Talk:Ferd Kayser

Spots that still need fixing

Hello. I happened to stumble upon this article. Having noticed how poorly this article was written, I suspected that it might have been the work of a malicious editor, so I checked the history. It turns out that it was created from a very crude outline by a user (a certain Doug Butler) who most likely did not speak English as his/her first language. I have therefore set about to give it a massive overhaul (perfect timing for the New Year!). I tried my best to improve the grammar, style, and sentence flow; however, there were several spots that I either did not know how to fix, or fixed anyway yet wasn't sure as to the acceptability of my edits. Here they are:

• Was the article's subject commonly known by his initials (akin to, say, E.B. White or J.J. Thomson), or his full name? The sources are ambiguous about this. Six of them are newspapers and one of them are not; the non-newspaper refers to Kayser by his full name, and the newspapers either use his initials or avoid mentioning his full name at all. Yes, I know that the source using his full name is outnumbered by about four to one, but the statistics are skewed due to the others all being newspapers, and besides, the newspapers mention everyone else by their initials too. If the latter, then I suggest that we move this article to Heinrich Wilhelm Ferdinand Kayser, or something along the lines of that.
• The name of the article's subject was originally listed as "Heinrich Wilhelm Ferdinand "Ferd" Kayser M.E. F.R.G.S. MAusIMM MIMechE". Are those extra letters at the end honorifics? They were not present in the original, and I can find no such honorifics in any other article on Wikipedia.
• According to the article, Kayser's reforms to the mine at Mount Bischoff made "around ₤1,250,000 for its investors". But that's not the pound sign before the numbers; that's the lira sign! The linked source has a sentence reading "The mine has paid nearly 1½ millions in dividends", but fails to specify a unit of currency. I'm assuming that's simply a typo for the real pound sign, as Australia used the Australian pound at the time before switching to the Australian dollar.
  • The main question I'm trying to ask here is: are values in historical currencies acceptable on Wikipedia, or must I convert them into the country's modern equivalent? If the former, must I provide a conversion?
• How am I supposed to format the "Family" section? How are the names of the people supposed to be presented, and are the bullets and dashes correct? What sort of relationship do Agnes and Bertha have to Kayser? Daughters? Sisters? Nieces? The article is very vague on this. How come none of the (other) children have names? And they can't possibly all still be alive today if all of them were born prior to 1900, now can they? Last but not least, where are the sources for all of this?!?!?!?! Unsourced information itself does not make me angry, but once I see unsourced information as egregious as this, I start fuming. That's it; I've removed the "Family" section until we can supply citations.

(For reference, here is the latest revision of this article before I initiated cleanup efforts. Good luck, all of you.)

Thanks, HighwayTyper (talk) 20:38, 1 January 2020 (UTC)