Talk:Printing press/GA1

GA review

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Nominator: Metalicat (talk · contribs) 20:12, 31 March 2026 (UTC)

Reviewer: A.Cython (talk · contribs) 01:11, 22 April 2026 (UTC)

I will review this one as part of GARC#82. A.Cython(talk) 01:11, 22 April 2026 (UTC)

I read the article on the printing press. While the article is full of interesting information, found hard to be engaged and there are several major issues that need to be addressed before even talking about GA review. I do appreciate the effort of the nominator in attempting to bring this important and highly visible article to GA, but I am afraid it requires improvements that might require time and resources beyond the GA review timeline. I list my concerns below (in no particular order as I do not have the time to organize my thoughts).A.Cython(talk) 00:30, 25 April 2026 (UTC)

1. Copyright issues. A section of the article has high correlation. I do not know who copied who, but evidence need to be presented that the original text is from WP. Otherwise the particular section needs to be rewritten.

1. The text should be cleaned up from various tangents. Please try to clean throughout the article.
   • it was commonly employed in agricultural production for pressing grapes for wine and olives for oil, both of which formed an integral part of the Mediterranean and medieval diet. I fail to see the relevancy of "Mediterranean and medieval diet"
2. Unsupported statements. There a few instances where the paragraph ends without a citation.
3. The lead is relatively large with 463 words, some trimming is needed per MOS:LEADLENGTH
   • Additionally, the citations in the lead are not needed, unless it is a contentious topic, which does not appear so per MOS:CITELEAD
4. "See also" section is also quite long. Please note that only relevant entries that have not appeared anywhere else in the article should be in "See also". So for example, "Lithography" should not be there since it is mentioned at the sidebox on publishing. Also "Desktop publishing" is mentioned in the main body.
5. Reading flow and structure. There is not as much theme cohesion between paragraphs and there are several single sentence paragraphs. Elimination of the latter and significant improvement on the former are needed.
6. Missing thematic transition. I fail to see as a reader the significance of the printing press. It is not well explained how the world was before and what happened afterwards. For example, The press was also a factor in the establishment of a community of scientists who could communicate discoveries through widely disseminated scholarly journals, contributing to the Scientific Revolution. This is rather confusing, as it implies that there was no community of scientists beforehand, why would there be a need of journals in the first place. Scientists communicated beforehand via letters, was it not enough? Printing press must have been something more than just exchanging papers.
7. Reading for the review, it became clear the Gutenberg was lucky for the influx of Byzantines (due to the fall of Constantinople), who were bringing with them a wide range of classics. See JSTOR article: The Invention of Printing: Revolution within Revolution
   • The spread of printing also raised issues of censorship and freedom of the press. This is also not well explained. See here for brief and possible expansion.
   • Of Erasmus's work, at least 750,000 copies were sold during his lifetime alone (1469–1536). this requires some context or it is useless information.
8. Bailyn & Hench 1981 produces a Harv Id error, since it has no proper target
9. Multiple sources are not cited, move them to "Further reading" section
10. Add language option to source information template
11. "Technological factors" section is too detailed/large with respect to the other sections of the article. The article is about the printing press, not just the Gutenberg printing press. So some re-balancing is needed, as I felt the modern age (era of newspapers etc) is awfully neglected.
    • Is the paragraph During the Islamic Golden Age, Arab Muslims adopted the Chinese craft of papermaking relevant to the Printing press? It does not appear so.
12. My understanding is that the Reformation played a much bigger role in shaping printing press (whether for printing religious texts and against by burning books). This aspect of the narrative is not clear enough in the text.
13. Printing press (at least to my mind) is more closely related to newspapers. After the industrial revolution, newspapers changed the way people saw the world, e.g., see here
14. Febvre and Martin who are they? please clarify in the text.
15. add wikilink to lead
16. led to a huge increase avoid subjective characterizations, let the numbers speak for themselves.

@A.Cython: Apologies for taking a while to reply, I only noticed today that you had posted the review. Thank you for the thorough review, this is my first attempt at improving an established article (25 years old!) and I appreciate the detailed feedback. I have made the following changes:

1. Copyright: the 75% match flagged by the Earwig tool is with virtualchange.wordpress.com, a WordPress blog dated January 2012. The flagged text (primarily the "Mass production and spread" section) is present in the Wikipedia article's revision from December 2011 (and earlier), predating the blog. The blog has copied from Wikipedia, not the other way round. The 2011 revision.
2. Tangents: Removed "both of which formed an integral part of the Mediterranean and medieval diet" from the screw press passage. Also removed the Islamic Golden Age paragraph, which concerned papermaking rather than the press itself.
3. Unsupported statements: Will continue to audit; please flag specific paragraphs if any remain.
4. Lead length: Trimmed from 463 to approximately 394 words. Removed inline citations per MOS:CITELEAD.
5. See also: Removed items already linked in the article body or sidebar (Printing, Typography, Lithography, Offset printing, Desktop publishing, Electronic publishing, Printer).
6. Reading flow: Will continue to review; the scientists/journals sentence has been reworded and the Erasmus figure now has framing context.
7. Scientists/journals: Reworded to clarify that scholars had previously communicated by manuscript letter, and that printed journals enabled wider and faster dissemination.
8. Censorship: Expanded with the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (1559) and secular licensing systems, cited to Eisenstein.
9. Erasmus context: Added framing sentence: "The commercial possibilities of the new technology were demonstrated by individual sales figures."
10. Bailyn & Hench Harv ID error: Fixed by removing the mismatched |ref= parameter.
11. Uncited sources: Removed the uncited Schlesinger entry. Will audit for others.
12. Language parameters: Added |language= to all non-English bibliography entries.
13. Febvre and Martin: Identified on first mention as "The historians Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin".
14. "Led to a huge increase": Changed to "led to a rapid increase".

Still to address: balance between Gutenberg-era and modern content, Reformation expansion, newspaper era, Byzantine scholars suggestion. These are larger structural changes. Would you be content to place the review on hold while I work through them? id aim to sort these in the next week a couple of days or so. Metalicat (talk) 14:56, 28 April 2026 (UTC)

Further progress on the remaining points:

1. Unsupported statements: Audited the full article and fixed three paragraph endings that lacked citations (Technological factors, Function and approach, and The printing revolution intro). Every paragraph now ends with a citation.
2. Uncited sources: Audited the full bibliography. Moved ten entries that were not cited anywhere in the article text to a new "Further reading" section (Berthold, Bechtel, Boruchoff, Crompton, Eisenstein 2005 abridged edition, Fontaine, Gerhardt ×2, Hind, McLuhan). The Bibliography now contains only sources actually cited in the article.
3. Single-sentence paragraphs: Merged three single-sentence paragraphs into adjacent paragraphs (Latin alphabet sentence into the movable type paragraph, production output figures into the European presses comparison, and the Dittmar economic growth sentence into the vernacular languages paragraph).

The structural points (balance, Reformation, newspapers, Byzantine scholars) are next. Metalicat (talk) 15:51, 28 April 2026 (UTC)

1. Byzantine scholars: Added a sentence on Aldus Manutius publishing the greater part of Greek literature between 1495 and 1515 with the help of Greek scholars who arrived in Italy after the fall of the Byzantine Empire, sourced to Barker (1978), the JSTOR article you suggested.
2. Reformation: Expanded with material from Pettegree, Brand Luther (2015). Luther is now identified as Europe's most published author in 1518–1519, with his 45 works reaching 291 editions (p. 104). Added detail on the short pamphlet format (p. 80). The passage now covers the scale of Luther's output, the pamphlet format, the Catholic Church's response (Index, licensing), and subsequent use of printed literature in later political conflicts.
3. Newspapers: Expanded from one sentence to a paragraph, also sourced to Pettegree (pp. 336–337). The article now explains how printers who had built a readership through Reformation pamphlets sustained it with news sheets, and how this led to the first weekly newspapers in seventeenth-century Germany.

The only remaining point is the overall balance between Gutenberg-era and modern content, which I will continue to work on. Metalicat (talk) 17:50, 28 April 2026 (UTC)

@A.Cython: I believe I have now addressed all of your points.

Balance: The Gutenberg-era Technological factors section has been trimmed (two tangential passages removed), while the Reformation and newspaper coverage has been substantially expanded with new sourced material. I am satisfied the balance has improved but am open to further suggestions on specific passages you feel should be trimmed or expanded.

Please let me know if you are happy to proceed with the review or if any points need further work. Metalicat (talk) 18:44, 29 April 2026 (UTC)

I will read it again at some point in the following days. I do appreciate your dedication and effort to improve the article. A.Cython(talk) 22:20, 29 April 2026 (UTC)

Apologies for my late response, but I needed the temporal distance to re-read the article with a clear mind. I know you have placed considerable effort, but this is not one of the easy articles. The fact that over 25 years, it has not reached to GA status is perhaps a testament of the challenges. I will provide the following observations:

• Section "History": contains information upto but before the Gutenberg? The printing revolution is also not included in the history?
• Subsection "Technological factors" Difficult to read and follow as each paragraph talks about different technologies without a cohesive narrative
  • For example, it says A fourth development and I was like wait how many did I just read, because it was more than four this point or at least this is the impression the text gives.
• I still do not quite get a good sense of what was the impact of the printing press.
  • https://www.jstor.org/stable/43554930
  • From Eisenstein Princes who had employed the cumbersome methods of manuscript to communicate with their subjects switched quickly to print to announce declarations of war, publish battle accounts, promulgate treaties or argue disputed points in pamphlet form. Theirs was an effort ... ' to win the psychological war which prepared and accompanied the military operations' of rulers. The root idea was to evoke the notion of the patrie as the realm of France and to represent the king as the personification of this patrie. In similar fashion the English crown under Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell made systematic use of both Parliament and press to win public support for the Reformation.
  • From Eisenstein A most important consequence of the printing press, however, was that it did create a new kind of public for idées' forces.318 The reading public was not necessarily vocal, nor did its members necessarily frequent cafe's, clubs, or salons of known political complexion. It was instead composed of silent and solitary individuals who were often unknown to each other and who were linked only by access to bookshops, lending libraries, or chambres de lecture and, here and there, also by membership in 'corresponding societies'.
  • From Eisenstein Certainly, unfortunate consequences have ensued when flesh-and-blood human beings are viewed as statistical averages or become stereotyped role-players. But many readers were also made more conscious of the limitations of book learning after the fifteenth century. Readers in the sixteenth century learned from Paracelsus and his followers, for example, that 'the sick should be the doctor's books.'

The quotes above reflect part of the struggle of who controls the forces unleashed by the printing press. The kings, popes, priests against pope (affecting biblical faith), intellectuals, all were fighting to control. The acceleration of societal changes caused by printing press also resulted in European wars, see here. Eisenstein's book provide several examples. It is fair to say that even led to the fall of Divine right of kings to rule, which is a rather important consequence not to be mentioned. Unfortunately, the current "Circulation of information and ideas" section does not cover sufficiently enough or properly reflect the magnitude of the consequences.A.Cython(talk) 02:32, 12 May 2026 (UTC)

@A.Cython: Thank you for taking the time to re-read carefully, it's very much appreciated. The two structural points and the impact concern were all fair, and I have spent the evening working through them.

• History section structure: I have unified the chronological narrative under History, with Gutenberg's press, Function and approach and Printing revolution now as subsections rather than separate top-level headings. The Industrial printing presses section remains at top level for the moment, but I can move it inside History too if you would prefer the whole chronology under one heading.

• Technological factors cohesion: The opening of the section now lists the four pre-existing technologies that Gutenberg combined (screw press, movable type, codex, mechanized paper) and each of the four subsequent paragraphs is signposted (The first of these..., The second element..., etc.). The A fourth development phrasing has gone.

• Impact / circulation of ideas: The Circulation of information and ideas subsection has been substantially expanded. The reading-public paragraph now covers Eisenstein's argument that the new audience was dispersed, atomistic and individualistic, linked impersonally through bookshops, coffeehouses, reading rooms and subscription lists rather than through physical assembly, with the corollary that classical models of citizenship suited it less well than they had earlier audiences. A new paragraph on state propaganda covers Cromwell's campaign in support of Henry VIII's break with Rome (which Eisenstein, citing Geoffrey Elton, describes as the first by any European government to exploit the propaganda potential of the press) and the parallel French use of print to promote the patrie and the king as its personification, with the "psychological war" framing you quoted. The censorship paragraph has been expanded to include the Mainz licensing edict of 1485, the Leo X decree of 1515, and the Counter-Reformation Indexes of 1559 and 1564, rather than just the 1559 Index in isolation.

Six further items I want to work through in the coming days rather than tonight: (1) the balance between the Scientific Revolution treatment and Eisenstein's much fuller account; (2) whether the Reformation impact, currently split between Mass production and spread and Circulation of information and ideas, should be consolidated; (3) the broader debate around the quantitative claims by Dittmar and Rubin; (4) the divine right of kings question, which I want to take to the literature properly — I am sympathetic to the connection but wary of synthesising it from Eisenstein's more localised observations without a specific named historian making the argument directly; (5) Paracelsus and the limits of book learning, which I will also re-examine in light of the wider literature; and (6) any further tightening that falls out of those searches. I will post again once these are done.

Metalicat (talk) 19:34, 12 May 2026 (UTC)

@A.Cython: Picking up the remaining items.

Scientific Revolution has gone from a single sentence to two paragraphs covering Eisenstein on the Almagest/De revolutionibus contrast, the features of modern scientific practice (serial publication, data preservation, public disclosure, reader feedback) that took shape in the incunabula era, and repeatable images with Vesalius as the named example.

Divine right of kings: added a paragraph citing Anderson's Imagined Communities (pp. 36, 39–46) on print-capitalism, the displacement of sacred languages and the erosion of divinely-ordained kingship. Anderson seemed the cleanest way to bring the point in without overreaching from Eisenstein.

Paracelsus is now in the contemporary critics paragraph, with Eisenstein's qualification that he was himself a creature of print culture and that the Galenic slogan he and his followers repeated made more sense in scribal culture than in print culture (Vol. I, pp. 474, 484–486).

Dittmar and Rubin: the original one-sentence paragraph has been expanded, with the instrument Dittmar uses (distance from Mainz) added. A second paragraph follows the literature into the wider quantitative debate: the BPR 2016 survey distinguishing supply- and demand-side accounts; Cantoni 2012 on strategic neighbour-effects as the mechanism behind the apparent distance-from-Wittenberg result; and BHPR 2020 in American Sociological Review on Luther's personal network ties (correspondence, recorded visits, Wittenberg student enrolments) as a complementary diffusion channel.

Reformation split: considered consolidating but have left it standing. Mass production covers the scale of bulk printing (291 editions, 300,000 tracts, sevenfold rise in German output), while Circulation covers the political and intellectual consequences. These are doing different work, and I've made the production-side framing of the Mass production paragraph slightly more explicit so the reader is primed for the consequences to be picked up later.

Metalicat (talk) 19:50, 14 May 2026 (UTC)

Thank you for adding the new material. I made some reorganization to improve the thematic cohesion. I will try to conclude the review over the weekend. A.Cython(talk) 03:10, 16 May 2026 (UTC)

Ok, I think we are getting there. I would ask you to tidy up a bit the "Impact" section. While I am inclusion-ist, I feel it is a bit wordy and the same information can be said with less. For example, "Eisenstein also stresses the role of repeatable images." does not add any value. Opinions of scholars if not contested can be presented as facts. Otherwise, you replace the particular sentence with "According to Eisenstein, ... ". Once you tide up this section, I will conclude the review. Also feel free to improve the subsection titles as well. Thank you for your hard work. A.Cython(talk) 00:44, 21 May 2026 (UTC)

Thank you. Also thanks for your time, excellent suggestions and review points. I’m away for a few days now, but will action this on my return and ping you. Metalicat (talk) 05:54, 21 May 2026 (UTC)

@A.Cython: Done. Trimmed the Impact section throughout: removed framing sentences like "Eisenstein also stresses..." and converted "According to Eisenstein..." constructions into direct statements where her claims are uncontested. Also renamed two subsections ("Science" → "Scientific practice"; "Negative views" → "Contemporary criticism"). Happy to trim further if any passages still feel wordy. Metalicat (talk) 20:49, 25 May 2026 (UTC)

Ok so this is the GA review in earnest (since we have reached a workable version). My comments are below.A.Cython(talk) 21:21, 28 May 2026 (UTC)

Various

• No edit war
• Neutral
• No copyright issues, Earwig's Copyvio Detector gave at most 25% flagging the first sentence at the lead (I had to rewrite it).
• Figures have appropriate licences, figure captions, and they are relevant to the subject
  • Please fix the missing parameter in File:Koenig's steam press - 1814.png

Prose & MoS

• I made a few copyedits
• I moved the "Further reading" below the references, as it is the typical/expected location as far as I know
• Also replaced the pseudo headings per MOS:PSEUDOHEAD

Sources

• I also replaced the isbn number of McLuhan's book with its oclc number, as for some reason it was producing Harv id errors
• Spot check, there has been discussion with various sources outlined above. I did not spot any issues.

@A.Cython: Thank you, and thank you for the copyedits and for moving the Further reading section and fixing the McLuhan Harv error.

On the Koenig steam-press image: I traced it to its reproduction in Meggs but could not verify the original date or authorship to a standard I was comfortable with, and the book I found isn't accessible to confirm it. Rather than leave a file with unresolved licensing, I've removed it from the article. Metalicat (talk) 08:19, 29 May 2026 (UTC)

Final comments

Not an easy article and I am sure that readers may have thoughts. For me as a casual reviewer and after the work of Metalicat, I think the article has reached GA status. Of course, GA is not the end but for now congratulations are in order. Well done! A.Cython(talk) 01:44, 30 May 2026 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.