Wikipedia:WikiProject History of Science

This is the page for the History of Science WikiProject. If you would like to participate, add your name to list of participants below. Be sure to check out the discussion page as well.

Project overview

This project focuses on creating and improving content related to the history of science. This will include (historical aspects of) the philosophy of science, as well as history of technology, mathematics and medicine. The project will also work on improving the categorization of History of Science-related articles and maintaining Portal:History of science.

• Child project: Wikipedia:WikiProject History of Biology

To do

The History of Science Collaboration is On the Origin of Species.

• Select future "selected articles" and create summaries for the History of science portal.

• Identify unmarked history of science stubs and add {{sci-hist-stub}} to them, or expand history of science stubs into full articles.

• Grab your favorite reference work and identify missing articles on notable scientists for the Missing scientist articles list, and/or create articles for them.

• Improve this page and make it more useful for potential history of science editors and project members.

• Invite active editors who write for history of science-related articles to join the project.

• Add the project template {{HistSci}} to the talk pages of history of science articles, and modify the template if you feel it can be improved.

• See also:

Writing and Editing needs

Other suggested projects

Open tasks

Participants

• Ragesoss (talk · contribs) -- physical sciences, biological sciences, technology
• dantheox (talk · contribs)
• Xuanwu (talk · contribs)
• Fastfission (talk · contribs) -- esp. modern physical and biological sciences
• Linas (talk · contribs) -- limited to history of physics
• Pjacobi (talk · contribs)
• -- history of physics and medicine
• Heron (talk · contribs)
• Ancheta Wis (talk · contribs)
• -- physics, materials science, electrical engineering
• -- history of philosophy and science in the Middle Ages
• -- esp. chemistry, thermodynamics, biology
• AppleRaven (talk · contribs) -- US Astronomy and Astronomical Observatories
• deeptrivia (talk · contribs) -- mechanics, physics, engineering, thermodynamics, mathematics. I'll also help ensure that the perspective remains global rather than Eurocentric.
• -- Industrial Revolution
• -- biology esp. botany and genetics
• -- biology, esp. translations of German articles
• Joke137 (talk · contribs) -- cosmology, particle physics, general relativity. I don't know much, but I do what I can.
• JackyR (talk · contribs) -- whatever I can remember from college HPS, but I might be good on local Cambridge stuff.
• KSchutte (talk · contribs) -- history of natural philosophy, psychology, neuroscience
• Peterlewis (talk · contribs) -- history of engineering
• Lacatosias (talk · contribs) -- history of physics, math, logic.
• Cugel (talk · contribs) -- psychology (anything to do with the scientific discipline)
• Leinad-Z (talk · contribs) -- esp. medieval science, and the relationship between science and religion.
• Sayeth (talk · contribs) -- biology, esp. neuroscience and molecular biology
• Carboxen (talk · contribs) -- history of chemistry and geology, translations from German
• Maestlin (talk · contribs) -- astronomy to Kepler/Galileo, Sci. Revolution, religion and science
• Apwoolrich (talk · contribs) -- History and biography of historic mechanical engineering and invention; Industrial Revolution; Admin on Wikisource
• Deditos (talk · contribs) -- Meteorology, climatology, oceanography and bits of other Earth science.
• IanWills (talk · contribs) -- Engineering related including invention and the history of technology. Particularly interested in Edison and late nineteenth century American inventors.
• Ricochet17 (talk · contribs) -- genetics, history of science 17th-19th centuries
• SOPHIA (talk · contribs) -- History of astronomy, telescope manufacturers and astrophysics
• Wijnand (talk · contribs) -- History of mathematics and its applications in technology, mainly 19th century
• MikeMorley (talk · contribs) -- History of physics, mostly - will work elsewhere if can contribute. Undergrad Physicist, 'minored' in History and Philosophy of Science in 2nd year.
• Beland (talk · contribs) -- Studied STS at MIT.
• Dumarest (talk · contribs) -- M.D. Ph.D. biochemistry, research career in Sickle Cell Disease, now retired, and with time on my hands.
• Sina2 (talk · contribs) -- Mathematics, Computing, Information
• SteveMcCluskey (talk · contribs) -- History of Astronomy, Archaeoastronomy, Medieval Science
• Goclenius (talk · contribs) -- natural philosophy, esp. 17th century and late Aristotelian; mathematics
• General Eisenhower (talk · contribs)
• Museumfreak (talk · contribs) -- HCI/informatics/history of computing, history of anthropology, science technology society, history of public health
• Espresso Addict (talk · contribs) -- medicine esp. virology, microbiology; early British 19th C
• TheGodEmperor (talk · contribs) -- limited mid-HS knowledge, but will help if I can
• TedE (talk · contribs) -- PhD in statistics, currently teaching genetics.
• Alexei Kouprianov (talk · contribs) -- PhD in History of Science, history of natural history, science in Russia. Background: M.Sc. biology.
• Science History (talk · contribs)
• -- Sincere dilettante; enjoys translating old texts
• Bwi410 (talk · contribs)

Current goals

Current goals for the project include:

• Identify and create missing history of science content
• Organize and maintain the History of Science Collaboration of the Month
• Improve the categorization and organization of history of science material
• Gather interest and participation in a history of science community within Wikipedia, including a History of Science Collaboration project
• Maintain and improve the History of Science Portal.
  • Create summaries for biweekly selected articles.
  • Find history of science related images for the weekly selected pictures.
  • Update the Did you know? section with interesting history of science trivia.
  • Create entries for the planned anniversaries section. Today's entry is Portal:History of science/Selected anniversaries/November 16.

Possible projects

Suggest something for participants to work on. Older suggestions will be archived; to see what work others have requested, go to the /Projects subpage.

• I just started a child project, Wikipedia:WikiProject History of Biology to help sort out problems with articles like Monera and Ernst Haeckel. It seems that most of the participants in this current wikiproject lean toward history of the physical sciences, and it might be worthwhile to assemble a more focused group to help deal with problems in articles such as these two. --arkuat (talk) 03:10, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

Categorization and media

• Wikipedia: Monitor the broad history of science categories and keep them clean by replacing overly broad categories with more specific ones.
• Commons: Ensure that history of science-related images are properly categorized, especially in relevant history of science subcategories. Many history of science images are very poorly categorized, making it very difficult to find all the files on a given topic actually present.
• Wikisource: Upload public domain content related to the history of science and ensure that existing content is properly categorized. There is currently very little marked history of science content on Wikisource.

Writing and Editing

Articles in need of expansion

• Timeline of scientific discoveries - needs a lot of expansion and improvement; each time you work on another subject, check to see if relevant discoveries are present in the timeline
• History of materials science
• Atomic theory
• Theodosius Dobzhansky
• Lise Meitner
• Natural philosophy
• History of optics - work in progress - needs medieval to modern coverage
• Natural history - very bare, with some dubious information
• History of biology - still needs work
• History of genetics - expand timelines into prose
• Heredity - is currently very poor, very short, and does not go back into concepts of heredity before the late 19th century in any appreciable sense.
• Max Delbrück
• History of zoology, post-Darwin - partly from EB 1911, in bad shape; needs copyediting as well. Now included in the Zoology navigation template; high priority, needs to incorporate the other good history of biology articles where appropriate
• History of zoology (before Darwin) - partly from EB 1911, in bad shape; needs copyediting as well. High priority; in Zoology navigation template
• The relationship between religion and science - partially historical. Needs a stronger framework, discussion of different models for the relationship (conflict thesis, NOMA, etc.) and either a link to a historical main article or a signficant expansion of the historical part.
• science studies
• Silent Spring - needs section on historical significance, and better description of its contents; the only two sections of prose after the intro are currently Criticism and Vindication?, neither of which has much, if anything, worth keeping.
• History of science in the Renaissance (links from history of science box)
• History of molecular biology (see also molecular biology and Molecular structure of Nucleic Acids
• Conflict thesis (aka, warfare model, Draper-White thesis) - The idea of a war between science and religion, which common in the historiography of sciece from the late 19th to the mid-20th centuries, and is still common among non-historians.
• Henri Becquerel
• Sofya Yanovskaya

Requested Articles

Missing scientist articles

• History of environmental science (links from history of science box)
• History of geology and/or History of earth science
• Patronage in the Renaissance (see Patronage)
• Book of Nature
• Aristotelian Physics

• Would this be "Aristotle's views on what we today call physics"? We have an article on Aristotle's Physics but I'm not sure that's what is meant. --Fastfission 18:31, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

• As in (I assume), the system of physics based on Aristotle's work, that was common in some form basically until Newton. Natural motion, natural place and the elements, violent motion, etc.--ragesoss 21:12, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

• Aristotelian Mechanics (maybe just one of these, I'm not sure of the relationship)

Just one, I think; the main separation in Aristotle seems to be life sciences/physics Maestlin 08:01, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

If the distinction is between Aristotelian natural philosophy (based on the Physics, Generation and corruption, Meteora and the biological works) and the tradition based on the Problemata mechanica attributed to Aristotle (and the various pseudo-Problemata that appeared in the Medieval period), then I think that separate pages are historically justified. —Goclenius 03:16, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

• Gravity theory

I think we need to separate Gravity from Gravity theory, but I'm not at all an expert on this. KSchutte 19:14, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

• Tetrabiblos - There is a discussion right now on Wikipedia:Reference desk/Humanities under "Ptolemy" about the fact that it was redirecting. A stub article is needed as a placeholder.
• Mertonian norms
• Orb (astronomy) - The clear spherical shells in which celestial objects are imbedded in pre-Keplerian astronomy

Try Sphere (geocentric) for a starting point. Maestlin 19:02, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

Articles in need of heavy copyediting

• Gottfried Leibnitz - hagiographic, massively too big and still growing
• Nuclear arms race
• Scientific Revolution
• Galileo affair
• Genealogy of theoretical physicists, survived AfD, but needs work
• John Harrison - lots of decent text, but needs structure
• Islamic science
• Galileo's Daughter - As of 30 May 2006, reads like a freshman book review
• Nicole Oresme - Relies largely on one self-published source - see discussion
• Alchemy - Quality varies widely; ignores much of the extensive literature on the History of Alchemy.

Auto-updated

This below is transcluded from Wikipedia:Pages needing attention/History of science.

Wikipedia:Pages needing attention listings are no longer being updated. For by-topic listings of articles that need attention, see:

• Category:Articles needing attention
• WikiProject Cleanup Listings

To flag an article for attention, add a cleanup template to the article or talk page. See Wikipedia:Template index/Cleanup for a listing. All previously listed articles have either been fixed or tagged.

See also the page history of Wikipedia:Votes for rewrite which ran from May 2002-June 2003 then was redirected to here.

Related Pages

WikiProjects

• Science WikiProject
  • Pseudoscience WikiProject
  • Science pearls
  • Years in science WikiProject
• History WikiProject
• Futures Studies WikiProject
• Biography of Academics WikiProject
• Wikiproject Philosophy
• Astrology WikiProject

Portals

• Science portal
• History portal
• Techology portal
• Medicine portal
• Scientific Method portal
• Mind and Brain portal

Collaborations

• Science COTW
• Medicine COTW
• Biography COTW

Votes, Polls and Candidacies

History of science-related material that is being voted on or discussed elsewhere on Wikipedia:

• Articles for Deletion
  • {none}

Collaborations

• Collaboration of the Week
  • (none}
• Article Improvement Drive
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• Science COTW
  • (none)
• Mathematics COTW
  • Cambridge Mathematical Tripos
• Core Topics COTW
  • Science (current)
  • Astronomy

Featured content

• Article candidates
  • {none}
• Topic candidates
  • Nuclear weapons
• Picture candidates
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• List candidates
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