User:Rurik the Varangian/Robert Temple cleanup
Robert K. G. Temple is a pop history writer, and not a reliable one. His most popular book is The Sirius Mystery, a book full of crazy pseudoscience about how an ethnic group in Mali contacted aliens. This is what he is known most for. However, there was a later, lesser known book called The Genius of China: 3000 Years of Science, Discovery and Invention. It was a pop history attempt at promoting the history of Chinese technology. That, in and of itself, is not a bad thing. The history of Chinese science and technology is an academic topic that is fascinating, and one that has been extensively researched by sinology experts. The seminal Science and Civilization in China, published by Cambridge University Press and spanning a whopping seven volumes, is an excellent scholarly source on the topic. Temple's book claims to have used it as a source, but the statements that he makes in his book are usually less accurate than the ones made by the book he claims to cite. Sometimes Temple is cited on Wikipedia for articles on Chinese science and technology. However, his name is so tainted with his hawking of extraterrestrial pseudohistory that citing him is a huge disservice to Wikipedia and to the field of sinology. Most of the content that uses Temple as a citation are rather commonplace, and can be found in other, better sources, like the aforementioned Science and Civilization in China, The Cambridge Illustrated History of China, and other academic books and journals about China. This page will list my ongoing efforts on Wikipedia cleaning up misuses of the Robert Temple citation.