Talk:Hanshan (poet)

Speculation on existence

Is it possible to include information on the speculative nature on the reality of his existence? After all, his corpus of material was gathered by a single person (Lu Qiuyin): it could be possible that Lu simply made the identity of Han Shan up rather than discovering his poetry.

Literary context

This needs literary context. --maru 10:22 PM Friday, 18 February 2005

Critical writings

I have added a paragraph with some discussions about the Hanshan-figure. Vragebugten

Japanese

We dont need a japanese translation! WIKIpedian64

Self-published sources and self-promotion

The author pseudonym Wandering Poet (presumably who admits to be the same person as User:Wandering Poet) occurs no fewer than 15 times in the current article text. His self-published (see Lulu.com/wanderingpoet) work, Cold Mountain Transcendental Poetry, is referenced in 30 citations in the article. Per WP:SPS, self-published material is not acceptable as a source. Since editor Wandering Poet has been adding his own translations in some 90 edits over the last two years, ridding this article the undesirable material is going to take a considerable amount of work. All assistance would be appreciated. --gråb whåt you cån (talk) 09:46, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

I've done quite a bit, but the Biography section remains problematical. It was added en bloc with this edit by user Wandering Poet (Edit summary: "I have used words from the poems of Han-shan, from my own translation, to create his auto-biography"). While it would be unfortunate to leave the article with no Biography section, if it consists entirely of unsourced original research, then there is no choice. Has anyone any constructive proposals? --gråb whåt you cån (talk) 11:59, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

Self-published sources are acceptable, as your own link says, Bagworm. The question is, is Wandering Poet the good or bad kind of SPS? Before we tear out a huge chunk of the article, perhaps that should be answered. --Gwern (contribs) 20:09 28 May 2013 (GMT)

Per WP:SPS the only exceptional case where self-published sources are acceptable is as follows: "Self-published expert sources may be considered reliable when produced by an established expert on the subject matter, whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable third-party publications." There is no evidence to suggest that this is the case, and in the absence of such evidence we have no choice but to assume that he is the "bad kind", to use your words. --gråb whåt you cån (talk) 22:06, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

Why should we assume that? Nothing he's added seems outright wrong or objectionable for other reasons. (I say this as the editor who wrote this article in the first place, in case you don't recognize my nick from the history.) Assuming bad faith as a reason to massively reduce the quality of the article seems like the sort of thing that should bear the burden of proof here. --Gwern (contribs) 21:02 31 May 2013 (GMT)

Gwern, I know you're an experienced editor, and this has nothing to do with assuming bad faith. It has everything to do with Wikipedia:Verifiability, the cornerstone of this entire project. Unsourced content does not need to be "objectionable for other reasons" to be objectionable, and this is all the more true for material bearing all the marks of wp:self-promotion by an exclusively self-published writer.

That writer's latest edit is suspicious for the following reason: he has simply substituted 12 references (unpaged) to Watson where I had removed reference to his own Lulu- (i.e. self-)published book. Is it not stretching credulity a little to assert that all of the detailed material originally sourced to the editor's own book was all the time actually supported directly by the text of Watson's? Without page numbers this is effectively unverifiable. Do you (or anyone else reading here) have a copy of Watson (Cold Mountain: 100 Poems by the T'ang Poet Han-shan (1970), tr. Burton Watson, Columbia University Press ISBN 0-231-03450-4)? If so, can you please supply the page numbers to the references missing them? --gråb whåt you cån (talk) 21:06, 12 June 2013 (UTC)

More: Checking the preview of Wandering Poet's book on GBooks, I've found on page 8 “With my son I gather wild fruit, I hoe the rocky field with my wife”, which the editor has ascribed to Watson. On the same page: “One or two heavenly books I read, mumbling, beneath the pines.” And "He becomes increasingly lonely. In the modern world, he sees selfishness and greed, ignorance and corruption. Nothing has changed in a thousand years. Disappointed with life and his fellow man, he becomes withdrawn, sinks into poverty and depression." On an unnumbered page, we find “Cold Mountain is hidden in white clouds, It’s peaceful to be cut off from the busy world.” I could go on, but I think the situation is already quite clear. The author's latest approach is to include his own writing in the article and pass it off as Watson's. Under the circumstances I propose to delete most or all of the Biography section as its contents are entirely untrustworthy. Any counter-proposals before I go ahead? --gråb whåt you cån (talk) 10:39, 13 June 2013 (UTC)

Done. It would be great if someone with access to reliable sources could expand the Biography section. --gråb whåt you cån (talk) 12:10, 16 June 2013 (UTC)