Wikipedia:Peer review/Tao Te Ching/archive1

Tao Te Ching

I want to submit this article to Feature article status. Your comments and suggestions on how to improve this article are most welcome. ≈ jossi fresco ≈ t • @ 19:48, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

• Needs references, first and foremost. LordViD 21:39, 8 December 2005 (UTC)
• Much improved over what I saw the last time I looked at this article 18-24 months ago. However, this article could still stand more improvements, to wit:
  • Where do the items under "Interpretatino" come from? They look vaguely as if taken from Holmes Welch's Taoism: the Parting of the Way (Boston: Beacon, 1957), but if so, then this article badly needs an explanation of the Chinese practice of Commentaries & sub-Commentaries on their Canonical texts, some of which took surprising liberties with the original text (Welch offers one interesting example in his book).
  • An awful lot of space is devoted to the biography -- or what is guessed of it -- of Lao Tzu, but very little about the competing claims of authorship, or whether the book was written by one person or several.
  • I think a discussion of the textual problems deserves more than a mention that the Tao Te Ching is "around 5000 Chinese characters". IIRC, the length of the text varies greatly between the various recensions; for example, the discovery of the Ma-wang-tui Texts settled the speculation whether Wang Bi's commentary had been accidentally copied into the text of chapter 31. (It hadn't.)
  • Do we really need a line in the textbox at the top to tell us how the title of this book is spelled in "Archaic pre-Wade-Giles"? Either tell us the name of the transliteration system, or take this bit of pedantic & obsolete information out.
  • Lastly, the Taoism of Lao Tzu is a very different thing from the Taoism of, say, Chuang Tzu & the Yellow Emperor. I would expect to find a discussion of that in a Reatured Article on this work. -- llywrch 03:45, 9 December 2005 (UTC)