Talk:Fred Bonine

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A fact from Fred Bonine appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 8 June 2012 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that Fred Bonine set the world's record in the 110-yard dash in 1886, and later saw over a million patients in his medical office?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2012/June. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Fred Bonine.

Wikipedia

Factual veracity of this article

The blog post [1] may be of interest to editors of this article; in particular, it calls into question many of the (reliably sourced!) claims in the article. (It is obviously not usable as a reliable source, but perhaps it provides some basis for identifying other sources.) --JBL (talk) 01:39, 1 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Good point. I did some digging on the track figures and added some clarifying material in that section. I also added some language to the patient size section to express that the numbers came from the obituary and may not be accurate. I didn't look hard for and didn't find any sources on Bonine that would do a better job of expressing how popular he was without hyperbole (note that the work in the blog post seems correct, but translating that into what I would put here would qualify, IMO, as original research). Smmurphy^(Talk) 15:44, 1 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I wrote the blog post linked above. There is no record anywhere of Bonine running a time of 10.8 in an 110-yard race until 40 years after the fact, when newspaper articles generated by publicity for the projected Dempsey-Wills fight in 1926 made this claim. How those articles count as "reliable sources" is unclear.

The fastest time anyone ever claimed Bonine ran prior to the publicity blurbs 40 years later was 11.0. This time was not accepted by as legitimate by the compilers of unofficial world records -- official records via the ITAF did not exist prior to 1912 -- so Bonine was never credited with any kind of record in the world of track and field.

The claims regarding how many patients he saw are wildly improbable on their face, as I point out in the blog post, but are not as conclusively debunked by examining the extant historical record.2601:281:8180:B0:2858:91ED:458C:4E59 (talk) 05:37, 2 February 2022 (UTC)Paul Campos[reply]

Hi Paul, thanks for your message. (I'm a long-time reader of LGM.) I'm glad you were able to find your way over here. This case presents a structural weakness of Wikipedia: if someone gets a bunch of nonsense written about them in reputable sources, and then that's debunked in a blog-post, the various sourcing guidelines the community has developed over the years push heavily in favor of using the (wrong, even ridiculous) reliably sourced material rather than the (correct) blog debunking. In addition to raising the question here and with the creator of the article, I've also posted a message at one of WP's noticeboards in the hope of drawing the attention of a larger group of editors. --JBL (talk) 12:24, 2 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Looking at the Independent, its possible to classify that as self-sourced as it may be an interview. However, it also contradicts the million patients as it says "hundreds a year" The Montreal article also questions his earliest time. Need to do more digging but I think there's enough contradiction in the sources that extraordinary claims could be removed or minimized (perhaps discussing without making part of the lede and with attribution/qualification) Slywriter (talk) 14:29, 2 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Has anybody ever bothered to actually run the numbers to see how absurdly implausible it is that any doctor could ever directly treat 1.5 million patients over the course of their career? The article says that his career spanned "nearly 40 years". Let's go ahead and give him the full 40 and see how this works out. In order to treat 1.5 million unique patients, this doctor would have needed to see 37,500 new patients every single year of his career. Let's assume this guy was a real workhorse and put in 60 hours a week, every single week, for 40 straight years without ever once taking any time off for anything. That's more than 12 patients per hour, every hour of every workday, with no breaks for the restroom and no meals. And also no repeat patients, ever. It's not plausible. — Preceding unsigned comment added by DTG.stl.314 (talk • contribs) 19:54, 2 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

My thoughts: In general, basing an article entirely off of brief historic newspaper articles is fraught with risks. There are some dedicated sections in contemporary encyclopedias (e.g. [2][3][4]) which may not be any more reliable, but can help evaluate claims, establish due weight and guide efforts to locate more authoritative sources. Searching for "F. N. Bonnie" yields many sporting results.[5] Lastly, It may be prudent to attribute claims Bonine made himself when they are disputed or possibly hyperbolic, but the heavy use of "an article by X claimed Y and Z" etc. seems unwieldy and overly-editorializing. --Animalparty! (talk) 04:09, 9 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks to a number of editors for improving the situation here significantly. The current situation is that the most clearly dubious claims are now attributed to particular news articles; this has been done more thoroughly in the paragraph on athletics than in the section on his medical practice (which if anything seems less plausible). This unfortunately makes for some very choppy text in the section on athletics. There are also a couple points where the text seems very confusing: Bonine's obituary reported that he reputedly treated as many as 517 patients in one day and saw 200 patients in a day. Hundreds were said to have lined up each day is repetitive and the distinction in the first sentence is unclear, and I'm not sure I can parse Timekeeping was questioned by track followers at the time and Bonine was handily beaten in a race with Harvard's Wendell Baker, who was also considered the record holder at 11.2 seconds until 1910. Any further ideas for improving things would be wonderful. --JBL (talk) 20:37, 11 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Belated, but I disagree that the blog post is unusable. The key thing about blog posts is who wrote them - a random person on the Internet, or someone without expertise? Paul Campos has their own Wikipedia article, and I think we can unironically say that he's produced the majority of 21st century literature on Fred Bonine scholarship. Given that he appears to have actually researched the issue rather than made stuff up, I'd argue that the blog post is citable directly in this article, and can be used to call out certain claims as unlikely. (More generally, extraordinary claims require extraordinary sources - if we had local newspaper articles from 1920 about how some Iowa obstetrician could walk on water, we wouldn't necessarily just report that unadorned.) SnowFire (talk) 09:59, 10 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

My two cents: I thoroughly enjoyed discovering Fred Bonine back in 2012, digging through the clippings, and creating the Wikipedia article about him. My interest in him came from researching 19th century University of Michigan athletics, and he was someone who I had never heard of before 2012. I am frankly tickled that Dr. Bonine, who appears to have been forgotten for the better part of 80 years, has now been rediscovered, drawn further attention from Paul Campos's blog, and triggered a debate like this. This interaction and the process of improving the article through collaboration is what Wikipedia is all about. I tend to agree that some of the claims are incredible and that our reportage of such claims should be combined with appropriate cautionary language, including possibly even countering some points with citation to Paul's blog piece (we may need a bit more information to be sure Paul's blog qualifies at a reliable source). I am currently traveling in South America, but I'm able to work on a rewrite when I return later this month. If someone else wants to take on the task, have at it. Salud! Cbl62 (talk) 14:23, 10 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]