Talk:Statue of John Harvard

New article

[The following is coped from [1]]

Hi EEng. In the past few hours you have removed large swathes of the article John Harvard statue. All of this information was well sourced as I painstakingly took weeks to find reliable sources for all of it. If you do not feel a source is reliable please instead of outright deleting the information, look to see if there is a reliable source for it. I will be re-inserting much of information you have deleted as it is well sourced, relevant, and important in regards to the statue. While the article may not have been a perfect article before, you have edited it down to a place where it now has one sentence paragraphs and is lacking tons of well known information about the statue. I would love to work with you on this article, and hopefully your scrutiny of references will make them better in the long run.--Found5dollar (talk) 14:53, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

I assume you're referring primarily to the "urination" material. As explained in my edit summaries, I believe that the references for the idea that the statue is routinely "used as a pissoir" and so on either

• don't say that, or
• where they do say (or imply) something like that, are apparently repeating campus legend with no indication that the assertion was treated by the source as a fact worth checking.

Beyond urination I have removed scattered information I think few readers would find of interest (such as the paraffin coating -- a common treatment for bronze monuments) or related to peripheral topics on which the reader will be better informed by other articles (such as background on French).

I'll be happy to discuss all this with you, but please give me a day to complete what I'm doing. In meantime please reivew carefully my edit summaries on the urination matter, which explain the reasoning for removing material as it was removed. Please engage those reasons before restoring the material again. EEng (talk) 16:57, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

What you currently have in the article is not factually equivalent to the previous versions, nor is it equivalent in layout to what was written before. You have completely blanked two entire sections of sourced information and removed the lead. I see you are an experienced editor so I will not edit the article for a day as you have asked, but as the article currently stands you have removed virtually all of the reliably sourced information that is compelling about the statue. I added new references this morning from the Boston Herald about the urination, but instead of reviewing the additions you just completely deleted the section for a second time. I will be asking at Reliable sources notice board if The Crimson is a reliable source in this instance, as I still believe it is. I will not be online for the rest of the day as I have tons of work I need to get done outside of wikipedia.--Found5dollar (talk) 18:23, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

Also, it is very obvious from your edit summaries you either attend or work at Harvard University. If this is so you may want to be careful about any possible conflict of interest you may have with any Harvard articles.--Found5dollar (talk) 18:34, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

You may want to take your obviousness detector in for recalibration, since I am neither. EEng (talk) 08:06, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

WP:COI deals with self-promotion and benefiting monetarily from pushing a POV. It can't be extended to blocking Harvard-associated people from editing Harvard-related articles. Churn and change (talk) 18:56, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

I'm about to remove the "under construction" notice -- thanks for waiting. Where my edit summary said that version X was "factually equivalent to current version" it meant what it said -- X was meant to be factually equivalent to its immediately previous version X-1 -- not (as I think you are misinterpreting) to some earlier version before I started editing.

My edit summaries give the reasons for rejection of sources and removal of material; I am fairly careful in such matters and I need to ask you again to read and engage the reasoning already given in those summaries. For example, for my removal (about which you complain above) of the Hearld piece as a source on urination, my summary said source doesn't say students urinate on statue, rather says that 2 student tour guides, not affiliated with H, "are fond of saying" that -- exact the stuff of campus legends. I see that you made a post at RSN [2] and I think the response you received there from another editor, re pissoir, is worth quoting:

"The Harvard Crimson, the university's student newspaper, is reliable, but what they report isn't necessarily encyclopedic. This seems a classic case of what not to include from a student-run newspaper of a major university."

EEng (talk) 08:06, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

Sources on Bridge

• Apparently Bridge (full name Samuel James Bridge) was trying to singlehandedly populate the Harvard Square area with Puritans in bronze -- here's his gift of a statue, for Camb. Common, of an ancestor of his [3].
• He's also the donor of medals discussed here [4] -- see Cambridge Common link for bio material making it clear these are the same people.

EEng (talk) 19:35, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

Additional sources on subject

One of the sources in the article (sorry, memory fails -- but I think it's the Crimson 1984 1924 piece) mentions a pamphlet in Widener Library about the statue/monument. EEng (talk) 16:50, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

It's in the 1924 Crimson article, about the move. Cheers, Hertz1888 (talk) 16:59, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

Name of statue-monument / title of article

• John Harvard statue (current title) -- if this is indeed the formal title of the artwork then article title should probably be John Harvard Statue
• if the formal title of the artwork is John Harvard then the article title should probably be John Harvard (statue) or maybe John Harvard (monument) though there's a JH monument at the Phipps Street Burying Ground which may deserve an article of its own and which would have a claim on the same title.
• There may be JH memorials, monuments, statues elsewhere (London, Cambridge U.) so a dab page may be in the offing as well

I suggest we leave things as they are for now -- no urgency to change anything, so let's wait for some saint of patience to come by and get the full lay of the land before changing anything. EEng (talk) 16:50, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

I have created a page called "John Harvard (statue)" to reserve that title in case it might be needed later. If the formal name of French's work turns out to be John Harvard, the two article titles can be swapped. At that point the title may need to be partially italicized as "John Harvard (statue)". For now the new page serves as a redirect. Hertz1888 (talk) 10:42, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

Three lies

The name "Statue of the three lies" is a well known name for the state, weather or not it was created by "smartass guides". It is used by many news sources to refer to the statue. Here are just a few I quickly found: [5] [6] [7] It is a valid title that many people know the statue by.--Found5dollar (talk) 23:31, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

I can't find any mention in your third source; the first two use lower case for the name. Let's not give it any more prominence then it deserves, especially in light of the discussion relating to this name being a misnomer, itself plausibly a fourth lie. Hertz1888 (talk) 23:42, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

Harvard Magazine calls it "statue of three lies" in this[8] interesting article about where the tradition of rubbing his left toe comes from.--Found5dollar (talk) 23:45, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

Contrary to what you say, sources don't refer to the statue as "the statue of the three lies" i.e. they don't use that name expecting the reader to be familiar with it -- rather they introduce the phrase as a curiousity which will amuse and amaze. It's telling that even the H Mag piece you cite feels the need to explain what the "three lies" are, suggesting that it doesn't expect everyone in even its own narrow audience -- Harvard folks -- to understand what "the statue of the three lies" is without having it explained to them. That's why H Mag, like just about every other serious source (read: not Sunday travel sections and other material with low levels of editorial oversight) puts the three-lies moniker in "scare quotes". (I don't like the term scare quotes myself, which is why I enclosed it in so-called scare quotes.)

Finally, please think about why we don't find the following leads in other Wikipedia articles:

• George Washington (February 22, 1732 – December 14, 1799), also known as the Father of His Country, was one of the...
• Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847 – October 18, 1931), also known as the Wizard of Menlo Park, was an...
• Herbert Clark Hoover (August 10, 1874 – October 20, 1964), also known as The Great Engineer and The Great Humanitarian, was the...
• George Smith Patton, Jr. (November 11, 1885 – December 21, 1945), also known as Old Blood and Guts, was an officer in the...
• Richard Milhous Nixon (January 9, 1913 – April 22, 1994), also known as Tricky Dick, was the...
• George Walker Bush (born July 6, 1946), also known as Dubya, is an American politician and businessman who...
• In Greek mythology Helen of Troy, also known as the face that launched a thousand ships, was the...

I've again removed the "aka 3 lies" text from the lead. The phrase plays a part in a ritual narrative which undergraduates and tourguides recite for thier parents and patrons, but that's it. The phrase "statue of teh three lies" is never uttered outside a 15-foot radius of the statue itself, except in discussions such as this one. The final paragraph mentions the term in exactly the appropriate context, and that's all that's warranted. Anything more is WP:UNDUE.

EEng (talk) 09:37, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

Inanimate guards

Re [9]: Yes, an inanimate figure can guard something. [10] [11] [12] [13] Please, when you see careful writing employing idiom or diction with which you're umfamiliar, consider whether your unfamiliarity -- rather than the writing -- is the problem.

The tone of the caption may or may not be quite right for WP but the best way to decide that, I think, is to include it for now and see how it feels after a while. The caption as I've reinserted it just now is

The John Harvard statue guards the University Hall offices of the Dean of Harvard College. Note Harvard College seal on plinth.

EEng (talk) 08:45, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

This statue is not mystical like a sphinx, it is not a barrier like a wall, it is not cursed like an amulet, therefor it has no "guarding" qualities. It simply "is" outside the building. It isn't keeping anyone out like the abover objects were intended to do and like a "guard" is supposed to do. Hertz1888 appeared to agree with my thought on the caption when he(?) removed even more of the way the sentence was structured.

I also must add that you have reverted virtually all of the substantive or stylistic edits I have added to this article since I created it a few days ago. I cant help but feel you either do not agree with the article style I use, or that you do not feel I am qualified to edit this article. I want to assure you that I have been on wikipedia since 2007, I have brought many articles through DYK (as I am trying to do now with this one), and I have lead two other articles on statues in Massachusetts through to GA status. I do know what I am talking about with this article and I ask that in the future please respect me and my contributions to the page more. Wiki is collaborative so we should work together on strengthening the article, not work against each other.--Found5dollar (talk) 14:35, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

With "guards" removed from the caption it seemed capricious to have it say "John Harvard" stands there, when it is his statue that does, but I have no objection to the original wording. "Guarding" is fanciful, but I do not think it is over the top. What I do object to is edit warring over any of these changes. Instead of having text go back and forth, I hope we can discuss the major changes here in that collaborative spirit.

I have reworded the third section of the lead in what I believe is a non-controversial manner, sequed into from the second section (the quote), so that the entire text doesn't disappear on account of one disputed word. No one should be misled by the reframed statement. Hertz1888 (talk) 15:27, 17 October 2012 (UTC)