The primary-source rule
Wherever an entry quotes a classical source — the Huangdi Neijing, the Shanghan Lun, the Shennong Bencao Jing, the Pi Wei Lun, the Wenbing Tiao Bian, the Taiping Huimin Heji Jufang, or any other — the quotation must be the verbatim received text. Not a paraphrase. Not a summary. Not a modern rewrite. Each citation must include the chapter, section, or line number so that any reader can independently verify it.
This rule is non-negotiable. It is the single largest difference between Bencao Dian and a generic Chinese-medicine website. We give you a citation you can check; we do not give you "tradition holds…" or "it is said…" hand-waving. In an era when large language models can generate plausible-looking text in seconds, verbatim primary sources are the only ground a responsible Chinese-medicine reference can stand on.
Verification process
Every entry passes through three stages:
- Draft — written under a strict editorial rubric requiring an original-source citation for every claim and forbidding fabrication. Anything that cannot be verified against a primary source is left blank rather than guessed.
- Editor review — the project maintainer spot-checks page citations, runs the schema validator and terminology linter, and either merges the entry as "Editor-reviewed" or sends it back for revision.
- Community errata — via the public GitHub repository, corrections from any reader are accepted with a source citation; accepted errata transition the entry to "Community-corrected".
Practitioner review by named licensed acupuncturists or Dipl.OM holders is the aspirational next stage but is not yet in place. Entries marked "Practitioner-reviewed" will appear only when that program launches.
The permalink commitment
Once published, an entry's URL never changes. This is the single most basic precondition for Bencao Dian to function as a citable reference.
Concretely: paths take the form /en/herbs/gan-cao or /zh/formulas/si-jun-zi-tang, and the slug (the gan-cao or si-jun-zi-tang portion) is fixed once an entry is published. Entries may be deprecated or redirected, but they are never quietly moved to a new URL. Academic papers, clinical notes, teaching materials, other websites, and citations from large language models can all rely on these URLs still pointing to the same content a decade from now.
For citation templates, see How to Cite.
Revisions and errata
Content corrections are recorded in two forms:
- Silent fixes — typos, punctuation, obvious spelling errors may be corrected without public notice.
- Logged errata — any change touching the substance of an entry (dosages, herb combinations, contraindications, the wording of a classical citation, terminological choices) must be recorded in the public errata log in the format entry / old text / new text / source / date.
The purpose of the errata log is to allow any reader to trace the evolution of any published statement. This is the basic responsibility of any reference work that aspires to be cited.
What the badge means
Each entry displays a colored badge indicating its current editorial state:
- Draft: a working copy that has not yet cleared editorial review. Drafts stay inside the repository and are not published to the live site.
- Editor-reviewed: the editor has checked the entry against its original sources and run the schema validator before merging it under the Bencaodian Editorial byline. The most common state on the site.
- Community-corrected: at least one reader-submitted correction has been accepted into this entry.
- Practitioner-reviewed: reviewed by a named licensed practitioner whose credentials appear in the citation block. Aspirational state — not yet in active use.
- Historical reference: classical-source passages, included as scholarly reference with no clinical recommendation implied.