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A fact from Judge Lu appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 18 January 2023 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that according to Ren Xiaoping, the first reference to a body swap occurs in the Chinese short story "Judge Lu", in which the titular character performs a head transplant on his friend's wife?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2023/January. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Judge Lu.

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Did you know nomination

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by SL93 (talk) 22:39, 11 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

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Article history

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... that according to Ren Xiaoping, "the first reference to a body swap" occurs in the Chinese short story "Judge Lu", in which the titular character performs a head transplant on his friend's wife?
- Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/Emerson Charles Denny

Created by Kingoflettuce (talk). Self-nominated at 20:27, 9 January 2023 (UTC).[reply]

New enough, long enough, well referenced. Hook is very interesting and cited. AGF for close paraphrasing from the offline sources. QPQ is done. 97198 (talk) 00:09, 10 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

"body swap"?

Pace Ren Xiaoping, a head transplant is different from a body swap. A two-way brain transplant would qualify, but a one-way change is not a "swap". jnestorius^(talk) 00:29, 18 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

First?

The DYK hook was:

... that according to Ren Xiaoping, the first reference to a body swap occurs in the Chinese short story "Judge Lu", in which the titular character performs a head transplant on his friend's wife?

The Judge Lu story is dated 1766 but according to body swap appearances in media, they were "first popularized in anglo-saxon culture by the personal identity chapter of John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding." and that was earlier in 1689. This issue was posted at WP:ERRORS but there was no response in the brief time it was up. Andrew🐉(talk) 13:53, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It's very possible that Ren is mistaken/has a COI/etc. but it is not in our place to "debunk" what a source says using another unrelated source (that does not mention this story at all) - in my opinion that borders on original research KINGofLETTUCE 👑 🥬 15:31, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Ren is a surgeon not a historian or literary scholar. In any case, their claim starts by discounting previous "religious" examples even though the story is obviously a fantasy about a demon too. As it's a weak claim, I have removed it altogether. Even Locke isn't first in this field – see Switching Heads and Cultures which goes back to the year 1070. Andrew🐉(talk) 16:45, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Kingoflettuce, you're dead wrong. A critical part of our job as editors is to evaluate source reliability. A given source is not 100% reliable or 100% reliable -- reliability may need to be judged separately for each of various statements the source makes, and "first" claims need especially close scrutiny; see Template:Did you know nominations/Atomitat#cold. Having said all that, given Ren Xiaoping's stature I think a qualified "according to" statement is OK. Many physicians do serious historical and cultural research in their area of specialty; for example [1]. E Eng 22:52, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

That is true, I was referring more to Andrew's act of stitching together the two sources to read something like "X says (false statement)[1], but in xxxx there was an earlier instance of such a story[2]." I think that as an attempt at "debunking" what Ren says is original research. And the "according to" stuff was my edit after all, wasn't it? :) But I'm not too fussed about removing it altogether. KINGofLETTUCE 👑 🥬 23:00, 19 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]