Phra Bang (Wikipedia)

Phra Bang, the Wikipedia article on the palladium of Laos, is a community edited encyclopedic account of the standing gold alloy Buddha image, about eighty three centimeters tall, its legendary Sinhalese origin set against a more probable Khmer date, and its documented gift to King Fa Ngum in 1359, from which the city of Luang Prabang, place of the Phra Bang, takes its name. Its strength is that a well maintained Wikipedia article on a named, documented object collects citations from multiple outside sources into one accessible summary, useful for the kind of stable factual detail, dimensions, naming, chronology, that changes little between editors. Its limit is that Wikipedia is a continuously and anonymously editable reference rather than a peer reviewed publication, so it should be treated as a convenient index into the underlying scholarship rather than as the final authority on a contested point, and any claim about the image's actual date or origin needs the art historical sources the article itself is built from.