# Talk:NASA Astronaut Group 4

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— Preceding undated comment added 19:01, 8 June 2019 (UTC)

Image S65-36788 has all six astronauts. I found images at Spacefacts (with their watermark), collectSPACE. Looks like the smaller photo is a cropped image of the larger one. So far, all photos I have found with NASA ID numbers are official NASA photos and therefore in the public domain, so these should be too. Could make for a nice addition to the article. Kees08 (Talk) 01:45, 16 June 2019 (UTC)

I think the text in the Career column of the table in the Group Members section is way to wordy. For a table, it really should be a very brief statement. Otherwise it messes up the table formatting and makes it very hard to read. Would anyone object to shortening those entries and simply leaving out the astronauts full professional history? After all, we do have links to their articles on them and those articles contain all the details. Fcrary (talk) 05:37, 19 September 2021 (UTC)

Yes. Leave it alone. It is the same as those for Groups 1 through 3. The Mercury Seven article is featured. Do not remove sourced information from articles. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 06:12, 19 September 2021 (UTC)
Entries in tables are supposed to be short, like a name, a date or a few words. They aren't supposed to be a paragraph or more of prose. Currently, the "career" entries are about 18 characters wide and about 70-75 lines long. That's unreadable. In a useful table, one row shouldn't be taller than a reader's entire screen. If that information is necessary, it belongs in the text of the article not as a table entry. In any case, there is nothing wrong with removing redundant sourced information, and if all the information is in another, linked article, I think it's redundant.
There are other ways to improve the table, such as two row entries with the images and names spanning both rows. But personally, I'd rather get rid of the career column and replace it with a column with a (non-prose) list of degrees (perhaps PhD only) and another column with a (non-prose) list of the missions the person flew on. The rest of the information in the current career entries is in the articles about the individual. Fcrary (talk) 22:02, 19 September 2021 (UTC)
Resize your screen to the standard size, 1024×768 px. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 22:18, 19 September 2021 (UTC)
I am using the default size for my laptop and zooming from 110% back to 100% in Chrome doesn't help significantly. I thought the goal for formatting was, to the greatest extent practical, to things readable regardless of the reader's platform and settings. But none of that is relevant. According to the Manual of Style, prose (especially lengthy prose) does not belong in a table. And 971 characters of prose in a single table cell is definitely lengthy and excessive. Fcrary (talk) 22:40, 19 September 2021 (UTC)
Looks fine on my laptop at 1920 x 1200 px. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 01:19, 20 September 2021 (UTC)
I'm afraid that is a vastly abusive and inappropriate comment. An editor can simply not say, "Screw the readers. If they don't have as high a resolution computer as I do, or don't have as big a screen, then to hell with them." An editor who says "It looks good on my computer, so screw every one else." is not a competent Wikipedia editor. So you could please stop being abusive, self-centered and discuss the actual issue? Is lengthy prose acceptable in a table entry? It's a problem according to Wikipedia's MOS. You have repeatedly refused to address that issue. I have tried to focus on that. Why haven't you?Fcrary (talk) 04:01, 20 September 2021 (UTC)
It is acceptable according to the MOS. I have featured articles using the format. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 06:29, 20 September 2021 (UTC)
A large part of Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Tables is about when you should use prose rather than a table. E.g. the first paragraph, "sometimes the information in a table may be better presented as prose paragraphs". That strongly implies that prose paragraphs and table contents are different things. If lengthy prose, running to multiple sentences, were appropriate in a table, the whole Tables section in the MOS would make no sense. The fact that some featured articles have imperfect style is irrelevant. Mistakes are made and some poor formatting can slip through the reviews of featured articles. "I've gotten away with it in the past" does not excuse repeating a mistake.
But, again, that's not the issue. This is a discussion about how to improve the article. Unless your position is that it's perfect, you need to focus on why the suggested changes would make the article better or worse. Not fixate on the idea that the article is "acceptable" as is. What would be wrong about moving that prose out of the table? Or even the suggested two-row-per-entry table format, with the prose occupying almost the full width of the lower row? Fcrary (talk) 00:55, 21 September 2021 (UTC)
Reformatting the table to look like the episode guides with two rows per entry won't work because of the placement of the images and the sortable columns. As it currently stands, the prose reads fine even on a mobile phone, and the column cannot become too narrow to be readable. The layout is consistent with that of the other Apollo-era astronaut groups. The suggested form has been tried with the later groups, but consensus was that it did not look as good, and did not present the information as well. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 02:43, 21 September 2021 (UTC)
Perhaps the hostility to changing the formatting is motivated by the "sunk cost" of the one author who was responsible for the tabular formatting of all of the articles:
NASA Astronaut Group 1 edited by Hawkeye7 (Jan 2019)
NASA Astronaut Group 2 edited by Hawkeye7 (May 2019)
NASA Astronaut Group 3 edited by Hawkeye7 (May 2019)
NASA Astronaut Group 4 edited by Hawkeye7 (May 2019)
I'm sorry, but just because you put in a lot of work on these articles, and the same tabulation is used in all of them, does not in itself justify keeping them largely unchanged, especially it if there are other formats that would be accessible to a wider audience. It is particularly disappointing that you obviously put in a lot of work finding new details and citations, but added them to the wrong article (this one), rather than to the individual astronaut biographies.
Whilst the text in the "career" column is readable on most devices, including most cellphones, the table as a whole is not, as each mini-bio starts while the relevant name is still off the screen.
Nobody is suggesting deleting properly cited information, but either moving it to other more appropriate articles, or placing it in paragraphs under the table (as suggested by other commentators).
It is very concerning to find evidence of low-level plagiarism. There's at least one case where a 12-word description was copied unmodified from an official NASA biography. I noticed it because it was a skew list, a specific kind of garden path sentence. So I needed to read it twice, twice: once here, and once on an archive of www.jsc.nasa.gov. (Note that plagiarism is not necessarily copyright violation; the latter has much wider latitude.)
This is exacerbated by having citations in a separate column, which makes it unclear which citations belong to which assertions. If you're going to quote 12 words literally, they should be unambiguously cited.
All that said, I would favour having one table with all astronauts, which would make it clearer where astronauts from different cohorts are on one mission.
Arguably these should be categories rather than articles, but if they are going to be articles they should be very brief, existing only to highlight the history and commonalities of each group. Everything else should be either in individual astronaut biographies, or in an article summarising all missions.
Martin Kealey (talk) 05:20, 2 December 2024 (UTC)
 I disagree.  The lists for launches of launch vehicles use that two row format, and they work well. I do not understand why that format would not work in this case. If we think about it, this article's tables could be formatted in a more readable manner. It might mean merging the image and name columns, but I don't see why we shouldn't do that. Since the height of each row is currently driven by that massive amount of prose in the career column, such a merge would not alter the table's readability.
Your claim that it "reads fine" even on mobile phones is false. If that were true, I would never have suggested a change. The fact is that you think it reads fine, and don't seem to care about what other people think.
The consistency of the current format with other articles on Apollo-era astronaut groups is irrelevant. If this article can be improved by changing the format, then they would also have to be changed in a similar manner. That's a pain, but if it's an improvement, then we should do so. If you don't like the two-row format, fine. So what's wrong with moving the lengthy prose from the table to the text the article? That is definitely something the MOS recommends.
I hate to be rude, but I'm getting a feeling you have a personal interest in this. Were you the person who worked on the article to get it classified as a "good article"? If so, do you have strong feelings that it's perfect and that any suggested changes are accusations that your work was flawed? If so, you should remember that Wikipedia editors aren't supposed to think that way. Our work on an article does not mean we own the article. Fcrary (talk) 03:29, 21 September 2021 (UTC)

I agree that a shorter summary of a couple/quad short sentences should appear in the table instead of the lengthy prose. I suggest that the lengthy prose be moved to a list of astronauts in paragraph form below the table to supplement the table. Alternatively, the table itself could be reformatted to appear like episode list tables, with the large prose section spanning the entire table from left to right, below a line of stats, and the photo spanning both of these rows. -- 64.229.90.53 (talk) 23:25, 19 September 2021 (UTC)
An example: 

Example 1
Table with two rows per astronaut

Example 2
Table with list underneath

Owen Garriott
Garriott received a B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Oklahoma in 1953. From 1953 to 1956 he served with the U.S. Navy as an electronics officer. He then entered Stanford University and earned an M.S. in 1957 and a Ph.D in 1960 in electrical engineering. He became an assistant professor, and then an associate professor in the Electrical Engineering department there. His first space flight was in July 1973 as Science Pilot on the Skylab 3 mission, the second crew of the Skylab space station. He was Deputy, Acting and Director of Science   and Applications at the Johnson Space Center from 1974 to 1975 and 1976 to 1978. As such  he was responsible for all research in the physical sciences at the Johnson   Space Center. From 1984 to 1986, he was Project Scientist in   the Space Station Project Office. He flew in space a second time on STS-9  Columbia in November 1983 as a mission specialist on the Spacelab mission. He retired from NASA in June 1986.

-- 64.229.90.53 (talk) 00:04, 22 September 2021 (UTC)

I'd be happy with either of those. But I think I'd prefer to keep the degrees in the table (that was why I was reading this article and got annoyed about the formatting.) Perhaps something like:

Owen Garriott
Garriott received a B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Oklahoma in 1953. From 1953 to 1956 he served with the U.S. Navy as an electronics officer. He then entered Stanford University and earned an M.S. in 1957 and a Ph.D in 1960 in electrical engineering. He became an assistant professor, and then an associate professor in the Electrical Engineering department there. His first space flight was in July 1973 as Science Pilot on the Skylab 3 mission, the second crew of the Skylab space station. He was Deputy, Acting and Director of Science   and Applications at the Johnson Space Center from 1974 to 1975 and 1976 to 1978. As such  he was responsible for all research in the physical sciences at the Johnson   Space Center. From 1984 to 1986, he was Project Scientist in   the Space Station Project Office. He flew in space a second time on STS-9  Columbia in November 1983 as a mission specialist on the Spacelab mission. He retired from NASA in June 1986.

The main problem I see (other than my mangling the sorting when I merged the image and name columns) is that we do want consistency with other NASA groups, and for the earlier ones, their military background would be of more interest than their education. I guess having the same column, with a different heading and contents might not be too inconsistent. (I.e. consistent in the sense of having one column in the table about their professional background, with the specific aspect of their professional background varying from article to article.) Fcrary (talk) 00:40, 22 September 2021 (UTC)
I can handle complex table formatting and sorting. (I thought the tweak I made would have resolved your original problem.) We don't need the tables in the different articles to be completely consistent, but they should be consistent enough that the readers can compare one against another. As you say, for pilots, military background (service, rank, combat missions, test pilot training) is generally more important that education, but it was always a key demographic. (Two of the Mercury Seven had not graduated, but that would not be allowed in later selections.) I would be interested in knowing more about your interest in their education. I would supposed that the educational institution is also important. The big problem with education is sources:  abbreviations for the same degree differ, what their major was (and sometimes even what the degree was) is not always clear. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 01:55, 22 September 2021 (UTC)
My interest in the education of Group 4 resulted from been half way through reading A Man on the Moon, Andrew Chaikin's history of the Apollo program. In the book, he mentioned that Group 4 were all scientists, but that only one was a geologist. So I looked up Group 4 in Wikipedia to see what the other five members of Group 4 had degrees in. For that sort of thing, the reader wants to glance through a table, not read through lengthy prose. Fcrary (talk) 02:16, 22 September 2021 (UTC)
There isn't much interest in the scientist astronauts. The Mercury Seven article gets 617 page views per day; the Next Nine get 101; the Fourteen get 68 and this one gets just 59. Schmitt gets 459 per day as one of four surviving moonwalkers, which well above average. It would be good to have their articles in - or at least Schmitt's - in shape before they die, but the interest is not there. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 04:17, 22 September 2021 (UTC)

The lead paragraph says « an M.D. or Ph.D. in the natural sciences or engineering was a prerequisite for selection ». However M.D. generally means any medical degree, which seems at odds with the the description given further down. Perhaps "doctorate degree in natural sciences, engineering, or medicine" would be better?
Martin Kealey (talk) 05:15, 11 July 2025 (UTC)

I have reworded this to "an  M.D. or a Ph.D. in the natural sciences or engineering". Hawkeye7 (discuss) 06:37, 11 July 2025 (UTC)
In the selection section the formal list of prerequisites included:
With a doctorate in the natural sciences, medicine or engineering, or the equivalent
The degree usually connoted by M.D. does not meet this criterion (follow the link if you don't believe me).
The lead sentence needs to be rewritten to clarify that a post-graduate (research) degree was required, and not a bachelor degree in medicine. Martin Kealey (talk) 10:25, 11 July 2025 (UTC)
An M.D. was indeed what was required; a research degree in medicine was not. And M.D. is a post-graduate qualification. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 20:55, 11 July 2025 (UTC)
A doctorate is one kind of "postgraduate qualification", but there are other kinds of postgraduate qualifications that could not be described as "equivalent" to a doctorate. In particular, registration to practice medicine, which entitles one to the postnominal M.D., does not itself constitute any kind of degree, and is certainly not equivalent to a doctorate. However this registration is normally a formality, so the B.Med. degree is commonly referred to as an M.D.
A doctorate is by definition a research degree; that's why one has to present a thesis.
At this point I do not know whether a medical degree that's not a doctorate would have sufficed, so I would appreciate if you could please cite an original source that indicates one way or the other, and adjust the two paragraphs to have the same meaning. Martin Kealey (talk) 11:37, 13 July 2025 (UTC)
The article quotes directly from the NASA press release: "a doctorate in the natural sciences, medicine or engineering, or equivalent". All of the physician astronauts in the 1964, 1967 and 1978 intakes had MDs. None had research degrees in medicine. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 19:11, 13 July 2025 (UTC)