Talk:Xinxiu bencao

A fact from Xinxiu bencao appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 2 December 2022 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that the Xinxiu bencao was the first state-sponsored pharmacopoeia in China?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2022/December. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Xinxiu bencao.

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Xinxiu bencao has been listed as one of the Natural sciences good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
May 18, 2023	Good article nominee	Listed
July 17, 2024	Good article reassessment	Kept

Current status: Good article

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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 RoySmith (talk) 18:38, 24 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

(

Comment or view
Article history

)

... that the Xinxiu bencao was the first state-sponsored pharmacopoeia in China?
- Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/Jeffrey Buis

Created by Kingoflettuce (talk). Self-nominated at 09:10, 21 November 2022 (UTC).[reply]

Pass—new enough, just long enough, QPQ done, sourced with RS citations and well written; Earwig says copyvio-free. Hook is interesting (I do not care for medicine but the hook intrigued me). Actually, the article is quite fascinating—short but sweet and I loved reading it! I noticed that you provided no reference for this DYK, but the relevant text is cited in the article. Source verifies text, can be read on Google Books here, p. 53. 𓃦LunaEatsTuna (💬) 01:33, 24 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

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.

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

Reviewer: LunaEatsTuna (talk · contribs) 17:19, 17 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Will get to this later today or in the early hours of tomorrow morning (UTC). ツ LunaEatsTuna (💬)— 17:19, 17 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Nice work on the changes! Happy now to pass it for GA status. Congrats on this short but sweet GA! Keep up the work. ツ LunaEatsTuna (💬)— 21:13, 18 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Copyvio

Earwig says good to go.

Prose

In the first efn note, is there a reason "Materia Medica" is not italicised in Newly Revised Materia Medica?

Materia Medica is italicised by default and it seems that conventionally when a usually italicised phrase is in an intalicised title, you'd un-italicise it. Certainly that's the case in the sources I've read, but I wonder if our style guides differ on this KINGofLETTUCE 👑 🥬 11:37, 18 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, I see. Should be fine in that case. ツ LunaEatsTuna (💬)— 21:11, 18 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

"headed by editor-in-chief Su Jing" – use the ill template as you do so later in the article.

Done KINGofLETTUCE 👑 🥬 11:37, 18 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I basically have to obligatorily ask given how short it is—can Contents be expanded at all? For instance, are there any other particularly notable drugs given in any of the sources?

The difficulty is the original text and illustrations are lost. I've extracted as much as I can from the sources - I'd daresay our entry is one of the most substantial ones on the topic that you can find anywhere on the Web KINGofLETTUCE 👑 🥬 11:37, 18 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

From the spotchecks I did I would honestly say I agree. ツ LunaEatsTuna (💬)— 21:11, 18 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

"because of an "imperial taboo"." – does the source say anything else about this/can more context be given for readers?

I would like to know too! However the source doesn't say more. Buell (2017) similarly notes that his name was changed due to a "naming taboo" but doesn't elaborate. KINGofLETTUCE 👑 🥬 11:37, 18 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

That is unfortunate. ツ LunaEatsTuna (💬)— 21:11, 18 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Are there any freely-licensed images of the Xinxiu bencao? Would be fascinating to see what it looks like.

Can't find any at the moment, unfortunately - besides it would be images of the copy since the original has been lost for quite some time KINGofLETTUCE 👑 🥬 11:37, 18 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Fair point. ツ LunaEatsTuna (💬)— 21:11, 18 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Recommend adding Template:Use X English

Done. Thanks for the comments! KINGofLETTUCE 👑 🥬 11:37, 18 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]

References

Passes spotcheck on refs 1 (cited six times) and 5 (cited twice).

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.

GA Reassessment

Xinxiu bencao

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.

Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • Watch article reassessment page • Most recent review

Result: No consensus. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 10:30, 17 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Far from covering all major aspects of the topic. Chinaknowledge, which is based on Chinese language secondary sources, contains several paragraphs of information about the contents of the book, while the article only has two sentences. The article says that the book is considered lost in China, even though Chinaknowledge makes clear that large sections of the book survive and even lists modern editions of the text. Kzyx (talk) 03:18, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Good thing they list their sources so we can hopefully check those out. This also makes me realise that I think there must be more sources for this work that are in Mandarin, which I unfortunately do not speak; but if we find the sources hopefully there would be Mandarin-speaking Wikipedians willing to help translate/factcheck machine translations. ❧ LunaEatsTuna (talk), proudly editing since 2018 (and just editing since 2017) – posted at 11:31, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

It's been a long while since I took a look at this but I would hesitate to call Chinaknowledge.de a reliable source, even though its information is ostensibly based on reliable-looking Chinese sources. Notwithstanding the fact that I would really love to incorporate info from Chinese-language sources, I believe this article already covers virtually everything that can be found in the English-language scholarship; I would challenge anyone to contradict me. Claims such as the full text being lost (which I think you're insinuating to be inaccurate) are not based on my word (WP:OR), but the RSes cited. In any case, thanks for helping to improve the article but I respectfully submit that this GAR is a tad premature. Cheers, KINGofLETTUCE 👑 🥬 12:16, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

By the way, I believe you meant to link here instead. Frankly I do not see that much of a significant difference between the info listed there and in our article. There is a distinction between "comprehensive" (in fact, just "broad in coverage" suffices for GA purposes...) and "exhaustive"... For instance, I'm not quite sure our readers really need to know about every single modern print of the fragments by the Keji weisheng press, the Shanghai keji press, or the Shanghai guji Press, etc. KINGofLETTUCE 👑 🥬 12:26, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I did mean that link. I didn't actually want to cite Chinaknowledge (which is written by a specialist in Chinese history) in the article and it's definitely not necessary to actually list modern editions. I was just pointing out that there is a lot of information yet to be added. And yes, the statement that the full text is lost is inaccurate: the Encyclopedia of China states that 20 juan survive, and those 20 juan can be found on ctext.org. There are also very many academic papers in Chinese whose main topic is the Xinxiu bencao :[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14]. In any case, the article's five paragraphs are woefully inaccurate for a clearly important text in the history of Chinese medicine. Kzyx (talk) 21:35, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Please address my point that "this article already covers virtually everything that can be found in the English-language scholarship"... It's not reasonable to expect anything here to incorporate information from the "very many academic papers in Chinese", as much as I would like for this to be the case (and notwithstanding the fact that this topic is indeed Chinese-related)... The claim, for instance, that the full text is lost is made in one of the RSes and faithfully reported in this article. Per WP:OR, it is not in within our purview to contradict that. FWIW, the fact that 20 juan survive (which you are more than welcome to add) is not mutually exclusive with the fact that the full text (comprising who knows how many juan) no longer survives.... Again, as far as the modern English-language scholarship is concerned, I do not think your assessment of "Woefully inaccurate" is at all fair. Cheers, KINGofLETTUCE 👑 🥬 16:29, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Kingoflettuce, per WP:RSUE English-language sources are only preferred over non-English ones when they are of equal quality. From what Kzyx is saying, it seems like the Chinese-language source include huge amounts of relevant information, without which the article can't be said to cover the "main aspects" of the topic. I am thus of the view that unless the relevant material is added from the Chinese sources, this should be delisted. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 22:14, 8 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@AirshipJungleman29 Kzyx is being hyperbolic with such claims as "woefully inaccurate" and I respectfully submit that you shouldn't simply be taking his word for it. His main gripe revolves around the "Contents" section and I believe that since we aren't a specialist encyclopedia there's really no need to go into too much detail (or any at all) regarding the hundreds of various medicines listed in the text, apart from the fact that there are 850ish of them. Moreover, "the 'broad in its coverage' criterion is significantly weaker than the 'comprehensiveness' required of featured articles. It allows shorter articles, articles that do not cover every major fact or detail, and overviews of large topics." Short of gesturing towards a list of papers, Kzyx also has not specified what relevant info is so crucially missing from the article. Cheers, KINGofLETTUCE 👑 🥬 05:06, 10 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

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.