Edmund Ætheling edit
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
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- Result: Per consensus. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 23:17, 25 February 2024 (UTC)
The extensive biography of Edmund in this article is not supported by historians of Anglo-Saxon England, who say that there is almost no reliable information about him. Edmund and his brother Edward the Exile were sons of King Edmund Ironside and grandsons of Æthelred the Unready. It is known that Edward and Edmund were sent to Sweden as infants by Cnut to be murdered, but the King of Sweden was unwilling to kill them and sent them to Hungary, where Edmund died, possibly after a stay in Kiev. This article's far more detailed biography is mainly sourced to a book by Garriel Ronay. I do not have access to it, but I have found an article by him setting out his views, where he says that his main source is an account by Geoffrey Gaimar, who is unfairly dismissed by historians as unreliable ("Edward Aetheling: Anglo-Saxon England's Last Hope", History Today, Volume 34 Issue 1 January 1984). Simon Keynes describes Gaimar's account as "confused and (one suspects) largely fanciful" ("Crowland Salter", p. 363). Frank Barlow wrote that "because of the twelfth-century Gaimar's inventions in his Lestoire des Engleis, some very strange accounts of Æthelred's descendants are in circulation". Barlow cites Ronay's book as an example of these very strange accounts (The Godwins, p. 91 n. 25). There are other errors added after the GA review, but the basic point is that the article is fundamentally flawed as it is mainly based on an unreliable source. Dudley Miles (talk) 15:46, 17 February 2024 (UTC)
- Comments: I don't have a particular view on this article, but a couple of thoughts: on a rough count, there are 18 hits in the article code for "Ronay" and 53 for "sfn", which gives a rough fraction of a third of the citations being to Ronay -- which is a lot, but not enough to really say that the article is entirely based on it. Certainly, we'd still have an article even if we decided that Ronay was totally unreliable and to be declared anathema. Secondly, I'm not totally sure where WP:DUEWEIGHT and WP:OR leave our authority to determine the reliability of secondary sources: unless they're generally rejected by the historical consensus (and so much so that they're not even worth inclusion as a competing or historical viewpoint): there are reasons to be uncomfortable about Wikipedians blacklisting a peer-reviewed secondary source because we don't like its argument or methods. On a slightly different point, if Gaimar is
unfairly dismissed by historians as unreliable
(emphasis mine), why should we perpetuate that unfairness and continue to dismiss him? - I appreciate that this will read as opposition, and it really isn't intended to be -- this is not my field and I will leave questions of reliability and accuracy to those who know it. However, I do think it's worth bearing the considerations here in mind as we (you) go about addressing those questions. UndercoverClassicist T·C 20:17, 17 February 2024 (UTC)
- I said that it is mainly based on Ronay's book, not entirely. Many of the cites of other writers are for statements not about Edmund, for example four cites for the statement that Stephen was baptised in 985. Others are for uncontroversial statements. It would require a thorough analysis to see how many cites of other writers are for statements about Edmund, apart from the very few which are accepted by reliable sources, but I have found when reading the article that whenever a statement seems dubious, it is almost always cited to Ronay (apart from a few added after the GA review). I am not clear why you refer to a "blacklisting a peer-reviewed secondary source". Ronay's book is not peer-reviewed and it is cited as a source for statements presented as uncontroversial facts, whereas it is described by a leading expert on the period, Frank Barlow, as a completely unreliable "history" (Barlow's quotes). The article thus extensively relies on a non-RS for many unequivocal statements rejected by the historical consensus.
- As to Gaimar, I should have made clear that it is Ronay's claim that he is unfairly dismissed. I quote above two leading historians as disagreeing. Gaimar is an original source, and we should only accept his statements if they are endorsed by reliable secondary sources. Dudley Miles (talk) 22:33, 17 February 2024 (UTC)
- This is a really interesting point. But hopefully WP:CONTEXTMATTERS gives some relief:
- "The reliability of a source depends on context. Each source must be carefully weighed to judge whether it is reliable for the statement being made in the Wikipedia article and is an appropriate source for that content."
- A sensible reading would be that a book written by a journalist does not have the same reliability as a trained historian. Or, a book written by a trained historian that has in its reviews been pulled up for certain issues, can be viewed as less reliable on those matters.
- At least, without those readings, I think WP would struggle in some areas to make sensible decisions. Jim Killock (talk) 17:31, 19 February 2024 (UTC)
- Delist It's perhaps odd that B&B would let themselves be caught out like that, but the Sunday Telegraph damned Ronay's monograph with faint praise, describing it as a 'popularly written but scholarly book.' Too many important claims are cited to this one source, and as the OP has suggested, the remainder majoritively if not completely support less pertinent facts/oids. ——Serial 15:32, 19 February 2024 (UTC)
- Delist. Support as nominator. Dudley Miles (talk) 15:57, 20 February 2024 (UTC)