Talk:Cai Lun

Confusing and poor representations of appearance

I believe the portrait of Emperor Zhang on this page is unnecessary and confusing; a casual viewer could easily (as I did initially) mistake the portrait for one of Cai Lun, especially considering the similarity in appearance to the central figure in the image of “Patron Saint Cai Lun.” In fact, all of the images on the page must be incorrect, as they portray Cai with a beard, and as a eunuch he wouldn’t have had one. This is evident in the majority of recent representations, for example https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hunan_International_Economics_University23.jpg, his statue at Cai Lun Memorial Hall in Leiyang, and the official postage stamp of 1962: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cai_Lun_New.jpg. Any one of these would be more appropriate than the images currently used on this page. UnbrokenMonkey (talk) 18:23, 12 May 2024 (UTC)

Since all portrayals are inherently totally fictional, I don't see why using beardedness should be a deciding criteria. Remsense诉 22:58, 12 May 2024 (UTC)

Indeed, and such a rationale is essentially WP:OR. Both images the OP links are not in public domain; the stamp will not be until 2057, and the Statue is not due to commons:Commons:Copyright_rules_by_territory/China#Freedom_of_panorama. For the record, both images were used in the article until these issues were discovered during FAC.

The current image is a commonly used representation of Cai by modern sources, reproduced in Tsien 1985, Hunter & Hunter 1978 and Hart 2000. Aza24 (talk) 01:43, 13 May 2024 (UTC)

Thinking about this more, I've removed the portrait of emperor Zhang. It doesn't really add anything, and I can agree that no one reads image captions. Aza24 (talk) 05:00, 14 June 2024 (UTC)

Reverted edit

@Aza24 The point I was trying to make was that a lot of the {{ill}} links weren't pointing to the proper English Wikipedia link. For example, {{ill|延笃|zh|lt=Yan Du}} points to the English Wikipedia article 延笃, not Yan Du. I just changed it {{ill|Yan Du|zh|延笃}}, which points to Yan Du.

Also the Dongguan Hanji was not compiled by Yan Du like you put in the bibliography, it was progressively expanded by many different people throughout the Eastern Han. Kzyx (talk) 03:03, 29 May 2024 (UTC)

Understood, I've now restored most of your edits. Sorry for the confusion; in the future, a more detailed edit summary would be helpful. Usually when I see mass, unexplained changes to featured articles like this, its hard to vet them thoroughly. Aza24 (talk) 04:55, 14 June 2024 (UTC)