Talk:History of Ohio University

Flagship issue

I have twice removed the following statement and citation:

"As the flagship for the nation, Midwest, and state, the university’s current state flagship right has been defended several times. <ref>{{cite book|last=Peters|first=William E.|title= The Legal History of The Ohio University, p. 87|year=1910|publisher=The Western Methodist Book Concern|accessdate=January 22, 2014}}</ref>"

First and foremost, being a "flagship" is an actual designation, though it can be somewhat ambiguous. Typically, it's a designation either from a legal standpoint and/or from a third-party source. Very few outside sources regard OU as a flagship of the state (all I could find mostly have OSU listed; I have found one from 2006 that lists both OU and OSU) and it certainly isn't one of the country or the region. No one is arguing that it was first in Ohio and the Northwest Territories, but as for being considered a flagship now? Not so much.

Second, the citation that supports this statement has two issues: first, it's from The Legal History of Ohio University, meaning it's not a neutral, third-party source. Books like that are excellent for verifying non-controversial or otherwise non-POV statements about a school (dates of important events, names of important people, order of events, etc.), but not for anything that is a matter of opinion since these histories are often commissioned by the school and/or written by people with connections to the school. Further, the book was published 105 years ago, so there are major questions about how much of what it says are still current. When this book was written, Ohio still only had three public universities (OU, Miami, and OSU). Be sure to be familiar with Wikipedia policies for Reliable sources, "Peacock" terms, Boosterism, and No point of view.

Also, just a minor issue with the "cite book" template, the only time "accessdate" is filled in is if a URL is included. So if there's no "url" listed, "accessdate" is not needed. "Accessdate" lets readers and other editors know when the link was opened and worked since web addresses quite frequently change. --JonRidinger (talk) 01:52, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

Merge

There isn't much on this page outside of what the one author wrote. There are no sources for most of the material and hardly any images other than those used in the book. Authentic material should just be moved to the Ohio University page. --Chevy Jackalope (talk) 16:26, 30 September 2022 (UTC)

• Oppose merge There are multiple reliable sources cited in this article so the subject appears to pass our notability guidelines. There is too much material here to merge into the university's article. ElKevbo (talk) 22:52, 1 October 2022 (UTC)

Closing, given the uncontested objection and no support. Klbrain (talk) 16:17, 3 December 2022 (UTC)

Unexplained insistence on Steven M. Newman information and manually set sizes for thumbnail images

Sapienna recently added a sentence about Steven M. Newman to this article along with 7 separate references. I subsequently removed that sentence and its sources because this information doesn't seem to have anything to do with the subject of this article. I also removed all of the manually-specific image sizes for the many thumbnail images in this article because our policy about images explicitly says: "Except with very good reason, do not use px (e.g. |thumb|300px), which forces a fixed image width measured in pixels, disregarding the user's image size preference setting. [emphasis in original]"

Sapienna immediately reverted my edit with no attempt at communication or explanation - no edit summary, no message on any Talk page, nothing. I strongly recommend and request that they revert their edit - this is not their article in which only their opinion and preferences matter - and participate in this new discussion. ElKevbo (talk) 20:37, 28 January 2024 (UTC)