Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Laozi/1

Laozi

Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • Watch article reassessment page • GAN review not found

Result: Delisted by the person opening the review. I assume this was meant to be an individual reassessment. As it has had no response from the community there are no issues here with the closing AIRcorn (talk) 01:43, 3 November 2019 (UTC)

There are several reasons this article's status as a Good Article needs to be reviewed.

• First, & most visible, is the presence of a "Todo" list on the Talk page. While one can add a list of Todos to a Good Article to help an editor improve it to Featured Article level, a disinterested consideration of these 3 items will show these clearly question the GA rating.
• Second, but also critical, is that the GA review for this article was performed in January 2008 (it can be found here), & while it was satisfactory for its time, that review IMHO does not meet current standards. That review was little more than a critique of the wording & grammar, & failed to consider any issues of content or coverage.

The following points address short comings concerning content & coverage.

• The section about his name is poorly organized. The issue about his name -- Lao Tzu -- is that it could be interpreted as either "Master Lao" or "The Old Master". Thus there is no certainty about his personal name. What we know about his personal name comes from Sima Qian, as does practically everything we know about the historic Lao Tzu, as opposed to the later legends that accreted to the man. That we depend so much on Sima Qian is obscured by the organization of this section, which quotes solely & crudely from secondary sources.

  What I would do with this section is to begin with the ambiguity of the meaning of "Lao Tzu", then note that Sima Qian provides several names of people who were identified with him from different sources. As for the legendary names (e.g. "Supreme Old Lord"), while they could be mentioned here -- along with Huang-Lao -- I feel they would fit better in the section "Influence", for reasons I provide below.

• There is nothing about the date of Lao Tzu, except for a sentence in the lead paragraphs. This is a complex issue that deserves discussion in detail. On the one hand, one of the anecdotes Sima Qian records makes Lao Tzu an older contemporary of Confucius, which would put his flourit in the 6th century BC. On the other hand, the state of the Guodian Manuscripts suggest that this work may have been assembled from a number of texts during the late 4th / early 3rd Centuries BC; William H. Baxter provides an analysis of the rhymes in the Tao Te Ching -- which is an important & widely recognized method for reconstructing the words of Classical Chinese -- which dates this work to the "late 4th or early 3rd century BCE". Thus it is likely that the person(s) responsible wrote later in a pseudepigraphical mode, presenting ideas they believed the Old Master advocated.
• The issue of authorship is treated in a binary form: either the Tao Te Ching had one author & thus one voice, or it is an anthology of sayings lacking any unifying point of view. It does not recognize that at the time Chinese culture did not recognize the idea of a work having a single author, but as the statement of a corporate body, a school of thought. Thus this work could both be a unified whole & the product of several people.
• Here again the fact that all we know of the historic Lao Tzu comes from Sima Qian's brief biography; an English translation is barely longer than a single printed page. Yet this brief biography is full of problems. Sima Qian even admits at one point the material he had is unreliable. Thus this work needs explication by experts. One expert source would be A.C. Graham's essay "The Origins of the Legend of Lao Tan", which deconstructs this biography, providing a convincing theory of why Lao Tzu was associated with the attested Lao Tan (the older contemporary of Confucius), & how other traditions accreted around this germ of an idea.
• Here I have point out that many of the sources cited in this article are unsatisfactory. Few of them appear to be written by experts on Chinese history, let alone experts of the period Lao Tzu belongs to, which is the Warring States period. The few that are reliable sources are cited in an unsatisfactory way. For example, Kohn & LaFargue's book Lao-tzu and the Tao-te-ching is a collection of essays & the articles it comprises need to be cited separately, not as if Kohn & LaFargue wrote the entire book.
• The later legends presented in this section would be better discussed in the "Influence" section for reasons I discuss below.
• The section about the Tao Te Ching is one of the strongest parts of the article, yet is still unsatisfactory. While the section provides a discussion of how this work relates to Philosophical Taoism, it omits any mention of how it relates to the Taoist Religion, a movement that includes such practices as alchemy, meditation, sexual practices, search for immortality, & related interests. (There are several essays in Kohn & LaFargue's book which could provide material to fill this gap.) But that he was associated with the Taoist religion is clear from the names later Chinese gave him mentioned above, as well as his incorporation into the personage "Huang-Lao".
• The section "Influence" is probably the most unsatisfactory part of this article. It gives undue emphasis to its claimed influence on Libertarianism. That some Libertarians claim Lao Tzu was an ancient precursor is undeniable, yet his greatest influence is not even in politics but in religion. He is better known in the West for his reputation as a mystic. And as I noted at several points above, there is very little in this article about his influence in later Chinese thought. (I note here that there is no native libertarian tradition in Chinese intellectual thought; rather, China is known for creating the first organized government bureaucracy, which lasted from the Han dynasty down to 1911.)

I would rewrite myself this article entirely, but I doubt the final product would meet GA standards. For one thing, I admit I don't know enough about Chinese intellectual tradition to explain Lao Tzu's role in it adequately. But perhaps there is someone who is able to make the necessary changes to get this article on an important subject to GA or even FA status. -- llywrch (talk) 06:30, 29 May 2019 (UTC)

None of the concerns/criticisms I raised here have been addressed, even though I waited 4 months for any kind of response. With regret, I am downgrading this article. -- llywrch (talk) 05:08, 10 October 2019 (UTC)