Template:Did you know nominations/Thomas Ashburton Picken

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The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Edge3 (talk) 19:49, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

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Thomas Ashburton Picken

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Conflagration of Houses of Parliament, 1834
Conflagration of Houses of Parliament, 1834

Created by Storye book (talk). Self-nominated at 16:13, 18 January 2021 (UTC).

  • The article is new, long enough and was nominated in time; it appears neutral. Earwig found no issues and spotchecks found no paraphrasing issues (but there is little in the way of freely available online sources with any extended material; see below). QPQ done. Image is attractive at size and appropriately licensed.
  • The hook is concise and mildly interesting, though I wonder how common it was at that date? I'm not seeing any explicitly cited source for this. The London Picture Archive states it was executed in 1834 but says nothing about the publication date. The British Museum source linked by the image in Commons covers that, but needs to be added explicitly. More problematic is the birth date. I can't check the birth year source to calculate the age, but it appears to be based on the 1881 census? Not sure how reliable that would be (presumably it just means the census person asked him or someone else in the household how old he was) and how much dependence on primary documents is allowable without becoming original research.
  • More generally, a lot of the problem here is that this article appears to be the first time that anyone has attempted a coherent biography of the subject? I don't know how far it is possible to go without hitting the No original research rule; the creator is a probably lot more conversant than I am in this area.
  • Much of the material in the lead isn't developed in the body and sourced.
  • The figure legends under Some lithographs and commentaries, and elsewhere, need sources for everything except the work's title. A lot of this, in the absence of any sourcing, looks like original research/personal opinion.
  • How reliable is Geographicus (which is cited four times, including for the fact he never married)? It looks like an online shop.
  • The refs seem to be include a great deal of repetition of identical sources or the same newspaper article accessed in different ways; these need amalgamating.
  • Not necessarily essential for DYK but... I also found the article rather oddly organised, with snippets of information about his career in the figure legends and then in the Reviews section right at the end. It would read much better if there was a proper works section in which each of the important works was discussed and sourced in the text, even if the over-abundance of images meant that they had to be placed in one or more galleries. The material on his personal circumstances and later life/death doesn't fit well in Background. You don't need to give detailed dates and places of birth/death for his relatives; it interrupts the flow, feels bloated, and the long list of sources for material unrelated to the subject starts to look like ref bombing. You use "Day and Haghe" a lot, as if they were a company but with separate links, which I found rather odd. Either give the names as full names at least once in lead and body, or link to the article on their company. Hope this helps in developing the article on this interesting figure. Espresso Addict (talk) 19:02, 18 January 2021 (UTC)
OK, I have started to adapt the article to your opinion. Please note that the broadband is very slow in my village, especially as my house is at the end of the line, and during lockdown, everyone is using their broadband. Also my pc is overloaded with images due to this type of work, so the overload slows it down. So please understand that every task takes me a long time, and I cannot always get back to you with completed tasks quickly. Also please note the time difference. I have been working since 7am, and it is now around 9.30 pm, and it is difficult to work such long hours and keep to one's best standard, while dealing with such a long question. I am concerned as to whether you are attempting a GA review, rather than a DYK review.
Date of publication 1834: I have provided citations for that, in the text, in the way that you suggested.
Birth year of Thomas A. Picken: I have made it clear at all times that the birth date is approximate (e.g. "around" and "circa"). This is because there are no official birth registration records in UK before 1837. We have to calculate it from Census and GRO bmd indexes, plus GRO certificates if we can afford to pay for them (ten cost over £100). If all the censuses plus the death certificate say the same thing, then it is reasonable to conclude the approximate year of birth. In Picken's case all the census information and the GRO death index information concur in a birth year of 1818-1819, so we can reasonably say it is around 1818. If your theory about the enumerator's questioning of unreliable witnesses had been correct, we would have seen an inconsistent record of age at the time of census, especially as Picken was residing at different addresses with different people each year. As it is, the consistency is impressive and I think we have to respect that.
Primary sources: I have already explained that the aforementioned census and GRO indexes can be considered reliable for an approximate year of birth in a case like this. You ask why I have used these citations so much for so many reasons. If you would kindly read my long explanation for this on the talk page, you would understand why. I have gone to a great deal of trouble to clarify certain matters, and you need to understand this. (Note: I am not going to copy that whole piece from the talk page here: please kindly read it?) Doing a lot of work is not a crime. Trying hard to explain things is not a crime. All new WP articles are in development, and where there are primary sources, they are there waiting to be replaced in due course by secondary sources which have not been written yet, or found yet. Removing those sources will make everything very difficult for everybody. All the citations are verifiable by somebody, especially UK residents who have a library ticket from a major library or institution.
Original research is not about original research being a crime per se. It's about protecting WP from people who may misinterpret it, or misuse it by combining primary sources which they do not understand into a new but unjustified construct. I have used this material merely for its content, e.g. the age of Picken at each census, and have been clear about how I am using it. There is no suspect activity here. We should use WP rules as intended, i.e. to improve WP, not as a way of denigrating editors and creators of articles.
The content of the leader: I have taken your advice, and repeated the content of the leader in the Career section, with citations. If you want more citations I would be happy to add them.
The Some lithographs and commentaries section: A commentary on WP, as I understand it, does not need citations, and can contain what may look like opinion, so long as it is titled as a commentary. I have made a number of commentaries, titled as such, in articles and this is the first time I have seen a complaint. If you really can't handle it, I would be happy to remove all uncited material from the caption sections under the images. However the commentaries that I have added are not controversial. They are merely there to assist the reader to appreciate the detail and content. Normally, people don't bother to notice anything about art until you tell them, in my own experience - sadly.
Background section: The reason why I had to write that long explanation on the talk page (which you have now read?) was that I expected that sort of reaction about length and number of citations, so I explained exactly why the background section is like it is. If you are trying to establish whether you are writing about one person, or two people conflated, then you certainly do need to cover all bases regarding the family background, dates and so on. You have to check out all secondary sources (with primary sources if there is nothing else), then you have to look again and find more. There is no way around it. I feel that I cannot rest in this matter until we have all the identifiers in the Autnority control corrected. This will take some time. If you don't like it, then I will have to withdraw this nomination from DYK. I would rather do the job properly than have one more DYK credit.
Day and Haghe: They did in fact function as a single company when the two men were working together in the early days. When Haghe left, William Day carried on with his son (Charles, I think?), as Day & Son. The early lithographs say, in small letters in the border beneath the pictures, that the printer/publisher is Day and Haghe, as if it were a single company, so I have followed suit. There is no single link on WP for that, so I have not pretended that there were.
Well, I hope that I have begun to answer your questions, and to adjust the article to your opinion. I am primarily interested in improving the article to the benefit of WP, and I'm sure you are, too, otherwise you wouldn't have spent so much time and effort on the above review. I am now thinking about removing the article from DYK. Forgive me but this reply is probably full of typos because I can no longer see properly due to long hours. I must stop now. Storye book (talk) 22:19, 18 January 2021 (UTC) It took me nearly an hour to write this. Please have patience. Thank you. Storye book (talk) 22:20, 18 January 2021 (UTC)
  • @ Espresso Addict. Update. As you will have seen, a couple of weeks ago I did adjust the article, and paired the edit summaries with the appropriate points in your review. The matter of retaining the sources in the Arts background section has become more important, now that the Library of Congress staff have told me that they are trying to find their own sources to correct their own inadequate and incorrect information. In response I have of course made the article sources even more comprehensive so as to assist their researches, now that I know they will need them. They will want to know that Thomas Ashburton Picken (ca.1818–1891) is the same person as their Thomas Picken (d.1870) for whom they appear to have no evidence. So they will need to check out his family as well as his connection with the lithographs (of which they possess some examples in their collection). I note they have made some progress; they have added the WP article to their sources, but have not updated their information.[1]. Well, they did say that it would take a while due the pandemic etc. Storye book (talk) 15:22, 31 January 2021 (UTC)
Thanks for pinging me, Storye book. The article looks a great deal better now and I sympathise with your Wikidata woes; some of the material there has been very carelessly added and, from the Wikipedia end at least, it is hard to see how to contest the errors. (Just as an aside, afaik it isn't part of the DYK review to check the talk page (perhaps it should be) and if there are any issues that a reviewer should consider, it would be useful to note them in the comment.) However, I'm still concerned about the degree of what seems to me to be original research, and I don't think we're going to see eye to eye on this, so I'm going to hand this on to another reviewer to get an opinion. Espresso Addict (talk) 02:18, 1 February 2021 (UTC)
  • Thank you, Espresso Addict. I am happy to see a new reviewer here. @Cwmhiraeth:. @Gerda Arendt: Storye book (talk) 11:09, 1 February 2021 (UTC)
  • To the new reviewer: Regarding the above comment about WP:OR. Please see the talk page of the article for an explanation of why there is an Arts Background section in the article. Also see my above comment for an explanation of why we need to show evidence of family and personal identity for Thomas Ashburton Picken, bearing in mind that the Library of Congress (which, as I write, has wrong information about Picken) is unlikely to find any other sources for correcting its identifier errors. Regarding the above questioning of my creation of an article which does not already exist in the form of a book, please note that a large proportion of decent WP articles are like that, and many of them have passed happily through the DYK system. WP values articles containing information which the public can't obtain easily anywhere else. Also, Picken's work is in many prestigious collections, including the Royal Collection Trust and the Library of Congress. That more than fulfils the WP criteria of notability for an artist biography. The reason why Picken has not had a full biography book written about him is that until recently the lithographer, male or otherwise, has mainly passed through history unnoticed - much like women, you could say. This is probably because the public was never encouraged to realise that lithographers were often artists in their own right, and were often producing lithographs not as mere copies of full-blown oil paintings, but creatively from rough sketches. There is a quotation about that in the article. I hope that eases your mind about the points raised above. Storye book (talk) 11:09, 1 February 2021 (UTC)
  • Coming at this with fresh eyes, I think the article and nomination meet the DYK criteria. The article is new enough and plenty long enough and the splendid image is in the public domain. The hook facts are cited inline, the article is neutral and I detected no copyright issues. A QPQ has been done. Cwmhiraeth (talk) 07:21, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
  • Apologies Storye book. I was looking at this for promotion, and while the hook seems to fit the source, I'm not sure the equivalent information in the article does. The article sentence is "Probably Picken's earliest publication was his lithograph of The Destruction of Both Houses of Parliament, 1834,[21] executed when he was only about 16 years old.[13]", and while I'm willing to AGF the ancestry source, neither the British Museum source nor the ones cited for the hook above place the piece as the chronological first published. Could you clarify if I'm missing something, if this is from another source, or if it is an assumption? Best, CMD (talk) 15:37, 10 February 2021 (UTC)
  • Thanks for the prompt, Chipmunkdavis. I have replaced the phrase with "probably one of his earliest publications". Bearing in mind that he was only around 16 years old (you can see that immature quality anyway by the closeup quality of the engraving) it was unusual in those days to allow anyone who had not completed their apprenticeship to represent the company with a full job of work like this. An apprenticeship for a skilled job like that was normally 7 years, from age 14 to 21. It's astonishing enough that he was allowed to do this by top lithographers-to-the-king Day and Haghe, at around 16 years of age. I'd be surprised if he had been allowed to publish engravings before that age. I suspect that because he and his brother Andrew got this scoop which would be a fast earner for the company, they were allowed to do the engravings as an exception. So I think we should be OK now.
  • If you would like to check out the rather immature engraving quality, I have today received an original direct print of that engraving from Ebay (amazing luck) and I've uploaded it as a series of full scans and details here - they are the ones titled Conflagration. Storye book (talk) 15:59, 10 February 2021 (UTC)
  • Restoring AGF tick, although I am going to have to take issue with your assertion that "[I] can see that immature quality anyway by the closeup quality of the engraving". CMD (talk) 16:04, 10 February 2021 (UTC)
  • Fair enough. You would need to compare it with his later work - which is up to you, really, if you are interested enough. He never could do people (unlike his brother) and in this picture they are almost stick men (he improved later but could never properly do faces). Thank you for reinstating the nom. Storye book (talk) 16:37, 10 February 2021 (UTC)
  • In case it's needed, ALT1 has "created" instead of "published".
  • ALT1: ... that Thomas Picken's lithograph of the 1834 conflagration of London's Houses of Parliament (detail pictured) was created when he was around 16 years old? (Additional source to go with the above source: the subtitle of the original printed publication is dated 1834 - bottom right hand corner of border). Storye book (talk) 16:51, 10 February 2021 (UTC)
    @Chipmunkdavis: you've approved this, but an alternative hook has since been proposed. Do you have an opinion on which one? I haven't dived into the full details of the issues above, so not sure if it's an improvement... Cheers  — Amakuru (talk) 09:44, 11 February 2021 (UTC)
It looks like quite a technical distinction to me. I'd slightly lean towards ALT1 at that seems more certain, but they feel roughly the same. CMD (talk) 10:14, 11 February 2021 (UTC)
Regrettably, the latest icon on this nomination is Amakuru's query, not a tick. Amakuru, can you or CMD confirm (by use of a tick icon subsequent to the above ? icon) that this is approved for promotion, in which case the bot will move the nomination to the Approved page. Thank you very much. BlueMoonset (talk) 02:09, 22 February 2021 (UTC)
I remain happy with my last tick. I'll re-tick in a bit if needed, but prefer not to resolve someone else's question sign. CMD (talk) 02:26, 22 February 2021 (UTC)
Restoring tick based on CMD's comments. I guess ALT1 is the favoured one. Apologies for not circling back to this earlier.  — Amakuru (talk) 10:00, 22 February 2021 (UTC)

It might be more helpful to link to the actual event: Burning of Parliament.

Thoughts? Edge3 (talk) 17:55, 26 February 2021 (UTC)

I would be happy with that. @Amakuru:? Storye book (talk) 18:23, 26 February 2021 (UTC)
Great! Not sure what we're waiting for Amakuru to do, but I'm happy to restore the tick. Edge3 (talk) 18:49, 26 February 2021 (UTC)
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