The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
I note that a prior GA review raised issues of geographic balance and Anglocentrism - it's a fair point and I'll be looking to see if those issues have been resolved, looking also at the talk page discussion.
Once black holes gained mainstream popularity it isn't exactly clear from the article when this was. Is it the same time frame as when black holes first gained Serious scientific attention, i.e. the 1960s? The prior sentence suggests 1967 ("black star") was before the term "black hole" was coined. When was it first used in science, and in fiction?
Details about when the term "black hole" was coined can be found at Black hole#Etymology; the term was not generally adopted (hence the precise phrasing the adoption of the current terminology in the "Early depictions" section) until after John Archibald Wheeler used it in December 1967. Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia says Fred Saberhagen's "The Face of the Deep" (1966) described the concept in detail ahead of the term's coinage. There were several ready-made science-fictional slots into which such a notion could fit when it was popularised, and black holes rapidly became commonplace., hence the slightly vague phrasing here. TompaDompa (talk) 23:14, 5 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Please edit the article to make this clearer.
There is only so much that can be done without going beyond what the sources say, and getting into the detailed history of the terminology seems rather tangential to the topic of this article: black holes in fiction. There is already an explanatory footnote pointing to Black hole#Etymology (in the "Early depictions" section). That the first example in this paragraph (in the "Time dilation" section) is from 1968 is, well, a data point; the same source that talks about the popularization of the concept—Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia—continues Many early stories elected to focus on the relativistic time-dilatation affecting objects falling towards event horizons; notable examples include Poul Anderson's "Kyrie" (1968) [...]. TompaDompa (talk) 06:42, 6 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I just wouldn't want readers to be confused about when fictional treatments shifted from stories about "things similar to black holes" to stories about "black holes". Anything you can do to improve this going forward would be helpful. We're good enough for GA, though.
Speculation that black holes Speculation from scientists, or from fiction writers? "soon followed" when?
According to the "White Holes" entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, A series of theoretical papers in the 1970s suggested that for every black hole there must somewhere else – perhaps at the far end of a connecting Wormhole – be a corresponding white hole gushing energy out into the Universe in the same way that a black hole would suck it in. and An early sf example is "Fountain of Force" (in Infinity 4, anth 1972, ed Robert Hoskins; rev in Black Holes, anth 1978, ed Jerry Pournelle) by Grant Carrington and George Zebrowski, which links white holes with interstellar Wormhole transitions.TompaDompa (talk) 23:14, 5 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Black holes have been depicted with varying degrees of accuracy to the scientific understanding of them I think this sentence could be eliminated entirely and it would not weaken the section/paragraph. It feels out of place here.
2a. it contains a list of all references (sources of information), presented in accordance with the layout style guideline.
Pass, no issues.
2b. reliable sources are cited inline. All content that could reasonably be challenged, except for plot summaries and that which summarizes cited content elsewhere in the article, must be cited no later than the end of the paragraph (or line if the content is not in prose).
Why are both the first and second editions of Lukkala cited, but in the same cite? Do they contain different information? Could we just keep the second edition, or does the first have details missing in the second?
For these two, if the different editions/works are relaying different information, they should be split into separate cites, and each one only used where its specific information is relevant. —Ganesha811 (talk) 19:26, 4 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Looked into it a bit more. For Loukkala, they are mostly interchangeable apart from the stuff about Interstellar which is naturally only in the newer edition. For Nahin, the sources are basically interchangeable (and only cited at one place in the article). I think both of these are acceptable instances of WP:REFBUNDLE; I could perhaps split them into separate citations and cite both in each instance apart from the Interstellar one, but that would just add a bunch of visual clutter to no real benefit. For sources available through Google Books, which sometimes makes previously-accessible content inaccessible without warning and for which archiving services work poorly, there is real benefit to this kind of mild redundancy. TompaDompa (talk) 20:29, 4 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
For Luokkala, I found the older edition before I found the newer one. I don't quite recall, but I'm guessing the reason I didn't replace the older edition with the newer one is that it's not entirely easy to tell at a glance whether the older edition contains material absent from the newer one as the paragraphs have been shifted around quite a bit between the two (and I may very well have alternated between which one I used at any given time as Google Books is as mentioned fickle). For Nahin, they aren't different versions of the same book, so it's not like one supersedes the other. Rather, Nahin is repeating a point across both works. TompaDompa (talk) 23:11, 4 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
That's all well and good, but there's no reason to keep duplicative citations - it will just confuse the reader. Please remove them and make sure the information in the article is all cited to the proper source. —Ganesha811 (talk) 23:25, 4 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
It's understandable that this article focuses mostly on science fiction. However, I'm curious if the sources used have limited its scope a little - are there any significant works of fiction outside that genre that involve black holes?
3b. it stays focused on the topic without going into unnecessary detail (see summary style).
The mentions of Heller's Leap and The Space Eater, along with a few of the other individual stories thrown in, strike me as slightly overdetailed. There are clearly tons of tertiary and secondary sources covering this topic - if a work is not mentioned by one of them, its inclusion here feels a little arbitrary. These references could be removed, or modified to add phrases like "For instance" and "for example" to make it flow more easily.
4. Neutral: it represents viewpoints fairly and without editorial bias, giving due weight to each.
No issues of neutrality - pass. The prior concern about geographic balance has been improved, and while not perfect, is at GA standard for English Wikipedia.
5. Stable: it does not change significantly from day to day because of an ongoing edit war or content dispute.
No issues of stability or edit warring.
6.Illustrated, if possible, by media such as images, video, or audio:
Hmmm - I see why it's interesting, but I think it's more likely to confuse readers than assist them. I'd prefer if it was replaced by normal links in the 'See also' section.
I unfortunately haven't found any suitable images depicting black holes in fiction, specifically. If you want I could add File:Wormhole travel as envisioned by Les Bossinas for NASA.jpg, but frankly I don't think it's a particularly good image for visualizing wormhole travel. Commons:Category:Black holes contains File:Fantastic 196001.jpg, which I would use if I could verify that it's actually meant to depict a black hole (and thus be able to write a relevant caption), but from what I can gather it's not. I don't think additional images that just depict black holes would add anything of value—though if they show something special in addition to a black hole, e.g. a spaceship encounter, they might. TompaDompa (talk) 23:11, 4 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Agreed, sounds fair enough to me. Pass on images.
7. Overall assessment.
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
