Talk:Peanut production in China

A fact from Peanut production in China appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 25 July 2015 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that finds of the Neolithic period from the archaeological excavations at Zhejiang and Jiangxi have led to a claim in China that the groundnut is an indigenous crop?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2015/July. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Peanut production in China.

Wikipedia

Nonsense History![edit]

I find the first sentence here a bizarre fringe theory, unfortunately I was able to reference the gist to a few obscure websites. The specifics, however, such as the places mentioned, I cannot reference, the sources found mention another province. Searching in Chinese for specifics just gives me translations of this Wikipedia page. Also, 2000 year ago may be called 'ancient', but certainly not neolithic!

Looking back at earliest versions of this article, I see it was mostly copy/pasted from a report by one Gang Yao for the University of Georgia called 'Peanut Production and Utilization in the People’s Republic of China'. The offending info in this section comes from Yao, but he doesn't reference where he got the info in his report. Wikipedia editors seem to have further embellished it with romantic inaccuracies c.f. 'neolithic', 'ancient'. Also sentences from Yao were so truncated (or distributed across sections) that they lost original meaning. Subsequent editors seem to have moved mention of Portuguese traders from the history part of article to the intro some odd reason, and also relegated the original reference to this report to the first part of the intro... Bizarre this claim ended up unchallenged as a feature on the main page...

The oddly precise date of 1368 as introduction of the peanut (over a century before the peanut was discovered) is copied from Yao's report as well. He references 'Shuren et al 1995' for this purported fact, but in his list of references this he instead lists: 'Gai, Shuren, and Shanlin Yu. Peanut Production Situation and Development Strategy in China, in Peanut Technology, 1993'. This just has to be a screw up. 1368 happens to be the year the Ming Dynasty started, and the peanut was introduced during the Ming, so either Gai or Yao got the dates confused. Yang also contradictorily claims the first published mention of the peanut in China was in something called the 'Chanshu County Magazine' of 1503 (he probably meant Changshu), but again he doesn't reference this and I cannot corroborate the existence of this 'magazine'...

Leo 86.83.56.115 (talk) 00:05, 7 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]