User talk:FourLights

Welcome!
Hello, FourLights, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few links to pages you might find helpful:
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Please remember to sign your messages on talk pages by typing four tildes ( ~ ); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Questions, ask me on my talk page, or, and a volunteer should respond shortly. Again, welcome! Berek (talk) 23:06, 26 November 2017 (UTC)

Excellent work in promoting this long neglected philosophy
Hello FourLights,

I share your goal in trying to make more people aware of Chinese Legalism in the face of the overwhelming focus on Confucianism and Daoism which seem to have dominated the perception of Chinese Philosophy so long in the West. You're more knowledgeable than I am in this field I can see, and we can use all the help we can get! I wish I had more time to devote to toward this aim, but it's great to see more people with that same goal.

Sivartnosredna7 (talk) 21:18, 23 November 2016 (UTC)

Editing chinese legalism page
Hi FourLights,

Great work on the page. When I ran across it this morning I thought that it was an interesting and important page, but (in its then state) disorganized. So I did my best to put it in better order. I hope it works for you. I think its current organization now is pretty good, but the details of the information that go in each section isn't something that I personally want to tackle. I studied Chinese philosophy in college, but that was years ago and I'm no expert. So... Go to it! and Good Luck! StephenFerg (talk) 20:57, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

The core ideology of socialism
Hey man, thanks for your generous contribution to my page. I just got a few questions to ask you. Why do you think the title should be changed to Core Socialist Values, what's the differences in your eyes? Why do you devide the sections to be what it is now, as below? And why you name the 2nd section as Program? 1	Background 2	Program 3	Impact 4	See also 5	Further reading 6	References 邬山 (talk) 17:22, 30 July 2017 (UTC)

I think it's good to have some division in an article. I'm not very good with naming sections... If you have other ideas, feel free to edit and I'll give it a look.FourLights (talk) 23:20, 30 July 2017 (UTC)

It appears to be translated as Core Socialist Values in the west. If you have sources using another translation, I would be interested in using them and considering an alternative translation.FourLights (talk) 23:15, 30 July 2017 (UTC)

Criticize Lin, Criticize Confucius
Hi. I appreciate your your work and research on that article: it definitely needs more reliable sources. I wrote most of the content of that article preceding your edit, and I want to work with you to blend the two sources we cited together a bit better, mostly through prose.

I would like to be able to write the citations for the sources that you cited in the article in MLA style: right now the citations are a bit hard to interpret. Can you tell me the full names of the authors, and the names of the books/journals/articles where the information is from? Did you find the books/articles online, or were you working with paper sources?Ferox Seneca (talk) 06:08, 5 February 2018 (UTC)

Unfortunately, I had other things going on at the time, and this article was not a main focus for me.FourLights (talk) 18:27, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

Legalism article: Terms like "shi" ("position") and indeed "fa" itself seem to fall into what modern Europeans regard as the marketplace of ideas, Holmes' idea but not his term
You seem to avoid the pitfalls of "original research" thus far (I'm almost done reading the article and took a small dip into the "talk") and there is no way to introduce my suggestion into the article, but let's say the "talk" section is the real scholarly work on Wikipedia. It's said a chimpanzee has 99% the genome of the Homo sapiens, which makes any two H. sapiens identical, so that when you see a whirlwind and say, "Gosh," and I hear your "Gosh" and you say you saw a whirlwind, I have a pretty good idea of what kind of whirlwind it was. So the practice of inactivity, for example, is the ruler watching the marketplace of ideas--a better word would be information--resolve itself so facts and names are understood--the two sectors of the marketplace: the whirlwinds and the "goshes"--. One cannot mourn that the market does not produce the insulated coffee cup one would prefer. So does legalism require absolutism? One scholar somewhere tonight tied legalism to totalitarianism. In my experience, legalism has meant the shoe-horning of non-legal concepts into legal forms, like, "I really ought to like this person," whom I abhor, as I find. In fact, I find that law has a very small province. STOP signs and the like. I have tonight ordered from Amazon, for delivery by the next millennium, a collection of articles on metaphysics in classical China, led by investigating one of your terms to a Google book excerpt where "shi", "position", is discussed. I thought immediately of Plato and Aristotle, the one and the many, indeed the excerpt contains a version of that, unity and diversity, with the supposed poles being that for Plato all exemplars only exist to the extent they partake of the Form while legitimate Aristotelianism holds that you only approach the form, the essence, after grappling with many candidate exemplars (illegitimate Aristotelianism, scholasticism, being again the "triumphalism" whereby you either encounter the essence shorn of its accidentals, the school solution, or you know nothing at all). In general, we know what to do without thinking about it. We put on our pants one leg at a time, unless we're sitting down, or perhaps have no pants, etc. If we think too much, we fall over. Likewise a collection of people must respect each other and leave each other alone if all are to thrive, but the wrecker must be confronted. A wrecker is defined as someone taking refuge in abstractions, legalism, and thus blinded going about smashing things. So your entire article is refreshing, a daily visit to xinhuanet.com being a visit to the Xi fan club and yet he seems to be doing quite well by himself and by China. The main complaint that would be laid against Western Asia--Europe--would be its failure to trust markets. Instead, there is an elite, its intrigues, its unifying denial of factuality and consequently its ready assertion of uniform solutions--six feet social distancing here in the US, like a feeble "Heil, Hitler" from some teenager or pensioner in 1945 Berlin rubble. So I offer a term: markets. It stands to reason that Chinese emperors and ministers never quite encountered that origin of all statecraft. I am still amazed that "economics" does not come from some word meaning, say, homeostasis, but rather "house". Clutter attracts clutter.Chrisrushlau (talk) 06:41, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

Hello. No, I do not consider ideas in Chinese Legalist philosophy, as utilized by modern person, to require absolutism. Rather, excessive and pre-market beauracracy may tend towards it. It was rule of law that allowed the trust upon which the market was based, and rule of law in Europe developed precisely in the period of feudalism and subsequent absolutism and developing bureaucracies. The degree to which the market requires a strong state depends on development. See the article I and another person wrote on neoauthoritarianism. Unfortuanately for China, it's state always had bias against the merchant class in its development, but in particular events like the Mongol conquest brought about periods of conservativism and ultimate backward as Europe moved forward. FourLights (talk) 05:03, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Legalism short references?
Much admiration and thanks for your work on Legalism (Chinese philosophy), which is now richly sourced and comprehensive. I saw the "oversourced" template, however, and will comment on the Talk Page.

But here I thought I would make a quick suggestion about short citations that will save you time in the long run and make the notes easier for readers, who don't have to wade through repeated whole references since the note is linked directly to the entry in the References section. The big advantage for the editor is that it produces correct form with no fuss. The Reference section also is more useful because readers can see the good stuff in one place. There is certainly no compulsion to use short forms, but it is widely used among experienced editors such as yourself. I admit that it took me some experimentation and some mistakes, but it becomes as easy as spelling.

There are several ways to cite described in WP:CITESHORT or the main article Help: Shortened Footnotes.

Cheers, ch (talk) 21:52, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

I will attempt to look at it soon. Other users have made their own opinions regarding it in the past, and that it how it arrived to its format at time of writing. FourLights (talk) 22:45, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
 * You do grreat work, but do look at the policy pages such as WP:MOS:LEADch (talk) 23:46, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

I improved the lede since the time of this discussion.FourLights (talk) 21:27, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

Your deleted edits
Hello, I was checking my deleted edits and found that you'd gotten deleted as the sole substantial author. As someone who likes preserving Wikipedia edits where possible and one of the people who made a minor edit to that page, I object in the absolute strongest terms to removing such edits from page histories, especially seeing as the page was later merged, so I've undeleted that page and its talk page. I've done the same thing at for similar reasons; while checking your deleted edits in the article namespace I didn't notice any other pages with many substantial edits. Also, completely blank talk pages are highly irregular here (and irregular talk pages have been subject to deletion in the past), so I reverted your blankings on the relevant talk pages. Graham87 (talk) 09:16, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

Hello. The first was a mess of overly ambitious initial content which, with a more sourced foundation, would instead become the Chinese Legalism page, which I am currently redoing. There is likely little of value in the page you have undeleted except as something I might review at some point to see what some of my old ideas were. Without some kind of scholarly basis, I cannot currently assist you with "political thought in ancient China", as it is a very broad idea, and my Legalism page is already a broad project, but one which is making progress and is completeable probably within a couple years. "The two handles" refers to the two handles of Han Fei, which I discuss in the Chinese Legalism page. It is unlikely at this point that it warrants a separate page.FourLights (talk) 10:00, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

Edit summaries
Please remember to use edit summaries when you make changes. If you don't, it can make keeping track of the changes made difficult. Retinalsummer (talk) 16:23, 1 December 2023 (UTC)


 * okFourLights (talk) 22:02, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

You've been mentioned on the village pump
... regarding your prolific editing pattern at Legalism (Chinese philosophy). See Village pump (miscellaneous). Graham87 (talk) 08:16, 27 January 2024 (UTC)

February 2024
Hello. I have noticed that you edit without using an edit summary. Please do your best to always fill in the summary field. This helps your fellow editors use their time more productively, rather than spending it unnecessarily scrutinizing and verifying your work. Even a short summary is better than no summary, and summaries are particularly important for large, complex, or potentially controversial edits. To help yourself remember, you may wish to check the "prompt me when entering a blank edit summary" box in your preferences. Thanks! &#126;~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 23:20, 19 February 2024 (UTC)
 * I'll enable the promp, the work was essentially tidying earlier information, talk to me know anything you might consider objectionable.FourLights (talk) 23:22, 19 February 2024 (UTC)

Sources in Legalism (Chinese philosophy)
Hello, ! I am Gilbert and I am contacting you about one of your recent sourcing on this page. I have gotten a notice that you gave a harv/sfn error when putting in "Leung (1989)". Did you mean to put 2019 or no? If so, please put the correct journal down in the Bibliography/Work cited part of the article. Thank you! Thecowboygilbert -  (talk) ♥  14:10, 29 February 2024 (UTC)


 * Nevermind, it looks like you fixed it! Thecowboygilbert  -  (talk) ♥  14:11, 29 February 2024 (UTC)
 * I think I fixed it for you, you had sfnm instead of sfn. Sfn is for a single person while sfnm supports multiple people with multiple books. So if you have back-to-back sources than you can use sfnm to put them in one single source using "sfnm|1a1=foo|1a2=bar|1y=2001|1p=200|2a1=handsome|2a2=man|2y=2007|2p=321|3a1=lincoln|3a2=washington|3a3=jackson|3y=1778|3p=3" I usually don't use it but it is a template!  Thecowboygilbert  -  (talk) ♥  14:46, 4 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Thank you, I understand that at this point, though mistakes are bound to happen anyway. Although it is only in the beginnings of construction, I hope you'll consider reading the page to provide feedback. ThanksFourLights (talk) 16:13, 4 March 2024 (UTC)
 * I usually don't provide prose feedback. I usually help fix citations, references, and do MOS fixes. Thecowboygilbert  -  (talk) ♥  16:24, 4 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Well, that's good enough feedback already, I'll look into improving prose.FourLights (talk) 16:29, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

Your attitude at Legalism
I see that your solution to resolving the tags was to simply delete them, ignore what they were getting at, and continue with your incromprehensible verbosity. I could go through the entire article again and tag it for the exact same things, but what would be the point? It is now clear to me that you do not care about improving the article; please do not expect further comments from me. &#126;~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 10:19, 4 March 2024 (UTC)


 * hello, if you could provide prioritized, focused comments rather than tags, that would be more helpful. The tags were useful for brainstorming, but it's not like it's not under reorganizational construction. Not everything can be accomplished at the same time anyway, it takes work, and work has to be either prioritized or scrapped and re-worked. In general putting something together can involve a lot of rework and filtering, but your form of "feedback" leads more to things just being scrapped than it does to them being reorganized, expanded, improved.


 * If you aren't simply oppositional I am somewhat baffled that you would take tagging as the most constructive form of feedback. At a more basic level, verbal feedback could potentially be more useful than tags, but obviously, this kind of feedback is not constructive. We have had positive, constructive conversation, but this is generally the kind of feedback you provide. It would be more accurate that you have only provided limited commentary, mostly you just come in and Mark things up, and maybe it helps me rethink how I am doing things - but I am still the one thinking about it since you aren't verbally communicating.


 * I will reorganize anyway though, and I do still intend to list individual figures with brief descriptions as we discussed. But putting together such summaries will be an expansive work I have not done before.FourLights (talk) 14:41, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

April 2024
Can you explain why you reverted this edit, made by a sock and removed per WP:BANREVERT? While editors can choose to reinstate sock edits in mainspace, it's not ideal to reinstate talkpage comments made by a user evading their block, especially if there have been no responses to it. Grandpallama (talk) 23:15, 22 April 2024 (UTC)


 * there is a lot of vandalism and no explanation was provided for the removal of the inquiry. Inquiries are not generally removed from talk pages. I have no knowledge of socks, and his question seemed relevant. You have provided comment, and although I do not understand the need to remove the valid inquiry, I will not interfere. FourLights (talk) 02:33, 23 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Ah, okay, I understand. I actually did provide an explanation in my edit summary, but you may not be familiar with the lingo; "rv sock" is generally understood to mean "revert sock". You can see the details here, if you're curious. Although we don't always remove sock contributions, discussion contributions often get removed (or a strikethrough, if someone had already responded), especially if it's a sock with a history of POV-pushing. Grandpallama (talk) 03:59, 23 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Thank you for the Lingo provision.FourLights (talk) 04:20, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

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