User talk:Imaginatorium/Cardarelli

Ping

@Hoary and Isaidnoway: Could I ask for help? (I hope I have this ping thing right) Do you think you could together make a quick comparison of the versions of Cardarelli which you own. If we could see very roughly how much has been updated/corrected/or made wrong I think it would really help. Please fill in here: User:Imaginatorium/Cardarelli#Comparison of Versions. Thanks! Imaginatorium (talk) 20:43, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

Sorry, I can't do anything starting a few hours from now, ending a few days from now.

My version of the book is the oldest. It has a lot of little mistakes. For me, this is irritating; but I don't think that anybody has proposed to cite it here, so who cares? The question is rather of how good the edition(s) being cited is (are).

Right! Well, this is where it would really help to investigate some random "little mistakes" and see if they got corrected in later editions. Imaginatorium (talk) 08:06, 30 December 2014

Cardarelli provides big chunks of the latest edition on his website. You can look there. -- Hoary (talk) 09:34, 30 December 2014 (UTC)

You write (tentatively):

• Use of SI term 'symbol' for abbreviations
• Cavalier style of "Old units of (country X)" -- no history, no context, no language distinction (is 'botella' an English name of a unit, or a Spanish word for bottle?)

Careful. If the context isn't SI, "symbol" needn't be an SI term. And Cardarelli is writing as a metrologist rather than as a historian or encyclopedist: if such-and-such a term was used in the past in country X to mean Y, this smidgen of knowledge can be helpful to some people. (Koizumi usually doesn't even distinguish between [unspecified] past and present.) It would be good if Cardarelli had provided more info, but I wouldn't rush to condemn him for not doing so. I do wish that he'd provided his sources, etc etc; but if he had done so, the resulting book might have become unpublishably bulky.

About 'symbol': SI units have symbols, but older units only ever had "abbreviations", like "ml." for mile and "lb." for pound, with the dots. I recall learning "gm." with the dot for gram in the 1960s. I also remember having to learn that you were not supposed to put a dot after the new-fangled abbreviation for gram, precisely because it was a symbol. So for example 'kg' is the symbol for chilogramma in Italian too, even though it could not be an abbreviation. But perhaps there's something I don't know: do metrologists "officially" call everything "symbols"? Imaginatorium (talk) 15:16, 10 January 2015 (UTC)

More generally, with "cavalier style", etc, it looks as if you're out to demolish the reputation the book. That this would be relevant to (even useful for) the creation of articles here doesn't mean that it would be a proper use of "userspace". There's no need to teeter around what somebody might label the harassment or defamation of a living author when a straightforward exposition of errors can perform the function that you think WP requires. -- Hoary (talk) 07:49, 30 December 2014 (UTC)

I make no secret of the fact that I would like to demolish the apparently unwarranted reputation of the book, and those notes are still me talking about things to address: I can't think of another short way to say this. Someone else made a very good comment about this, and the offense this sort of treatment causes to a historian, and I would put this in if I could find it. Of course what I am working towards is simply a fair assessment of the quality of the book. Imaginatorium (talk) 08:06, 30 December 2014 (UTC)

I don't see why anything is needed beyond a calm and persuasive demonstration that it shouldn't be taken here as a reliable source.

Of course the bogus precision is risible, but bogus precision is pandemic in Wikipedia. As examples, we read in "London" that the population of the London region was 8,416,535 in 2013, that that of the Urban London was 9,787,426 and that of Metro London was 13,614,409. I have in the past pointed out that such numbers are ludicrous but been told that this is what it says in the source QED. I've then pointed out that -- but by this time my interlocutor has his palms over his eyes and is accusing me of anything from original research to attempting to pass myself off as a superior demographer to those with doctorates in the subject and who presumably oversee censuses. Now, if you agree with me that wodges of bogus precision demonstrate stupidity, or that they encourage impressionable schoolkids to perpetuate such stupidity, and if you'd care to plot a plan of action, I might well join in the campaign.

The standard way to avoid a source that might be dodgy is to cite an alternative that you can credibly say is reliable. Various books by 小泉袈裟勝 may or may not be good; certainly it's easy to find cheap used copies of some of them. And there are plenty of other books that might be worthwhile, eg 流れわざのシルクロード―流量計測の歴史, Klein's The Science of Measurement: A Historical Survey, and (though pricy) Berriman's Historical Metrology. -- Hoary (talk) 09:34, 30 December 2014 (UTC)

-- Hoary (talk) 09:34, 30 December 2014 (UTC)

Amazon

There's just one review for the encyclopedia on Amazon. The other four are for his previous book Scientific Unit Conversion: A Practical Guide to Metrication. NebY (talk) 15:24, 9 January 2015 (UTC)

Well, the two books appear to be very closely related, though I hope someone (or two) will be able to help with a comparison. I certainly can't afford to buy two books. Imaginatorium (talk) 15:10, 10 January 2015 (UTC)

Comment on style

I start writing this page in a personal style, but am progressively moving all personal comment to the introductory green box, and trying to make the rest into a real page. Imaginatorium (talk) 15:10, 10 January 2015 (UTC)

Chamberlain quote

Just a tiny question: Is the Things Japanese scan actually of the first edition (1890)? This isn't a rare book, but a dealer could reasonably call it "scarce". For every one copy, there seem to be ten or even twenty of the fifth edition (1905). Some articles in Things Japanese were little changed from the first edition to the sixth and last, but plenty were added and plenty were added to or altered (and a few were dropped). -- Hoary (talk) 23:09, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

The image is from an online version: it's the "Fifth Edition Revised" of 1905. I don't think this makes much difference: Clarke in 1875 was slightly confused; Chamberlain more or less sorted this out; then in 1926 Washburn came up with the total confusion copied to the Cardarelli book. Imaginatorium (talk) 08:33, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

You're right, it probably doesn't make much difference. But let's get it right. (If we expect care from others, we should demonstrate it ourselves.) -- Hoary (talk) 16:28, 19 June 2016 (UTC)

Salmarazd reviewed

Hoary inserted a comment in this summary about the Salmarzd article:

A combination of unreliable source information, inadequate editing of the publication (Cardarelli), and Wikipedia editing without at least a native speaker grasp of the subject -- Eh? What's wrong with a lack of a native speaker grasp of the language in which something is written? (Or if something else is meant, then what?) -- have resulted in an entry which is almost certainly complete nonsense.

At no stage did User:Shevonsilva show any ability beyond the copying of fragments of text. The following "conversation" should make this clear: User_talk:Shevonsilva#Argentine_units_of_measurement. An editor with appropriate English skills would have responded in a constructive way to other editors' questions, and might in this case, for example, have looked to see if "Salmarazd" was supported elsewhere as a word which even exists. Given the French form Salmanazar, it would not have been difficult to find that the correct term had been in Wine bottle#Sizes since 2007. In other words, despite a basic ability to construct English sentences which are not sufficiently ungrammatical as to be unreadable, the editor shows no sensitivity to "common sense", nor, in cases where other editors queried anything, an ability to understand the argument being made, let alone to improve the article accordingly. Perhaps you can see some better way to explain the difficulties introduced by the editor's approach? Imaginatorium (talk) 10:32, 26 June 2016 (UTC)

Malay

Thanks for your help regarding the untrustworthiness of this source at Japanese units. That said, you should neither fault him nor his sources for using a Malay word for a Japanese unit. It was formerly standard in every European language to use the Malay terms candareen, tael, catty, and picul to refer to the various local forms of Chinese units. That includes the Japanese measures. This isn't to say that his other information is accurate or that the Japanese themselves ever widely referred to their own units in Malay terms. However, they were the standard European terms for these units. — LlywelynII 18:01, 14 June 2017 (UTC)

Yes, there is a whole family of Malay names that were used to refer to the units of the Sinosphere, and I think there could be a good article about this. But the person Cardarelli copied from (Washburn 1926, p.9) simply lists "Candareen" as the Japanese unit, which is wrong/unhelpful. Imaginatorium (talk) 18:18, 14 June 2017 (UTC)

Niyo

"Niyo" is his (apparently simply garbled) version of the ryō. As the fundamental unit of Japanese bullion, its value relative to the momme seems to have fluctuated but it's usually given as either 4 or 10 momme. — LlywelynII 18:04, 14 June 2017 (UTC)

Hyakkin

I can't speak to how valid hyakkin is as a measure in its own right, but it certainly describes the tan or "picul" of 100 catties/kin. — LlywelynII 18:08, 14 June 2017 (UTC)

Clarke

I have no idea where inc and sals came from either but it's worth noting that the measures being referred to are the ken ("fathom") and shaku ("foot"). — LlywelynII 18:12, 14 June 2017 (UTC)

Springer, the fall of

Advanced in Springer and its applications. -- Hoary (talk) 07:14, 25 June 2018 (UTC)

Hmm, what triggered this investigation (into the Springer publishing scandal, about which Google and WP are curiously quiet) was this application for Page review permission: Wikipedia:Requests_for_permissions/New_page_reviewer#User:Shevonsilva, which struck me as curious, to say the least... Imaginatorium (talk) 07:44, 25 June 2018 (UTC)