ALT2: ... that cyclotrons were the most powerful particle accelerators in the world from their invention in the 1930s until the 1950s? Source: E.J.N. Wilson, A History of Particle Accelerators
Reviewed:
Improved to Good Article status by PianoDan (talk). Self-nominated at 16:40, 7 June 2022 (UTC).
This appears to be the nominator's second DYK nom, so no QPQ needed. Earwig found close similarities with several web sites but on inspection I'm pretty sure they all copied from us, not vice versa. Good Article status verified; despite the bare-bones nature of the GA review, the discussion about it at Wikipedia talk:Good article nominations#Another bad review appears to be petering out and the GA status appears likely to stand. (If that changes, we'll need to pull the nomination.) However, GA rules are not DYK rules, and the article does not currently meet DYK standards for sourcing. Every claim and every paragraph must be sourced, except when it is merely a summary in the lead of the article or a section of material appearing in more detail later with sources there. The article currently contains many unsourced paragraphs, two at the starts of sections "Particle energy" and "Relativistic considerations", an unsourced claim at the end of section "Synchrocyclotron", four unsourced paragraphs in section "Cyclotron types", and two more in "Target types". All must be fixed before this can run in DYK. Diagram is not readable at DYK thumbnail size and should not be used. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:57, 13 June 2022 (UTC)
David Eppstein Thanks for taking the time to review this. I was fully expecting a more detailed GA review, so I appreciate you basically doing that reviewer's job for them. (I nominated the article back in January, so I was definitely getting slightly antsy to see if anyone would ever look at it.) I've added citations everywhere indicated. The link to the image is above the "do not edit above this line" line, so I'm not sure how to change the suggested image. That said, my suggested replacement would be this one: Ernest Lawrence's 27-inch cyclotron. (1935) Please let me know if there's more improvements needed at this time. Thanks! PianoDan (talk) 06:19, 13 June 2022 (UTC)
The whole article now syntactically appears sourced. However, spot-checking of the hook claims still found a few sourcing issues (below).
ALT0 appears not to be mentioned in the article (at least, not the direct comparison of the relative sizes of the first cyclotron and the current largest; their individual sizes are mentioned). It's also a little confusing, because it appears to refer to the "Largest normal conductivity cyclotron" TRIUMF but the "Superconducting Ring Cyclotron" RIKEN is larger; is it not a cyclotron? And the two links given as sources didn't appear to say anything about relative sizes. It's a shame, because I think it's an interesting hook, and could be nicely illustrated by File:4-inch-cyclotron.jpg.
ALT1 is almost-properly sourced (a minor niggle: we need to repeat the footnote on the actual sentence of the claim in the article, even though it looks stupid to do so) and interesting enough.
ALT2 (most powerful from the 1930s until the 1950s) is I think more interesting than ALT1. It is stated in the lead, but not sourced there. Later in the article, we have separate statements that Lawrence's accelerators were the most powerful in the world in the 1930s (unsourced and still needs to be sourced) and that Synchrocyclotrons were the most powerful during the 1950s and were then superceded by synchrotrons (I couldn't find either of these claims in the source listed for both). The hook implies that synchrotrons were not invented until the 1950s but this is false; maybe they only became most-powerful in the 1950s? But the sourcing for such a claim is unclear. The easiest way to fix this would be to find and add a source for all of the claims in the lead sentence: that they became most powerful in the 1930s, that they stopped being most powerful in the 1950s, and that the reason they stopped being most powerful was that synchrotrons took over.
New image looks nice and would be ok for ALT1 or ALT2 (not ALT0 because it's not the first or the biggest, but there's another image that would be ok for that noted above).
Some other concerns: 2nd paragraph claim that crossing an accelerating field only once limits energy to "a few million volts": volts are not a unit of energy; maybe you mean electron volts? But a few million electron volts would be far higher than the first cyclotrons. Also SLAC achieved much higher energies while crossing (multiple) accelerating fields once per field, so this seems a bit misleading. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:43, 13 June 2022 (UTC)
ALT0 A few things. First off - if we a have a source that thing A is 5 meters and thing B is 50 meters do we REALLY have to have a source that explicitly says "Thing b is ten times as big as thing a" to make that assertion? That's such basic math - is it really OR?
That said, though - you're right about RIKEN being larger. (TRIUMF held the record for so long that it's kind of stuck in everyone's head) I started thinking that I'd use an iconic photo of the TRIUMF machine under construction with dozens of people sitting on the pole steel. Then I realized that picture isn't fair use anyway. Unfortunately, RIKEN is a separated sector machine, meaning there's not one single giant piece of steel to be as photogenic. But if we take your suggestion to use a picture of the tiny one, that still works as the hook, assuming we can work out sourcing.
ALT1 Cite duplicated.
ALT2 The Wilson reference DOES cover the relative energies, but since that's a book and not available online, I added a conference paper to the article. (Bryant, 1992) The "Livingston plot" of particle accelerator energies is such a fundamental graph in the field that I should probably write an article for that at some point - there certainly wouldn't be any problem establishing notability. Yeah, the early electron synchrotrons in the 1940s weren't very high energy - it wasn't until strong focusing arrived in the 1950s that synchrotrons really came into their own.
As we are having these discussions, I don't know to what extent I'm supposed to modify the original text of the hooks - as you say, this is only my second time through the process, and the first time was super weird because the article title was changed between the nomination and the review.
I think you're misreading the 2nd paragraph. It says that the POTENTIAL is limited to a few million volts, not the imparted energy, but I made that even more explicit. The SLAC linac, like cyclotrons, are RF machines, which are designed expressly to avoid the electrostatic breakdown issues of things like Van de Graff and Cockroft Walton machines. PianoDan (talk) 17:36, 13 June 2022 (UTC)
For the purposes of sourcing within articles, WP:CALC allows direct calculations like "150 times larger" without a source making that exact comparison. So it's not a problem to say so in the article, even in a Good Article. For the purpose of making that same claim in a DYK hook, I think the DYK sourcing requirements are stronger: we need the article to make the same 150x comparison and we need a source for that claim. If you want to make small copyedits to the hooks, go ahead, just note it here because modified hooks require re-approval. If you want to propose a totally new hook, that's ok too; mark it as boldface ALTn like the others. Anyway, I think we're good to go (taking offline book source on good faith) on ALT1 or ALT2. If you still want to push for ALT0 instead, that will require more changes to the article and its sourcing. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:32, 13 June 2022 (UTC)
I'm fine with abandoning ALT0, and subbing in the proposed new image for ALT1 and ALT2. I think the online Bryant source supports ALT2, and the Imaging Technology Online source supports ALT1, so no good faith is required. (If you want something a LITTLE less commercial for ALT1, there's also an IAEA report somewhere I could dig up.) Other than that, is there anything else I need to do on my end? PianoDan (talk) 16:07, 14 June 2022 (UTC)
No, just wait for the people putting together DYK sets to choose it as part of one of them (they will make the choice between ALT1 and ALT2) and get automatically notified on your talk page once it appears on the front page. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:14, 14 June 2022 (UTC)
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This appears to be the nominator's second DYK nom, so no QPQ needed. Earwig found close similarities with several web sites but on inspection I'm pretty sure they all copied from us, not vice versa. Good Article status verified; despite the bare-bones nature of the GA review, the discussion about it at Wikipedia talk:Good article nominations#Another bad review appears to be petering out and the GA status appears likely to stand. (If that changes, we'll need to pull the nomination.) However, GA rules are not DYK rules, and the article does not currently meet DYK standards for sourcing. Every claim and every paragraph must be sourced, except when it is merely a summary in the lead of the article or a section of material appearing in more detail later with sources there. The article currently contains many unsourced paragraphs, two at the starts of sections "Particle energy" and "Relativistic considerations", an unsourced claim at the end of section "Synchrocyclotron", four unsourced paragraphs in section "Cyclotron types", and two more in "Target types". All must be fixed before this can run in DYK. Diagram is not readable at DYK thumbnail size and should not be used. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:57, 13 June 2022 (UTC)
For the purposes of sourcing within articles, WP:CALC allows direct calculations like "150 times larger" without a source making that exact comparison. So it's not a problem to say so in the article, even in a Good Article. For the purpose of making that same claim in a DYK hook, I think the DYK sourcing requirements are stronger: we need the article to make the same 150x comparison and we need a source for that claim. If you want to make small copyedits to the hooks, go ahead, just note it here because modified hooks require re-approval. If you want to propose a totally new hook, that's ok too; mark it as boldface ALTn like the others. Anyway, I think we're good to go (taking offline book source on good faith) on ALT1 or ALT2. If you still want to push for ALT0 instead, that will require more changes to the article and its sourcing. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:32, 13 June 2022 (UTC)
