Talk:Wenwanggua

Original research
As the user who created this article has been repeatedly informed, the threshold for inclusion is not "based on the obvious analogy of yin-yang and binary". Edit-warring is not going to get WP:OR included in the article and what should be "obvious" by now is that the proposed changes do not have WP:CONSENSUS.

Moving lexicographical order to a footnote is tantamount to deleting it. Furthermore, that makes it appear to be a citation in support of the user's insertion, which it certainly does not. The user provides only one citation, the IEP yin-yang article, to state that a following diagram "first appears in the writings of Shao Yung…" Of course, the IEP doesn't include that diagram. In merely lists, in passing, "the Xiantian tu (Diagram of Preceding Heaven) credited to Shao Yong (1011-1077 CE)". That's not an acceptable citation. While it seems unlikely that the diagram appears in those writing, I am not, however, contesting that similar diagrams are frequently used to explain the author's earlier heaven arrangement, (attributed to Fu Xi).

What I am contesting, is the claim that the diagram "seems to be a sequence of numbers in binary notation." Such anachronistic nativity is wrong on numerous levels… suffice it to say that Shao wrote numbers when he meant numbers, and gua when he meant gua, without conflating them. Gua express combinatorial properties, and contrary to the overly-enthusiastic speculations of Leibniz, they are not binary numbers. As the user has been informed, the decimal values can be represented various ways in binary notation, their naive table of decimal values is completely arbitrary.

While those misunderstanding are fairly commonplace, the following WP:OR is much more peculiar: "Considering yin and yang ( and ) as binary numbers 0 an 1, the yang lines' corresponding decimal numbers are: top: 1, middle: 2, and bottom: 4."

Hard to say what they're talking about but it seems to be a pet theory of some sort.—Machine Elf 1735  03:47, 4 June 2012 (UTC)