User:Geo Swan/The earliest sockpuppet to be unmasked...

Originally submitted to the village pump.

The earliest sockpuppet to be unmasked...

I regularly see quality control volunteers argue in {{afd}} discussions that a biographical article should be deleted, even if it is written from a neutral point of view, and cites verifiable, authoritative references -- because it does not cover the ordinary biographical milestones, like where and when the individual was born, or studied.

I regularly ask those quality control volunteers to consider "false Geber". He was the first person to describe the process for the purification and use of Sulfuric acid. Isaac Asimov thought his work was significant enough that he had an entry for him in his biographical encyclopedia of the World's top 1,000 most important scientists -- even though historians knew practically nothing about him, not his name, not when or where he lived, or his religion or occupation.

I suggest to them that while the milestones of a person's life are definitely worth including, if we can verify them, not having them available is a very poor reason to suggest we should suppress coverage of what we do know about what the individual did.

Well, since the last time I told someone about him, someone updated the false Geber article to incorporate a claim that a recent scholar feels sure he can establish that false Geber was a practically unknown monk called "Paul of Taranto". And, rather than writing under the name of the earlier, more famous Geber, as an act of altruism and self-abnegation, this scholar suggests Paul of Taranto was forging new works under Geber's name to help promote earlier works he published under his own name.

So, it seems to me, if the recent scholarship is correct, this could be the eariest instance of what we call sockpuppetry. Here is a passage from Openness, Secrecy, Authorship by Pamela O. Lang

"Newman provides detailed evidence to show that the Latin Summa was probably written by Paul of Taranto, a virtually unknown Franciscan from the order in Assisi. The Summa is clearly related in specific ways to an earlier work, Theorica et practica, in which Paul is named as the author. In the earlier work Paul tries to justify the power of man over nature and provides a detailed defense of applied science. In the later Summa he combines a rigorous defense of alchemy with a pseudonymous attribution to an Arabic alchemical authority, Geber. Thus he defends alchemy against its critics and at the same time enhances the authority of his treatise for a readership of alchemists.

According to the scholar in question, one William R. Newman, this Franciscan monk Paul wrote Theorica et practica under his own name, and then wrote another work entitled Summa Perfectionis under Geber's name.

I still hate sockpuppets.

And I still think a lack of information about the mundane milestones of a subject's life is a bad reason to argue for deletion.

Cheers! Geo Swan (talk) 18:28, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

See also

• User:Geo Swan/opinions/"False Geber" and what a biography should contain