# Talk:University of Chicago

There is an ongoing dispute on how closely connected the current University of Chicago is with the Old University of Chicago. While this debate is worthy of transparent discussion on this talk page, there are mostly anonymous wikieditors making revisions to the University of Chicago wikipage without review that are meant to strengthen the association between these two entities. The majority of these changes are present in the second paragraph of the history section which I believe needs to be addressed. As an employee of the university, I do not have a NPOV, and will not make these edits myself. I am writing to request the input of neutral wiki-editors on how to move forward. Of my suggested edits, the second paragraph of this history section requires a number of revisions, clarifications and accurate citations for it to be a fair representation of the university's history. I would be happy to provide suggested revisions for review on this page if desired.  
StickerMug (talk) 11:54, 8 Aug 2018 (CST)


### Simplifing History Section, Redirecting to History-Specific Page
I would suggest simplifying the entire History Section of this page and redirecting users to the History of the University of Chicago page for more detail. (This approach is similar to Stanford's succinct History section on its main page.) Ideally, having a singular wikipage that details the history of the university would allow all wikieditors interested in contributing to have a single place to discuss, debate, and apply agreed-upon changes.
StickerMug (talk) 11:59, 8 Aug 2018 (CST)


### Old University of Chicago Disambiguation
Suggested edit in History Section header: Change "Further information: Old University of Chicago" to "Disambiguation: Old University of Chicago". StickerMug (talk) 13:07, 8 Aug 2018 (CST)

"Per MOS:CITELEAD, there shouldn't be any citations in the lead unless the material is "likely to be challenged" this means almost the material in the lead should not be cited. Citations are reserved for the body unless they are very important."  Done
"There is an unreferenced paragraph in the "people" section."  Done Admittedly, only lists of Wikilinks are provided instead of actual citations, but more rigor can be very easily added (at the expense of readability) simply by adding a citation for each name
"The schools could do with a little summary each for broadness, like in Washington University in St. Louis#Colleges and Schools"  Done Maybe should add a summary for the College as well?
"This article is extremely reliant on self-published sourcing by the university. In the sections about the current facts (e.g. the "administration and finance" and "rankings and reputation" sections), this is largely unavoidable, however in the "history" section, better sourcing should be used. The book "The University of Chicago: A History by John W. Boyer" would be a fantastic source to integrate for this purpose. I'll send you a copy if you want one and can't access it."  Done
"There is some unnecessary detail in the "history" section (e.g. the sixth paragraph should mostly be cut). The history section should be summary. Details can be moved to History of the University of Chicago."  Done Still need to restructure history section as per above though; might cut this down further when doing so
"The "Administration and finance" section needs to be updated. Some of the information needs to be updated to 2024, and some of the information is cited to old references which can't be used to support statements in the present tense. If the information is still accurate, the citations should be updated to point to non-dead links on the university website. If the citations are already up to date, you can modify the access dates on them to reflect that the information was accessed recently. This section is also missing key information like the university's most recent budget and their total assets value."  Done Although maybe more can be said about the administration's response to Palestine protests/reorganizing the finance section
"The "Reputation and rankings" needs to be updated too, and also it would benefit from expansion to include more of the university's current rankings. Historical information should also probably be in the history section like in other FA and GA university articles (e.g. Pomona College)."  Done Although perhaps disproportionately many rankings for graduate schools included over rankings of the university itself
"The article is missing a "transportation" section."  Done
"Per MOS:INFOBOXPURPOSE, there shouldn't be information that is in the infobox only. The infobox, like the lead, should be a summary of the article."  Done Still has a citation for being a "large city" in the infobox, but it seems like other good articles feature this too; if need be, it can be removed
"Many of the URL statuses are set as "live" when they are actually dead. Changing this reformats the references so the main link points to the live reference link."  Done Probably should replace a lot of these dead links with updated ones though Charter6281 (talk) 05:38, 23 May 2025 (UTC)

Hey @Charter6281. I've been watching your revisions from the sidelines (pretty busy at the moment). I have a few suggestions--take them or leave them. I might get to them next week, but feel free to make progress earlier if you're interested. Your hard work is admirable, especially for a newcomer !SSR07 (talk) 13:35, 25 May 2025 (UTC)
Reintroduce names of affiliated colleges
Keep the mention of the Keller Center being designed by van der Rohe
James and Paula Crown OF the Crown Family (I assume, unless the whole family participated? In which case maybe no need to mention the husband/wife duo)
Consider which rankings are used. Why isn’t Times Higher Ed used, for example?
Ravelstein in the pop culture section
Names under the people section currently under citations should be in notes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Note)
SSR07 (talk) 13:35, 25 May 2025 (UTC)
Thanks for the suggestions, I really appreciate it! I will probably add the names of the affiliated colleges when I rewrite (or re-source) the history section, although I'm not 100% sure if it's superfluous information (since the affiliation ended over a century ago). I added the information about Edith Abbott Hall being designed by van der Rohe (Keller was designed by Edward Stone) and a mention on Ravelstein. Also, we do mention Times Higher Ed in the article, unless you mean for graduate school rankings? To be honest, I just looked up "UChicago rank" online and chose the publications that seemed the most important/recognizable, so please let me know if you have other publications you want to cite.
On the Crown Family - the source I use says that the donation was from James and Paula Crown AND the Crown Family, which I agree seems ambiguous and a little unnecessary. I left it like that to be more faithful to the text I was citing in case I was interpreting it wrong, but you can change it if you like (or we can use a different source).
Finally, on the Template:Note - thank you for the suggestion! I'm not sure how exactly to format them though and could use some help with that. Also, on the top of the link you sent, it says that this is no longer the recommended method of citing sources - should we be using a different template? Either way, if you can post an example on the talk page of how the lists of names should be formatted, I can do the rest on the main article. Charter6281 (talk) 00:13, 26 May 2025 (UTC)
Thanks! On the notes system, I think I sent the wrong link. There's a way to have a "footnotes" system separate from the sourcing/referencing system. See this example on the Oxford Uni page. They're pretty popular, especially on longer articles. I think this is probably the guide to do that, but I suck at Wiki markup so I'm really not sure. I'lll give it a shot, but we may need to get someone else to do this for us.... SSR07 (talk) 14:19, 27 May 2025 (UTC)
On second thought: Is it even necessary to list out the recipients of these awards? It's a little inconsistent (we're not listing the Olympians, for example, or all of the Nobel laureates). I could imagine a page called something like "List of awards received by people affiliated with the University of Chicago", but I feel like that's a little outside of this article's purview. Thoughts on just getting rid of the lists altogether? Other university articles, with a cursory scan, don't list recipients. SSR07 (talk) 14:30, 27 May 2025 (UTC)
It's just because I have no other way to easily give citations to the claim that UChicago has produced X cabinet secretaries or Y heads of state, since the information is not collated and published elsewhere (as it is with the statistic 101 Nobel laureates, which is on the UChicago website). If we remove the lists (even if it's what the other university articles do), we ought to replace them with a different citation, but I'm not sure if that's possible outside of listing one citation for each person on the list to confirm their UChicago alumnus status.
Also, by awards do you mean notable positions post-graduation? I don't think we do list names of award recipients in the people section. As for Olympians, yeah this is a problem, but at least we have a link to a Wikipedia article with all their names, and I would even suggest replacing that citation with a list as well (although in this case, perhaps a list of citations, since I'm not sure all these Olympians have Wikipedia articles). Then again, I have no idea what the standard way of citing something like this is, so take my opinion with a grain of salt. Charter6281 (talk) 14:39, 27 May 2025 (UTC)
Oh, unless you mean the Turing Award recipients - again, that was just because I couldn't find that statistic anywhere else. Charter6281 (talk) 14:41, 27 May 2025 (UTC)
Oh, I didn't even realize that.
I double checked to make sure, but I think citing sources and adding them should be permissible under the "routine calculations" exception to the "no original research" rule, so we're clear there.
Looking to how other articles on prestigious universities treat award counts: Oxford doesn't cite at all (a problem!), Harvard cites articles that seem to have the accurate count (directories, announcements that include running totals, etc.), as does Yale, and Columbia. Princeton doesn't count (and is more generally a big mess).
Looking for running totals somewhere is likely the best option. If there isn't such a source and the list is short enough, a mixed reference/note system would probably be preferable, and if there isn't a good source and the list is quite long, might just be best to cut it....if there isn't a number anywhere published then it's probably just not notable enough to be counted on WP. Just my opinions! SSR07 (talk) 15:17, 27 May 2025 (UTC)

With all parts of the initial GA recommendations for this article addressed, is there any consensus on what more should be done before this page is renominated? Charter6281 (talk) 22:39, 19 September 2025 (UTC)

... that the University of Chicago achieved the world's first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction under the stands of a football stadium?

ALT2a: ... that the University of Chicago has hosted an annual debate since 1946 arguing whether latkes or hamantashen are superior? Source: https://magazine.uchicago.edu/0512/features/puns.shtml, University of Chicago Magazine
ALT4a: ... that the original University of Chicago, founded in the 1850s, was foreclosed upon and shut down in 1886? Source: The University of Chicago: A History, by John W. Boyer, pages 8-10. ISBN 9780226835303
ALT5: ... that the University of Chicago's Gothic architecture was deliberately designed to evoke Oxford and Cambridge, despite the university being located in America's Midwest? Source: Schulze, Franz; Harrington, Kevin (2003). Chicago's Famous Buildings (5th ed.). University of Chicago Press. pp. 246–50. ISBN 0-226-74066-8. Retrieved August 31, 2009.
Reviewed:
Comment: I don't have the Boyer book with me at the moment, but if necessary I can get it and find the exact text supporting the claims.

Charter6281 (talk) 19:06, 14 October 2025 (UTC).

I am reviewing this. Cielquiparle (talk) 22:13, 14 October 2025 (UTC)
 Article was nominated for DYK on the same day it passed GA (Oct 14) and at 44k characters and 6.5k words it is more than long enough. Sourcing is fine, although if I were the GA reviewer, I would have asked for more independent secondary sources rather than relying so heavily on University of Chicago-affiliated sources (understandable as this is pretty typical of university histories; it's just that it's not that hard to find secondary sources for a lot of the claims in the article). Article is neutral in tone. Earwig suggests that copyvio is unlikely; the match rate nevertheless seems high (31% with Britannica for example) but when you look closely it turns out to be due to things like the long institute names, which should remain fixed. As for manual spotchecks, a quick comparison with pages from the Boyer book, which the article cites heavily, makes it apparent that the Boyer book is much more flowery in tone and that close paraphrasing seems unlikely. Only one link in the proposed hooks is bold-linked and this article looks presentable. The QPQ is not required, as the nominator has fewer than 5 past nominations.
This leaves the hooks. ALT0, ALT1, and ALT2 fail the "short enough" test – ALT0 and ALT1 both contain very interesting facts, but they are crammed with so much detail and bluelinks, such that there is no compelling reason for the reader to click on the link to read the University of Chicago article. (In other words, you don't want to ask a question that contains the exact answer. ALT1, for example, could perhaps be shortened to "... that only Room 405 of the University of Chicago's George Herbert Jones Laboratory is a National Historic Landmark?" because at least then the reader would want to know "why only Room 405?" but it's not great in that it's more about George Herbert Jones Laboratory than the University of Chicago itself. And in any case, if you wanted to use that hook, you really should cite additional sources like this one in the article itself. To be honest, ALT3 is the hook that caught my eye from the very start, but WP:ERRORS is very unforgiving of superlative claims like "first" and "largest". Even if it technically is true that University of Chicago Press is the largest in North America, this claim is only sourced within the article to the University of Chicago Press itself (a primary source), which also fails to explain exactly why it's the largest (by what metric). This leaves ALT4. And while I thought ALT4 was going to be an easy pass, a potential problem is that the article itself doesn't use the words "bankrupt" or "bankruptcy" anwhere, and one could argue that foreclosure is not the same as bankruptcy. @Charter6281: If you are in a hurry to get this DYK approved, I would recommend doing a bit of work to resolve this and bulletproof ALT4. Otherwise, good job with the article; it's well written and very informative. Cielquiparle (talk) 04:25, 15 October 2025 (UTC)
@Cielquiparle: Thanks for the review, I quite appreciate it. I made some changes based on your comments, let me know whether any of the hooks are now acceptable. Charter6281 (talk) 02:32, 21 October 2025 (UTC)
@Charter6281: Better. Thanks for working on your hooks. There are still issues that need to be resolved, though. See below. (And also, from this point on, please don't swap out any ALT hooks. You can start new ones inline here in the Comments, formatted the same way (scroll through WP:DYKNA to get a feel for formatting options for revised ALT hooks) and strike any content you decide not to use like this. I've also re-numbered your ALT hooks so it's clear to any subsequent reviewers that we aren't talking about the same hooks as before. Cielquiparle (talk) 04:32, 22 October 2025 (UTC)
ALT0a seems like an interesting hook. Can you find an additional source for it that isn't University of Chicago Press? For a "world's first" claim like that, we're looking for reliable secondary sources that verify that the claim is true. That source or sources need to be added to the article itself.
ALT2a is better than it was before, but there is literally only one sentence about the topic in the actual article that doesn't give us any "reward" for clicking on the hook and no real argument about why this is a significant or interesting fact (plus it's only sourced to the University of Chicago magazine). Either expand the content in the article by at least one sentence, citing at least one reliable secondary source, or we can just table this hook.
ALT4a is ok.
ALT5 is interesting but the article refers only to Oxford, not Cambridge, and the hook itself is still way too verbose.
In conclusion, I would recommend you fix at least ALT0a and possibly ALT5 (meaning fix the corresponding sourcing in the article itself in the case of ALT0a, and fix the hook language and possibly the content within the article itself if you can find a source to back up the "Cambridge" part), and then we will have at least 3 approved hooks and leave it up to the hook promoter which one to choose. Cielquiparle (talk) 04:32, 22 October 2025 (UTC)
One possible solution to ALT0/ALT0a is to simply drop the "first" claim and just mention that the reaction took place under a stadium's stands. To me at least, that was the actually interesting part, not that it was a "first". Narutolovehinata5 (talk · contributions) 09:07, 25 October 2025 (UTC)
@Charter6281 and Cielquiparle: Would you be okay with this revised version of ALT0?
ALT0b ... that the University of Chicago achieved a nuclear chain reaction under the stands of an American football stadium?
One issue is that the article currently does not mention "stands" but only the specific stadium itself (in this case, Stagg Field) is mentioned, without any mention of the experiment being done under the stands. Unless the article is revised, another possibility could be:
ALT0c ... that scientists at the University of Chicago achieved a nuclear chain reaction at the school's American football stadium?
Narutolovehinata5 (talk · contributions) 05:27, 27 October 2025 (UTC)
@Narutolovehinata5: I like these versions, yes. I can edit the article to make the first hook possible if need be.
Charter6281 (talk) 17:12, 27 October 2025 (UTC)

You can do either. For what it's worth, I'm also fine with ALT2a, but not the other hooks. I find ALT5 not that interesting and even complicated. Narutolovehinata5 (talk · contributions) 22:56, 28 October 2025 (UTC)