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Paragraph 3 of the section Emperor Hui's death and Empress Lü's taking control opens with the following: "Empress Dowager Lü then "promoted" Wang Ling . . ." Are the quotations meant to have meaning? If so, the intended meaning should be specified. If not, I suggest removing them to prevent confusion. Ipeaf (talk) 14:15, 5 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Hi@Ipeaf:, welcome to Wikipedia! Thanks for your help editing this article! When I first found it in April of this year, it was pretty close to a direct translation of the cited chapter from Book of Han, didn't cite any sources, and had been stable in that state since like 2005.
I hope my reword of the sentence in question clears up your concern about why I put scare quotes around "promoted". I noticed last night that you had just joined the site, and debated with myself for a long time about undoing some of the changes you made, because I seek to be encouraging to new editors and it's not a fun feeling to have your prose changed, so I have a few explanations from what I can remember for that edit as well.
The Lü clan (to which she belonged) → her clan of Lü was mostly to avoid a parenthetical in the lead. struck by an arrow → suffered an arrow wound was mostly because the next phrase is allegedly caused his death, and it was the wound that did the causing, not the arrow. Puncture wounds in ancient warfare had a high mortality rate due to infection, which is probably what happened here. Consort Qi was also killed → mutilated and publicly humiliated is the change that pushed me over the line to making the edit rather than letting your improvement over the previous version stand. Poor consort Qi had her hands and feet cut off, her eyes gouged out, and her ears set on fire, then put in the latrine and mocked as "human swine". (Shiji, vol.9) I suppose we could put in the full story, but I felt called to honour her memory by changing "also killed" to give some sense of Empress Lü's cruelty. described as a favoured servant, which may indicate a romantic connection between the two used to be her lover, Shen Yiji, which is not exactly attested although the wording of the sources makes it likely. I did track down where the rumours of romantic connection came from thanks to your tag, which is an excellent improvement since it's in a different chapter than the two cited as general references, so thank you for that.
This article (which is largely the same as it has been since 2005) still could use some more copyedits. I notice that people do a lot of "alleging", for one thing, and although a significant number of the run-on sentences have been reworded, the structure of the prose is not significantly different, and I encountered laziness when cleaning it all up.
So, if there's any other tags or improvements you'd like to see in the article, please don't hesitate, and don't worry about changing the wording either, as long as it still reflects the sources and gets the intended point across. You are welcome to ask for help anywhere on the project. My talk page is always open, and I'm usually able to respond within twenty-four hours. Please don't hesitate to ask if you're uncertain how to perform a task technically or have any other questions. The Teahouse is another great resource for new editors, and if you're interested in the Chinese history topic area, WikiProject China could always use more hands. Thanks again, Folly Mox (talk) 19:47, 5 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for replying! I changed "brutally mutalated" to "killed" because I felt 'brutally mutalated' was too emotionally charged and didn't fit in with Avoid stating opinions as facts from Wikipedia:Neutral Point of View; although just 'killed' isn't really in depth enough, so you're probably right about a full desc. of the event being preferable.
But, I think the two changes of mine that you mentioned directly before that were definitely mistakes on my part; your originals were definitely better. Ipeaf (talk) 01:17, 10 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
