Mib came online this morning (Singapore Time) and told me something shocking. He told me his name appeared in Wikipedia! Well, it is nothing much actually, so my response is like, “Yea, so?” And so, he replied with his usual line, “For fun, laughter and joy”. Joy, yeah right. I ‘wikied’ his name and the results revealed no exact match – with one article about the surname, ‘Ye’. Mib, it really is nothing.
So I typed on MSN Messenger, ‘Oei, where got your name?’, and his reply was this URL. Click it and you know it is a dumb article talking a whole load of crap that is inaccurate and is extremely Japanese. And guess what Mib told me? He said he wrote some parts of the article. Okay, I believe him – because there were so many mistakes. To correct some of them: The ‘red words’ seal is not termed as ‘Hong Zi’, but ‘Zhu Wen’ (朱文) while the ‘white words’ seal is not termed as ‘Bai Zi but ‘Bai Wen’ (白文).
And the main mistake, a chop/seal/stamp in Chinese is known as ‘zhang’ (章), rather than ‘yin’ (印), because ‘印’ is referring to the image created by the seal and not the seal itself. Of course, with modernisation, and a tinge of Singaporean-ness, things just mix and merge, or become inter-changeable. Worst, he mistook ‘yin-ni’ (印泥) as the name of the red paste which is used for the ‘ink’. ‘印泥’ literally means ‘soil for forming seal image’. There is no exact phrase that mean the paste but since it is made from ‘zhu-sha’ (朱砂), people used ‘朱砂’ to refer to this red ‘ink’. To prevent further confusion, let me clarify that people nowadays uses a red artificial chemical paste for this purpose and it is usually sold with the label, ‘印泥’ – hence, Mib created this serious confusion.
Please note that all these mistakes were present at the time when Mib was writing the article (and when it is first published on Wikipedia). You may have noticed that some of the mistakes are now cleaned up – since I informed Mib about most of the mistakes.
With regards to personal ‘chops’, Mib, once again, commited a grave error despite confirming some factual details with me this morning. Apparently, he didn’t doubt his memory as much as he should have. Well, it is not exactly an error, he simply missed out one important section in this article, which I may eventually decide to file myself. Anyway, he didn’t talk about how the ‘chops’ are used in the Chinese Calligraphy or Painting works. This is extremely grave because after reading the part about personal ‘chops’, a ‘NOOB’ would have no idea why people want a personal piece of stone for themselves.
In conclusion, Mib is never lucky with Wiki because he’s articles always fail terribly (get voted out by viewers), or provide falsified information that might not be done on purpose. We got to feel sorry for Mib, and at the same time, support him by finding more errors in his articles so that he can perfect the information and reduce the number of misled persons. I thank all of your support on behalf of Mib.