User talk:GenoV84/2020/December

Jabir ibn Hayyan

Dear GenoV84,

Thank you again for you contributions to Jabir ibn Hayyan. Would you in the future please take a look at the diffs and only change what you disagree with rather than revert the whole thing? This way, undisputed contributions and improvements do not get deleted along with the disputed content (note that this is the approach I took). Also, when (some of) your stuff gets reverted it is almost always a good idea to discuss it at the talk page before reverting the revert (see wikipedia:brd).

Note that I added Newman's Britannica article to the bibliography (under 'Encyclopedic sources') and withheld the reference for calling Jabir 'the father of Arabic chemistry' (an ever controversial notion, the more so since experts generally don't deal with this type of 'titles'). Note also that what is referenced in the article does not need referencing in the infobox (ideally the infobox would contain no references at all, but this article is incomplete), and that the word 'Arab' is used only for people, while things and concepts are called 'Arabic'. I deleted the reference to Newman at other places where you added it because better and more appropriate references were already given.

Then for the most crucial question: yes, William R. Newman is an outstanding expert on the history of alchemy and chemistry. But, he does not know Arabic, let alone studied the Arabic sources, and there are plenty of sources written by experts who did (please take a look at the bibliography). Moreover, if you inspect the 'article history' section of Newman's article, you'll see that almost the entire article was rewritten in 2007 (I suspect that Newman's article is the 2007 version, so we should perhaps correct the date of writing in our article), but Jabir's date and place of birth were already there before 2007 (and so this was probably not written by Newman).

Actually, the whole section on Jabir's biography badly needs to be rewritten on the basis of better sources (see my proposal at the article's talk page, though note that most of the work proposed there is already done). It would be absolutely great if you would take a stab at this. A good place to start is Delva 2017, where further references to almost everything relevant are given, including the old hypothesis of Holmyard 1927 (on which the place and date of birth as Tus, 721 is based, but which has always been taken as speculative and which as Delva argues is contradicted by newly available sources) and the significant minority of views of Sezgin 1971 and Nomanul Haq 1994 (who argue against the majority of scholars that a historical Jabir authored most or all of the corpus), which we should also mention in our article.

Nocturnal greetings, Apaugasma (talk) 01:31, 5 December 2020 (UTC)