Talk:Jumbo

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Jumbo was nominated as a Natural sciences good article, but it did not meet the good article criteria at the time (April 13, 2015). There are suggestions on the review page for improving the article. If you can improve it, please do; it may then be renominated.

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Untitled

Source of etymology: Take Our Word For It.

Where is or was "Gare de Sud" in Paris?

I can't locate "Gare de Sud" in the map of Paris.

I have heard of "Gare du Nord" and "Gare de l'Est", but not "Sud" in Paris. There is a railroad station close to "Jardin des Plantes de Paris", but it is "Gare d'Austerlitz" (Map Jardin des Plantes Area - ParisBeyond).

La "Gare d'Austerlitz" was hardly once called la "Gare de Sud" or "Gare de le Sud", though it might have been named "Gare de Sud-Ouest".

Links

w:fr:Liste des gares parisiennes
Web pages showing the word "Gare de Sud-Ouest"
1. The use of the 25c. Sage ultramarine and blue - postmarks
2. Lot 2219 in 2160-2239

Toby (YebisYa) IQUEPPE 19:13, 2004 Nov 17 (UTC)

Peanut butter jar

Um, can we get a citation on the elephant's ashes being kept in a peanut butter jar in the office of the Tufts athletic director? It just seems...unusual. Especially with the specific brand of peanut butter jar being stated. -Toptomcat 02:46, 4 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

In Response to Toptomcat:

I added a citation for the peanut butter jar: "For Carzo and his colleagues in intercollegiate sports, Jumbo continued to live on in this little jar. Since 1975, teammates have rubbed the 14-ounce Peter Pan Crunchy Peanut Butter jar for good luck. In 1999, when Carzo retired after 26 years of directing Tufts athletics, a ceremony of "passing the ashes" to new director Bill Gehling, A74, was performed."

from Tufts Magazine Spring 2002 - http://www.tufts.edu/alumni/magazine/spring2002/jumbo.html

I have never added a citation before, so please check that I did the formatting correctly.

On a side note, I have seen both the tail in the Tufts Archives, and The Jar of Ashes in the athletic office.

AJseagull1 22:48, 5 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

History/trivia

23-July-2007: I have created a "History" section, merging and removing the "Trivia" section. It is a common technique: generate an intro summary, then move original details into full sub-sections (such as "History"), where there is more space to merge trivia points which would crowd an intro; then keep adding subsections until all trivia statements find a home. Usually, a "History" section can absorb a lot of trivia, with ample explanations to connect facts. -Wikid77 10:55, 23 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

What about ties to the Disney movie "Dumbo"? Dumbo, in the movie, is officially named 'Jumbo Jr.' That can't possibly be a coincidence- I was born in St. Thomas, Ontario, and I always just assumed that Dumbo was supposed to be Jumbo's son. Naming him after a legendary elephant wouldn't be all that surprising, for Disney. 72.38.113.250 (talk) 14:05, 18 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

French Sudan or Abyssinia?

In the french article it is said that he was captured in Abyssinia, in this article he comes from French Sudan. Which origin is correct? 114.45.160.208 (talk) 13:59, 17 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I join the questioning crowd. About the half of the other different languages WP say Jumbo was captured in Abyssinia (East-Africa), not in French Sudan (Mali) West-Africa. They provide sources for this, how about that French-Sudan theory? (By the way - French Sudan was etsablished 1880 (about 20 years after Jumbo was captured)). So who is right?. Best regards, --188.100.234.204 (talk) 21:38, 16 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

According to "New source" (see below) "The place was indeterminately what was borderland Abyssinia and the Sudan and is now Eritrea..." —E:71.20.250.51 (talk) 04:18, 27 June 2014 (UTC) —P.s.: note the ambiguities on this 1860 map of Africa (including a large "Unknown Interior" and "probable course of the Nile") → [1][reply]

New source

There is a new potential resource that seems to be well researched. Since I am "retiring" from WP soon-ish, I thought I'd post this here:

Sutherland, John (2014). Jumbo : Ihe Unauthorised Biography of a Victorian Sensation. ISBN 178131246X. — "Limited preview" on Google books

—E:71.20.250.51 (talk) 03:44, 27 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Comments

The intro should present the weight (in kg too) and height and put that into perspective with what does the average of his kind weigh. Nergaal (talk) 23:10, 16 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Style

This article has the tone of a children's book. "Jumbo was very ill when he arrived at the London Zoo. He had not been fed properly. His hide was covered with filth that had to be scraped and scrubbed off." "Jumbo's legacy was the joy he gave millions of people just by being himself." Is there a template to mark the page about this? SSSheridan (talk) 05:39, 5 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

No, there is no such template. WP does not discriminate between storybook prose, esoteric prose, or academic prose. There is no criteria for simple, well written prose. The simple prose is not a hindrance to gaining GA. As is, the article is accessible to a great number of people. One or two sentences can be modified, but the article as a whole is well written, simple, and easy to understand. This is what WP wants. Pleases review the "good article criteria".

This is not a scientific article. It's a cultural article drawn from current and the best sources. It's an article about one huge elephant's life and its impact on world culture. There are few scientific facts. Jumbo's weight, height, and other measurements varied over his lifetime. There is no guarantee that contemporary measurements are accurate. The article cannot undergo a massive re-write because there are a few sentences that are described as story book prose. The prose is simple, and will reach many our users. SeeSpot Run (talk) 18:42, 5 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

No, the OP is right. This is supposed to be an encyclopedia article, not a children's book. I had the exact same thought when I was reading it. And this is actually nominated as a "good article"? It's a shame Wikipedia's standards have dropped so much.2600:1000:B025:9146:145E:A576:4B34:BD1E (talk) 09:01, 14 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

GA Review

This review is transcluded from Talk:Jumbo/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Shyamal (talk · contribs) 14:40, 15 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

This is a very interesting article and is close to GA but will need a bit more work. I hope the nominator is still active.

Referencing

General comment - a lot of referencing needs to be checked again. The Harvard format links are broken for several footnotes. Some of the sources are dead links, some of them can be replaced with alternate book / journal sources. Here are some sources that have not been used:

Scott, Matthew (1885). Autobiography of Matthew Scott. Jumbo's keeper. New York: Trow's Printing.
Benton, Joel (1891). Life of Phineas T. Barnum. Edgewood.
Sutherland's work does not even find mention.
The ivory king ... (many interesting bits)
McClellan, A. (2011). "P. T. Barnum, Jumbo the Elephant, and the Barnum Museum of Natural History at Tufts University". Journal of the History of Collections. 24: 45. doi:10.1093/jhc/fhr001.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/1293123
https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/handle/1774.2/8202
~~http://www.jstor.org/stable/40188110~~ The Republican Elephant came up in 1874 although Nast made an interesting cartoon of Jumbo
http://www.jstor.org/stable/41068417
Blewitt, John (2013). "What's new pussycat? A genealogy of animal celebrity". Celebrity Studies. 4 (3): 325. doi:10.1080/19392397.2013.831626. Alice's purchase after Jumbo's death is not covered
Seems to miss out on the Disney Dumbo inspiration - ref. Chambers

Article structure

Please check the sequence again esp. within the sale section, was the offer to buy made first or was the idea of selling first considered. Many of the subsections are too slim and could well be just a paragraph within a main section heading. This will also help in better layout of the pictures (now pushing headings around). Will revisit with more comments. Shyamal (talk) 03:18, 20 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Pinging SeeSpot Run, just to be sure he/she saw this. FunkMonk (talk) 11:27, 21 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Cancelled - due to unforeseen circumstances - nominator User:SeeSpot Run has been blocked for sockpuppetry. Shyamal (talk) 14:25, 13 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

What's with the simple one-clause sentences?

This reads like a children's book, not an encyclopedia article. 70.192.8.45 (talk) 08:58, 14 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Museum of Natural History Display?

When I was a kid, there was a large elephant skeleton on display near the dinosaur exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution; there was something on the sign about its being the largest known, or something like that. In later years, I took this to be Jumbo, though I don't remember reading it at the time. Are you sure about where the skeleton was displayed years ago? Shocking Blue (talk) 18:58, 1 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Assessment comment

The comment(s) below were originally left at Talk:Jumbo/Comments, and are posted here for posterity. Following several discussions in past years, these subpages are now deprecated. The comments may be irrelevant or outdated; if so, please feel free to remove this section.

Good first artical. In response to the other comment left reference the name Jumbo: The tower was nicknamed 'Jumbo' after Phineas Barnum's famous circus elephant in a derisory attack made by Rev. Canon J. Irvine during the opening ceremony in September 1883. (Lloyd whellams (talk) 00:24, 24 March 2008 (UTC))[reply]

Last edited at 09:29, 24 March 2008 (UTC). Substituted at 20:43, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

Childish tone

As noted above by multiple people, this article employs a childish tone. As it turns out, this is copied without attribution from the Simple English Wikipedia article. Copying from another Wikipedia article without attribution is a violation of the site's license, which causes the entire text to become a copyright infringement. I have reverted to the version immediately preceding the introduction of infringements in late 2014 and deleted the infringing edits. If you want non-problematic content from those edits (non-copyvio text, better citations, anything else), let me know and I'll retrieve it for you; I just did this myself with the infobox, which had been improved since 2014. Nyttend (talk) 14:18, 15 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

If it turns out that the content that you removed and blocked from public view is simply from that simple English page and you wanted to strictly address the copyright issue, you can simply copy the same content back again onto this page with a comment that has "Content in this edit is translated from the existing Simple English Wikipedia article at simple:Jumbo; see its history for attribution." This is per WP:CWW. That will solve the copyright issue entirely. Changing from simpl English tone into an English article is a separate issue that doesn't get fixed by blanking out half of the page. That can be done through copy-editing. By blanking out in mass like this, we might risk losing content and references that were added and gathered through hundreds of edits by hard working editors. Z22 (talk) 20:47, 14 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Origin of Name?

The article mentions the English word "jumbo" comes from the name of the elephant, but there doesn't seem to be anything about where the name of the elephant came from. Is there any information on this? Do we know when (who) bestowed the name upon the elephant? Do we know anything about where the name comes from (e.g. why call the elephant "Jumbo" in the first place)?

This article: http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2015/02/word-jumbocome/ indicates that "jumbo" existed as a slang term for "a big, clumsy person, animal or thing" in 1823 (predating the elephant). It also indicates that the name may have been bestowed in England (by Abraham Bartlett or Matthew Scott), with no indication of what the elephant may have been called prior that point. It doesn't cite any references, so it's probably not a reliable source, but if we had one, it would be nice to amend the article with it. -- 129.59.122.107 (talk) 18:57, 24 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]