Talk:Abu Bakr al-Razi

message: There is a recurring issue of good faith editors adding to this article that al-Razi discovered ethanol, as well as sulfuric acid, citing sources that do not themselves refer to any other source (in particular, these sources fail to tell us in which primary sources the claims are based). This means that none of the sources making these claims are properly secondary sources, but per WP:PSTS secondary sources  and .
Now if no proper secondary source exists, why do all these sources repeat these claims? For two reasons.
#The first reason has been uncovered in this long thread on the Reliable sources noticeboard: there actually are secondary sources arguing that al-Razi discovered sulfuric acid on the basis of primary sources, but all of these date to the 19th century, and it turns out that the primary sources they are basing the claim on are Latin texts attributed to al-Razi which scholars have not considered to have been written by al-Razi ever since the researches of Julius Ruska (in particular Ruska 1939; see also Moureau 2020 for a recent overview).
#The second reason is that our Wikipedia article on al-Razi itself has featured these claims from 2004 to 2021. It has been established (in the same RSN thread and before that on this talk page) that at least one source that is often cited for these claims on Wikipedia (Modanlou 2008) has itself literally copied (plagiarized) the claims from our 2006 Wikipedia article (Modanlou 2008  vs Wikipedia 2006 ). One other source (Amr & Tbakhi 2007) uses very similar wording , and Schlosser 2011 actually just cites our Wikipedia article.
Of course, while it's interesting to try to uncover just why all these sources are repeating the same unfounded claims, the most salient point for our purposes is simply that there is no proper modern secondary source, as policy requires. In this context, it should be noted that this source refers for the alcohol claim to al-Hassan & Hill 1986, and someone should check what al-Hassan & Hill 1986 are basing the claim on (I don't have access to this source). If they are referring to a primary source we may want to include a paragraph on them in our article. At the same time it should be noted that the main author of al-Hassan & Hill 1986 (Ahmad Y. al-Hassan) later wrote a dedicated article on the history of alcohol in Arabic texts (first as a chapter in al-Hassan 2001 pp. 65–69 and then as a 2009 paper republished online called Alcohol and the Distillation of Wine in Arabic Sources From the Eighth Century Onwards), in which he does not even mention al-Razi. This needs some looking into.
For now, please do not add the claims to the article unless you've found a properly secondary source that bases the claims on an analysis of primary sources. Since we as Wikipedia may in part be responsible for the wide circulation of these claims, having featured them prominently for 17 years, it's also our responsibility to get it right now. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 17:26, 11 December 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Discovery of ethanol and sulfuric acid 

message: — Assignment last updated by Kberberian (talk) 15:31, 16 February 2024 (UTC)
thread_title: Wiki Education assignment: Humanities 2 1400-present