Template:Did you know nominations/Nangong Kuo (disciple of Confucius)

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 97198 (talk) 11:28, 22 November 2014 (UTC)

Nangong Kuo (disciple of Confucius)[edit]

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... ~~that Confucius commended his disciple Nangong Kuo as a gentleman and gave him his niece in marriage?~~

Reviewed: Mamilla Mall

Created by Zanhe (talk). Self nominated at 06:49, 16 November 2014 (UTC).

Article: New; long enough; neutral, cited, and non-plagiarized. It very badly needs for the Wade to be unbolded (I can do that), for simplified characters to be included (Zanhe can hopefully manage this on his own), and for the mess of characters and alt romanizations to be shunted into a {{Chinese}} infobox (ditto), but none of that really needs to hold it back here. It's not wrong, just mildly unhelpful and ugly.
Hook: Short enough; accurate and cited; neutral. Aside from the comma misuse (fixed), the problem here is that, howevermuch it is standard that junzi gets translated as "gentleman", it's an utterly misleading→terrible translation that's a holdover from the Victorians. Our article on it is at junzi and "lord's son" or "superior person" are both closer to what Mr Kong was getting at. Reading between the lines, he could even have been mildly insulting the guy by not calling him a sage. More to the point, there's no call for that part of the sentence at all. The commendation shown by the marriage itself is much stronger and more straightforward than taking note of an archaic Chinese courtesy title. (Note that I have to take the information about the niece in good faith: Confucius's own article lists no brother; the brother given by the article "Mengpi" doesn't appear at all in a Wiki-wide search; and the only online source provided for the claim doesn't give that name at all. Those are some pretty major issues for hooks focused on the girl, although presumably this is all standard Chinese legend and Kongzi was parcelling out his older brother's children owing to a family death.)
ALT1: ... that Confucius thought so highly of his disciple Nangong Kuo that he gave the student his niece in marriage?
ALT2: ... that during a major fire at the court of Lu in ancient China, Confucius's disciple Nangong Kuo ignored the treasury to save the library?
are both good to go, unless another editor wants to add some wiggle words ("...is said to have...") to clarify that the histories we have of these guys are essentially hagiographies. — LlywelynII 16:17, 16 November 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments. I know the jumble of different romanizations is ugly, but unfortunately they are commonly used. I wish scholars could just agree on the pinyin standard which everyone else uses nowadays, but many of them still use the Wade-Giles romanization, which is why I bold them in the title.

Regarding the hook, it is sourced to multiple modern scholarship in the form of critical comments (by Chichung Huang, Edward Slingerland, and Han Zhaoqi) published by academic presses, not to ancient primary sources. Your assertion "the histories we have of these guys are essentially hagiographies" does not reflect the academic consensus.

Confucius' older brother Mengpi is well known to any student of Confucianism or ancient Chinese history, and is mentioned in several ancient sources including the Records of the Grand Historian and the Kongzi Jiayu. The fact that no en.wiki article mentions him is only a symptom of Wikipedia's deficiency. There is a stub for him on the Chinese Wikipedia at zh:孟皮.

There is no such thing as perfect translation, especially from ancient Chinese to modern English; the gaps in time, space, and culture between the two cannot be any greater. Gentleman is not a perfect translation for junzi, but that's the word used by both Professor Huang and Professor Slingerland.

That being said, I have no problem with dropping the word "gentleman", and I'm perfectly happy with ALT1 you proposed. -Zanhe (talk) 01:57, 17 November 2014 (UTC)

@Wade: I didn't ask you to remove them: you just needed to unbold them. It was an eyesore and not helpful. There are clutches of scholars who still use them (and obviously many previously published books that do), but it's now the official romanization essentially nowhere and is just an alternate form of the pinyin (all of which should be bolded).

@Formatting: Similarly, you shouldn't remove any of the names, but (especially if you're going to be doing many of these entries in a row) you should familiarize yourself with the {{Chinese}} infobox and start using it [Done]. Compare the first draft of this article with the much, much more user-friendly (and WP:MOS-ZH-compliant) Confucius article. You should also include the tonal pinyin and simplified forms of the characters: Pin1yin1.com or a similar website can make this faster. It's lagniappe, but it's always nice to have the reconstructed Old Chinese, too. This Wiktionary page has many of the common Old Chinese characters and their Baxter-Sagart reconstruction.

@Tone issues: Obviously you don't feel that way or you would have written your hook differently. I'm talking about the editors like EEng at your Bu Shang entry above. (And scholars do feel that way. It's just something we gloss over because we have to use the sources that we've got, for better or worse, just like hagiographies.)

@Mengpi: You've vastly overstating your case: the lack of any entry here, any mention on Confucius's page, and a bare stub at Zh shows just how few people have heard of this guy. If you didn't make him up out of whole cloth, great. (I didn't think you had.) He seems like someone whose inclusion is really needful. (Although thank you for undertaking this project with the disciples.)

@ALT1: Peachy. Do we need a third editor to double-check it since I formatted it? or since it's just a pared-down version of your proposal are we good to go? — LlywelynII 12:14, 17 November 2014 (UTC)

Thanks a lot for adding all the romanizations and infoboxes to the article. My head would've exploded if I had to do them myself! One word about the hagiography point. There is a (minority) voice that dismisses much of the traditional biography of Confucius as hagiography, but the traditional biography, prominently by Sima Qian, begins with the statement that Confucius was the product of an illicit relationship between his parents. Other records say that he and his mother were expelled from the Kong family after his father died, and that his mother was denied a burial in the family cemetery after her death. Decidedly non-hagiographical stuff for a person who valued proper rituals above almost everything else. But that's way off topic. We have an agreement on ALT1, which is what matters here. -Zanhe (talk) 04:42, 18 November 2014 (UTC)

You're welcome, but hopefully you see how easy it is? Just go to {{Chinese}} and then copy/paste the template to the top of any new pages you're making. Obviously other people can add lagniappe like the Old Chinese forms but, if you're only including one, tonal pinyin is much more valuable than Wade anymore. — LlywelynII 04:17, 20 November 2014 (UTC)

To promoter: the reviewer approved the original hook except for the "gentleman" part, and formatted the remaining hook as ALT1. I suppose this does not require a second review. -Zanhe (talk) 04:59, 18 November 2014 (UTC)

Removed all the inline ticks. One tick should be placed at the end to indicate whether this has passed or not. Yoninah (talk) 22:26, 18 November 2014 (UTC)
< Replacing tick indicating that initial concerns have been dealt with and this passed. — LlywelynII 04:17, 20 November 2014 (UTC)