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Another template that might tread on toes style-guide-wise, but I think is probably really worthwhile in some form? I wrote {{
kxr}}
this morning. I want to tweak it a bit more, but it only works by number right now, because by label will take a bit longer.
{{
kxr|120}}
→ ⽷ 'SILK'
{{
kxr|54|l=yes}}
→ ⼵ '
LONG STRIDE'
It uses small caps and boldface, but I really do think it's fine here, to distinguish from both regular texts and regular glosses. It uses the Unicode gloss for each Kangxi radical, but I also want to add positioned variants like ⺼, 爫, and 歺, etc. etc. But! I wanted to make sure people would find this useful before I put another few hours into it, and moreover don't actively hate it! Remsense 聊 17:00, 11 October 2023 (UTC)
{{
lang|zh}}
(or equivalent bare HTML markup, like <span language="zh">...</span>
), followed by the gloss in 'single quotes': ⼵ 'long stride'. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 17:46, 11 October 2023 (UTC)
{{
unichar}}
→ U+2F35 ⼵ KANGXI RADICAL LONG STRIDE. It's almost a less-glossed gloss? Since the semantic meanings of the radicals are so broad and reified, it feels appropriate to potentially mark them up differently/make them appear as part of a set. But maybe I'm overfixated on the distinction?{{
Unichar}}
uses that format because it is conventional (not just within Wikipedia) to render the official names of Unicode code points that way. This is not true of glosses of Chinese radicals. It's kind of like deciding to render all names of video game characters in italics because you saw that italics were used for book titles. There's no connection between the subjects. Re: Und-Hani – sure, that makes sense. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 18:57, 11 October 2023 (UTC)
References
Remsense 留 22:02, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
Thank you @ Folly Mox for being bold with that, I was thinking of replacing the passage as such, but I didn't want to just in case I was wrong about it being unideal somehow, thank you. :)
|last=(transliterated surname)
|first=(transliterated given name) + (full native name)
. I view it as incorrect, and had no idea it was being recommended! Back when the |script-parameter=
series of parameters was first added, I tried using |script-author=
to hold native names, but it has never existed.
Folly Mox (
talk) 21:07, 25 November 2023 (UTC)
|first=
is incorrect, but using |author=
is worse: both of them mess up the metadata, but the second also messes up the refname used by {{
harv}}
, {{
sfn}}
and friends. Yes, that can be patched up with an explicit |ref=
and {{
harvid}}
, but the proper solution is to push for |script-author=
, |script-editor=
, etc in the citation templates.|ref=
to make shortened footnotes work as expected. The comma form looks super wrong to me, but of course I acknowledge it is standard in many scientific publications. I'm not really excited about recommending any incorrect methods. Could we have both or neither?
Folly Mox (
talk) 22:13, 25 November 2023 (UTC)
|firstn=
or |authorn=
is actually wrongheaded. The proper way to do this is clearly with the |authorn-mask=
and should be the only method recommended here. But I also agree that "Family, Given" is not "wrong" for Asian names in bibliographies in English (it's entirely standard in many citation formats). All that said, I'm not as keen on |script-authorn=
, etc., as Kanguole is, because the citation templates are already complicated, and |authorn-mask=
will generally do what we need to do. Maybe there is a need for something like |last1=李
|first1=四
|script-author1=zh
when we have no Latin-script names to use at all, but this is uncommon, and the sky has not fallen without it. It's not really "broken", just not as maximally informative metadata as it would be with such a parameter. But doing |last1=Li
|first1=Si (李四)
or worse yet |author=Li Si (李四)
actually is broken. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 08:16, 26 November 2023 (UTC)
|script-author=
, see
Help talk:Citation Style 1/Archive 92#Proposed script-author parameter.
Folly Mox (
talk) 14:17, 27 November 2023 (UTC)
|author-name=
to change the name formatting.
Kanguole 18:51, 27 November 2023 (UTC)
last, first
and not all articles do either. I'm fine with it as an option, but I don't want all the advice anywhere in the "Citations" section to prefer last, first
without ever mentioning last first
.
Folly Mox (
talk) 21:41, 27 November 2023 (UTC)|author-mask=
to display East Asian names without the comma?
Folly Mox (
talk) 23:13, 28 November 2023 (UTC)
|author-mask=
either, and said as much at
Help talk:Citation Style 1/Archive 92#Proposed script-author parameter (thank you for proposing that,
Kanguole; I'm not sure my support did it justice, and the conversation is still there if you had any more points to add).I suppose the problem we have is that using |author-mask=
is best practice currently, according to the people who maintain the citation templates. I'm not really sure we have the option not to cover best practice at the MOS. I think there's a larger question here, about what level of consensus certain procedures and best practices should be subject to. For the most part, the people who do the actual work writing and maintaining the citation template code have outsized influence on best citation practices. I suspect, for example, that the vast majority of the community doesn't care at all about producing clean metadata for downstream reusers, but it's a priority for the people who write the code, so best practice reflects that priority.Maybe instead of trying to change that culture though, a technical solution would be easier. If we had a template like {{
zh-name}}, that accepted parameters for a Chinese name and spit out citation template parameters, it could wrap the tedious bits and let us get on with whatever we're doing, and could be updated whenever best practice changes. I don't remember enough programming to know if I could implement that or not, but it could probably be done (details, of course, may contain devils).
Folly Mox (
talk) 00:46, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
|vauthors=
being common in particular subjects, virtually never seen in others, and universal in none). Most of them are nationally defined anyway (e.g.
APA style and
AMA style and
ACS style are set by American organizations, and
MHRA style by a British one) and are nowhere near universal across journals and such within that topic area, just common in ones published in or strongly influenced by a particular country's dominant professional body in that field. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 06:02, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
|author-mask=
at all, and the comma is a separate objection.It's true that last, first
is not "wrong", and even in the now-removed Paragraph on commas I added, I called that out explicitly. I've even seen it in specialist works, although rarely.It does – to me – look wrong. The comma tells my brain I should be thinking of the name in the opposite order, which is false. I've never seen a bibliography in a humanities topic work written or edited by a person with a Chinese name where authors with East Asian names are credited in last, first
format. This might be sampling error, or it could be that I'm not the only person who thinks it looks wrong.I don't care about consistency across articles (within articles is desirable) and I'm not tryna backdoor standardise last first
as the only recommended practice. We currently recommend last, first
in three of four examples, and I do think that here at the MOS:CHINA page, some guidance should be provided as to how editors can display the names of Chinese authors in the usual way.
Folly Mox (
talk) 05:41, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
last first
, while rendering the names of people from "Given Surname" cultures as last, first
, as a bibliographical inconsistency in violation of CITEVAR.I'd oppose standardising last first
almost as strongly as I'd oppose standardising last, first
. I don't want a standard. I want a valid alternative to be presented as such.
Folly Mox (
talk) 12:13, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
|authorn-mask=
. But recommending it as standard practice needs a broader discussion that four people on a talk page no one pays any attention to. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 10:01, 1 December 2023 (UTC)|archive-date=
+ |archive-url=
, etc., but we have those all over the place. There's also probably not a citation style guide that recommends roughly Chicago style bibliographical citations combined with roughly Harvard style author-date footnotes. That's also what we have, because the coders of the shortened footnotes templates went with author-date as their default instead of author-title.
SMcCandlish, I know you're kinda like the MOS ambassador and probably have way more familiarity with it and institutional memory about it than almost anyone else, but I'm finding it a little incongruous for you to be making a
WP:CONLEVEL argument based on the essay
Wikipedia:Specialized-style fallacy, which you created and
still have 80% authorship of over a decade later.
Folly Mox (
talk) 12:24, 1 December 2023 (UTC)
{{
Rp}}
template I made back when, to quickly solve a real need at one article; it has since become common, but has been suprassed several years ago by CS1's |ref=
, yet not systematically replaced despite being obsolete.) I am not making a CONLEVEL argument based on an essay. There is no such thing, really. I'm making a CONLEVEL argument based on CONLEVEL. I'm also, severably, referring to an essay which has been around for a long time and had considerable influence, because the reasoning in it is sound. It's not a rule, but it is a rationale. The nature of a WP essay is not that it's "cited" or "relied on", it's referred to as a spot at which a repeatedly needed argument has been written down once so it need not be written again and again every time it is needed. (There are handful of weird exceptions that are cited and relied on by the community as if guidelines or even policies, but which never had the {{Essay}}
or variant tag changed for some reason. The only examples I can think of are
WP:BRD,
WP:AADD,
WP:ROPE,
WP:DUCK,
WP:NOTHERE,
WP:PURPOSE,
WP:ENC, and the weird case of
WP:5P which isn't tagged as anything.) Trying to dismiss anything on a "because you created it" argument is workable (see 1st section at
WP:FOTROP; nominally about P&G material, it obviously also applies to essays or anything else). I kind of feel like you're reaching to find every possible point you can imagine to argue with me about, instead of trying to find codified and systematic evidence (i.e. a documented citation style) that supports the name formatting you like despite its troublesome inconsistency (not just random writers in random publications doing what you like). In the end, it is possible a consensus could come around to doing it your way without that evidence, but it would go a long way to convincing people. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 14:05, 1 December 2023 (UTC)References
Remsense 留 23:25, 11 December 2023 (UTC)
Starting a fresh heading because
the previous discussion is a bit tangled now. @
SMcCandlish has reasonably requested an example of the style Surname Given, with no comma, being recommended by a published style guide.
I looked at the 9th edition of the MLA Handbook from 2021, and the relevant section says:
If we do recommend a single convention, I would be okay with adopting this one point-for-point.
References
|author-mask=
parameter (or misusing |author=
as if the writer were mononymic). Anyway, it's probably at least a minor "win" for one side of this "What to do with such names?" question that one style guide so far is at least some of the time okay without the comma. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 02:43, 13 December 2023 (UTC)It's come to my attention recently that
Am I alright to add as such to this article? It is conspicuously absent.
What we have now (due to someone reverting to it): Where "China" or the "People's Republic of China" is used, it should not be changed arbitrarily. In many contexts, the terms are interchangeable: if China and People's Republic of China both seem appropriate, editors should use their own discretion.
What we should have again: If "China" or the "People's Republic of China" is used consistently in an article, it should not be arbitrarily changed. In many contexts, the terms are interchangeable: if China and People's Republic of China both seem appropriate, editors should use their own discretion.
Or some blended version that still includes "used consistently in an article".
Someone absolutely should "arbitrarily" change a stray occurrence of one match the otherwise consistent usage of the other in the same article. On no style matter should we be veering back and forth confusingly, especially when it comes to names that may mean something different to different people. If you're going to use the short "China", then use it consistently and explain it at first occurrence (with a link or more textually) as referring to the PRC. If you're going to use the long version, then stick with it and use "PRC" for short as seems warranted. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 03:47, 19 December 2023 (UTC)
Just today alone I see a truly excessive amount of "rehape this in my own person idiom" editing, without any discussion for any of it. This is not how guideline changes are made, it tends to lead to mass-reverts and other disputation, and it casts doubt in community minds whether this is really a guideline or something that needs to be moved to WP:WikiProject China/Style advice and tagged as an essay. Doing typographic and code cleanup is one thing (maybe along with some objective structure and flow improvements), but it's quite another to be making so many actually substantive changes without any consensus discussion in support of them. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 03:50, 19 December 2023 (UTC)
I'm not sure whether my feeling is very rigorous, but it does seem there are instances where both simplified and traditional characters are supplied where the forms are similar enough that it does little but take up extra space. I do not know exactly how universal the knowledge of basic forms of both sets is, but it seems like it could be worthwhile to investigate a nuance in style policy here. For example, it seems potentially very wasteful when both forms of a word are given, but the only graphical distinction is the systematic simplification of a radical. Remsense 留 08:02, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
Hi! A user argued in WP:PINYIN for usage of pinyin. This makes sense with post-1949 articles about Mainland China and/or general about individuals loyal to the CCP. However, I think both Pinyin and old postal system names/other romanizations of cities should be used in late Qing Dynasty and Republican Era-related articles, as those spellings were used at the time. Also, IMO individuals who died in the Republican Era and/or were loyal to the KMT should likely use the non-standard romanizations. WhisperToMe ( talk) 03:31, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
{{
Infobox Chinese}}
exists.
What does everyone think of this as a reworking of the "Romanisation" section? Hopefully there's nothing controversial here. My main goal was to add clarifying details and improve the overall flow. I also replaced guidance that already exists more extensively at WP:NCZH with references to that page, to minimize duplication.
===Romanisation===
There are a number of systems used to romanise Chinese characters. English Wikipedia uses Hanyu Pinyin, with some minor exceptions outlined below. When using pinyin:
If a source uses a non-pinyin or non-standard spelling, it should be converted into pinyin. Consider also providing the source's spelling to ease verification by other users.
Even where the title of an article uses a non-pinyin romanisation, romanisations of other Chinese words within the article should still be in pinyin. For example, Tsingtao Brewery is a trademark which uses a non-pinyin romanisation, but an article talking about Tsingtao Brewery should still use the pinyin spelling when talking about Qingdao city:
Correct: Tsingtao Brewery Co., Ltd. is located in Qingdao city, Shandong.
Incorrect: Tsingtao Brewery Co., Ltd. is located in Tsingtao city, Shan-tung. or Tsingtao Brewery Co., Ltd. is located in Tsingtao city, Shandong.
====When to use romanisations other than pinyin====
Articles should use a non-pinyin spelling of a term if that spelling is used by the clear majority of modern, reliable, secondary sources (see WP:NC-ZH for examples). If the term does not have its own article, the pinyin romanisation should be given in a parenthetical. For example,
The Hung Ga style Ng Ying Hung Kuen ( Chinese: 五形洪拳; pinyin: Wǔxíng Hóngquán) traces its ancestry to Ng Mui.
Relatedly, note that systems of Chinese language romanization in Taiwan (the Republic of China) are far less standardized than in mainland China. Hanyu Pinyin has been the official standard since 2009, but systems such Wade–Giles, Gwoyeu Romatzyh, Tongyong Pinyin, and Chinese postal romanization remain in use for both personal and place names. In Taiwan, place names derived from Hanyu Pinyin rarely use the syllable-dividing apostrophe. For example, write Daan District, Taipei City, not Da'an District, Taipei City. SilverStar54 ( talk) 19:59, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
{{
uuline}}
is likely the best technique we have when we would like to emphasize a character:This should be a logical last resort, though.Posthumous name
Emperor Qintian Lüdao Yingyi Shengshen Xuanwen Guangwu Hongren Daxiao Su
欽天履道英毅聖神宣文廣武洪仁大孝肅皇帝
Remsense 诉 04:21, 4 March 2024 (UTC)
During the GAN for Chinese characters, @ Kusma pointed out sections that really should include the characters and romanization for certain terms, even though they're linked—e.g. regular script in the the § History section. I agree: perhaps some class of exception to this guideline should be mentioned, while always being mindful of WP:CREEP. I'm not sure exactly what that class should be—perhaps "within a broad article, while summary style–ing what could be considered its subarticles", or "when omission would be conspicuous or confusing in light of other terms that are linked within an article" Remsense 诉 02:39, 13 April 2024 (UTC)
This is the
talk page for discussing
Manual of Style/China- and Chinese-related articles and anything related to its purposes and tasks. |
|
This project page does not require a rating on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 |
|
This page has archives. Sections older than 180 days may be automatically archived by Lowercase sigmabot III when more than 4 sections are present. |
Another template that might tread on toes style-guide-wise, but I think is probably really worthwhile in some form? I wrote {{
kxr}}
this morning. I want to tweak it a bit more, but it only works by number right now, because by label will take a bit longer.
{{
kxr|120}}
→ ⽷ 'SILK'
{{
kxr|54|l=yes}}
→ ⼵ '
LONG STRIDE'
It uses small caps and boldface, but I really do think it's fine here, to distinguish from both regular texts and regular glosses. It uses the Unicode gloss for each Kangxi radical, but I also want to add positioned variants like ⺼, 爫, and 歺, etc. etc. But! I wanted to make sure people would find this useful before I put another few hours into it, and moreover don't actively hate it! Remsense 聊 17:00, 11 October 2023 (UTC)
{{
lang|zh}}
(or equivalent bare HTML markup, like <span language="zh">...</span>
), followed by the gloss in 'single quotes': ⼵ 'long stride'. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 17:46, 11 October 2023 (UTC)
{{
unichar}}
→ U+2F35 ⼵ KANGXI RADICAL LONG STRIDE. It's almost a less-glossed gloss? Since the semantic meanings of the radicals are so broad and reified, it feels appropriate to potentially mark them up differently/make them appear as part of a set. But maybe I'm overfixated on the distinction?{{
Unichar}}
uses that format because it is conventional (not just within Wikipedia) to render the official names of Unicode code points that way. This is not true of glosses of Chinese radicals. It's kind of like deciding to render all names of video game characters in italics because you saw that italics were used for book titles. There's no connection between the subjects. Re: Und-Hani – sure, that makes sense. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 18:57, 11 October 2023 (UTC)
References
Remsense 留 22:02, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
Thank you @ Folly Mox for being bold with that, I was thinking of replacing the passage as such, but I didn't want to just in case I was wrong about it being unideal somehow, thank you. :)
|last=(transliterated surname)
|first=(transliterated given name) + (full native name)
. I view it as incorrect, and had no idea it was being recommended! Back when the |script-parameter=
series of parameters was first added, I tried using |script-author=
to hold native names, but it has never existed.
Folly Mox (
talk) 21:07, 25 November 2023 (UTC)
|first=
is incorrect, but using |author=
is worse: both of them mess up the metadata, but the second also messes up the refname used by {{
harv}}
, {{
sfn}}
and friends. Yes, that can be patched up with an explicit |ref=
and {{
harvid}}
, but the proper solution is to push for |script-author=
, |script-editor=
, etc in the citation templates.|ref=
to make shortened footnotes work as expected. The comma form looks super wrong to me, but of course I acknowledge it is standard in many scientific publications. I'm not really excited about recommending any incorrect methods. Could we have both or neither?
Folly Mox (
talk) 22:13, 25 November 2023 (UTC)
|firstn=
or |authorn=
is actually wrongheaded. The proper way to do this is clearly with the |authorn-mask=
and should be the only method recommended here. But I also agree that "Family, Given" is not "wrong" for Asian names in bibliographies in English (it's entirely standard in many citation formats). All that said, I'm not as keen on |script-authorn=
, etc., as Kanguole is, because the citation templates are already complicated, and |authorn-mask=
will generally do what we need to do. Maybe there is a need for something like |last1=李
|first1=四
|script-author1=zh
when we have no Latin-script names to use at all, but this is uncommon, and the sky has not fallen without it. It's not really "broken", just not as maximally informative metadata as it would be with such a parameter. But doing |last1=Li
|first1=Si (李四)
or worse yet |author=Li Si (李四)
actually is broken. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 08:16, 26 November 2023 (UTC)
|script-author=
, see
Help talk:Citation Style 1/Archive 92#Proposed script-author parameter.
Folly Mox (
talk) 14:17, 27 November 2023 (UTC)
|author-name=
to change the name formatting.
Kanguole 18:51, 27 November 2023 (UTC)
last, first
and not all articles do either. I'm fine with it as an option, but I don't want all the advice anywhere in the "Citations" section to prefer last, first
without ever mentioning last first
.
Folly Mox (
talk) 21:41, 27 November 2023 (UTC)|author-mask=
to display East Asian names without the comma?
Folly Mox (
talk) 23:13, 28 November 2023 (UTC)
|author-mask=
either, and said as much at
Help talk:Citation Style 1/Archive 92#Proposed script-author parameter (thank you for proposing that,
Kanguole; I'm not sure my support did it justice, and the conversation is still there if you had any more points to add).I suppose the problem we have is that using |author-mask=
is best practice currently, according to the people who maintain the citation templates. I'm not really sure we have the option not to cover best practice at the MOS. I think there's a larger question here, about what level of consensus certain procedures and best practices should be subject to. For the most part, the people who do the actual work writing and maintaining the citation template code have outsized influence on best citation practices. I suspect, for example, that the vast majority of the community doesn't care at all about producing clean metadata for downstream reusers, but it's a priority for the people who write the code, so best practice reflects that priority.Maybe instead of trying to change that culture though, a technical solution would be easier. If we had a template like {{
zh-name}}, that accepted parameters for a Chinese name and spit out citation template parameters, it could wrap the tedious bits and let us get on with whatever we're doing, and could be updated whenever best practice changes. I don't remember enough programming to know if I could implement that or not, but it could probably be done (details, of course, may contain devils).
Folly Mox (
talk) 00:46, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
|vauthors=
being common in particular subjects, virtually never seen in others, and universal in none). Most of them are nationally defined anyway (e.g.
APA style and
AMA style and
ACS style are set by American organizations, and
MHRA style by a British one) and are nowhere near universal across journals and such within that topic area, just common in ones published in or strongly influenced by a particular country's dominant professional body in that field. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 06:02, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
|author-mask=
at all, and the comma is a separate objection.It's true that last, first
is not "wrong", and even in the now-removed Paragraph on commas I added, I called that out explicitly. I've even seen it in specialist works, although rarely.It does – to me – look wrong. The comma tells my brain I should be thinking of the name in the opposite order, which is false. I've never seen a bibliography in a humanities topic work written or edited by a person with a Chinese name where authors with East Asian names are credited in last, first
format. This might be sampling error, or it could be that I'm not the only person who thinks it looks wrong.I don't care about consistency across articles (within articles is desirable) and I'm not tryna backdoor standardise last first
as the only recommended practice. We currently recommend last, first
in three of four examples, and I do think that here at the MOS:CHINA page, some guidance should be provided as to how editors can display the names of Chinese authors in the usual way.
Folly Mox (
talk) 05:41, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
last first
, while rendering the names of people from "Given Surname" cultures as last, first
, as a bibliographical inconsistency in violation of CITEVAR.I'd oppose standardising last first
almost as strongly as I'd oppose standardising last, first
. I don't want a standard. I want a valid alternative to be presented as such.
Folly Mox (
talk) 12:13, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
|authorn-mask=
. But recommending it as standard practice needs a broader discussion that four people on a talk page no one pays any attention to. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 10:01, 1 December 2023 (UTC)|archive-date=
+ |archive-url=
, etc., but we have those all over the place. There's also probably not a citation style guide that recommends roughly Chicago style bibliographical citations combined with roughly Harvard style author-date footnotes. That's also what we have, because the coders of the shortened footnotes templates went with author-date as their default instead of author-title.
SMcCandlish, I know you're kinda like the MOS ambassador and probably have way more familiarity with it and institutional memory about it than almost anyone else, but I'm finding it a little incongruous for you to be making a
WP:CONLEVEL argument based on the essay
Wikipedia:Specialized-style fallacy, which you created and
still have 80% authorship of over a decade later.
Folly Mox (
talk) 12:24, 1 December 2023 (UTC)
{{
Rp}}
template I made back when, to quickly solve a real need at one article; it has since become common, but has been suprassed several years ago by CS1's |ref=
, yet not systematically replaced despite being obsolete.) I am not making a CONLEVEL argument based on an essay. There is no such thing, really. I'm making a CONLEVEL argument based on CONLEVEL. I'm also, severably, referring to an essay which has been around for a long time and had considerable influence, because the reasoning in it is sound. It's not a rule, but it is a rationale. The nature of a WP essay is not that it's "cited" or "relied on", it's referred to as a spot at which a repeatedly needed argument has been written down once so it need not be written again and again every time it is needed. (There are handful of weird exceptions that are cited and relied on by the community as if guidelines or even policies, but which never had the {{Essay}}
or variant tag changed for some reason. The only examples I can think of are
WP:BRD,
WP:AADD,
WP:ROPE,
WP:DUCK,
WP:NOTHERE,
WP:PURPOSE,
WP:ENC, and the weird case of
WP:5P which isn't tagged as anything.) Trying to dismiss anything on a "because you created it" argument is workable (see 1st section at
WP:FOTROP; nominally about P&G material, it obviously also applies to essays or anything else). I kind of feel like you're reaching to find every possible point you can imagine to argue with me about, instead of trying to find codified and systematic evidence (i.e. a documented citation style) that supports the name formatting you like despite its troublesome inconsistency (not just random writers in random publications doing what you like). In the end, it is possible a consensus could come around to doing it your way without that evidence, but it would go a long way to convincing people. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 14:05, 1 December 2023 (UTC)References
Remsense 留 23:25, 11 December 2023 (UTC)
Starting a fresh heading because
the previous discussion is a bit tangled now. @
SMcCandlish has reasonably requested an example of the style Surname Given, with no comma, being recommended by a published style guide.
I looked at the 9th edition of the MLA Handbook from 2021, and the relevant section says:
If we do recommend a single convention, I would be okay with adopting this one point-for-point.
References
|author-mask=
parameter (or misusing |author=
as if the writer were mononymic). Anyway, it's probably at least a minor "win" for one side of this "What to do with such names?" question that one style guide so far is at least some of the time okay without the comma. —
SMcCandlish
☏
¢ 😼 02:43, 13 December 2023 (UTC)It's come to my attention recently that
Am I alright to add as such to this article? It is conspicuously absent.
What we have now (due to someone reverting to it): Where "China" or the "People's Republic of China" is used, it should not be changed arbitrarily. In many contexts, the terms are interchangeable: if China and People's Republic of China both seem appropriate, editors should use their own discretion.
What we should have again: If "China" or the "People's Republic of China" is used consistently in an article, it should not be arbitrarily changed. In many contexts, the terms are interchangeable: if China and People's Republic of China both seem appropriate, editors should use their own discretion.
Or some blended version that still includes "used consistently in an article".
Someone absolutely should "arbitrarily" change a stray occurrence of one match the otherwise consistent usage of the other in the same article. On no style matter should we be veering back and forth confusingly, especially when it comes to names that may mean something different to different people. If you're going to use the short "China", then use it consistently and explain it at first occurrence (with a link or more textually) as referring to the PRC. If you're going to use the long version, then stick with it and use "PRC" for short as seems warranted. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 03:47, 19 December 2023 (UTC)
Just today alone I see a truly excessive amount of "rehape this in my own person idiom" editing, without any discussion for any of it. This is not how guideline changes are made, it tends to lead to mass-reverts and other disputation, and it casts doubt in community minds whether this is really a guideline or something that needs to be moved to WP:WikiProject China/Style advice and tagged as an essay. Doing typographic and code cleanup is one thing (maybe along with some objective structure and flow improvements), but it's quite another to be making so many actually substantive changes without any consensus discussion in support of them. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 03:50, 19 December 2023 (UTC)
I'm not sure whether my feeling is very rigorous, but it does seem there are instances where both simplified and traditional characters are supplied where the forms are similar enough that it does little but take up extra space. I do not know exactly how universal the knowledge of basic forms of both sets is, but it seems like it could be worthwhile to investigate a nuance in style policy here. For example, it seems potentially very wasteful when both forms of a word are given, but the only graphical distinction is the systematic simplification of a radical. Remsense 留 08:02, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
Hi! A user argued in WP:PINYIN for usage of pinyin. This makes sense with post-1949 articles about Mainland China and/or general about individuals loyal to the CCP. However, I think both Pinyin and old postal system names/other romanizations of cities should be used in late Qing Dynasty and Republican Era-related articles, as those spellings were used at the time. Also, IMO individuals who died in the Republican Era and/or were loyal to the KMT should likely use the non-standard romanizations. WhisperToMe ( talk) 03:31, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
{{
Infobox Chinese}}
exists.
What does everyone think of this as a reworking of the "Romanisation" section? Hopefully there's nothing controversial here. My main goal was to add clarifying details and improve the overall flow. I also replaced guidance that already exists more extensively at WP:NCZH with references to that page, to minimize duplication.
===Romanisation===
There are a number of systems used to romanise Chinese characters. English Wikipedia uses Hanyu Pinyin, with some minor exceptions outlined below. When using pinyin:
If a source uses a non-pinyin or non-standard spelling, it should be converted into pinyin. Consider also providing the source's spelling to ease verification by other users.
Even where the title of an article uses a non-pinyin romanisation, romanisations of other Chinese words within the article should still be in pinyin. For example, Tsingtao Brewery is a trademark which uses a non-pinyin romanisation, but an article talking about Tsingtao Brewery should still use the pinyin spelling when talking about Qingdao city:
Correct: Tsingtao Brewery Co., Ltd. is located in Qingdao city, Shandong.
Incorrect: Tsingtao Brewery Co., Ltd. is located in Tsingtao city, Shan-tung. or Tsingtao Brewery Co., Ltd. is located in Tsingtao city, Shandong.
====When to use romanisations other than pinyin====
Articles should use a non-pinyin spelling of a term if that spelling is used by the clear majority of modern, reliable, secondary sources (see WP:NC-ZH for examples). If the term does not have its own article, the pinyin romanisation should be given in a parenthetical. For example,
The Hung Ga style Ng Ying Hung Kuen ( Chinese: 五形洪拳; pinyin: Wǔxíng Hóngquán) traces its ancestry to Ng Mui.
Relatedly, note that systems of Chinese language romanization in Taiwan (the Republic of China) are far less standardized than in mainland China. Hanyu Pinyin has been the official standard since 2009, but systems such Wade–Giles, Gwoyeu Romatzyh, Tongyong Pinyin, and Chinese postal romanization remain in use for both personal and place names. In Taiwan, place names derived from Hanyu Pinyin rarely use the syllable-dividing apostrophe. For example, write Daan District, Taipei City, not Da'an District, Taipei City. SilverStar54 ( talk) 19:59, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
{{
uuline}}
is likely the best technique we have when we would like to emphasize a character:This should be a logical last resort, though.Posthumous name
Emperor Qintian Lüdao Yingyi Shengshen Xuanwen Guangwu Hongren Daxiao Su
欽天履道英毅聖神宣文廣武洪仁大孝肅皇帝
Remsense 诉 04:21, 4 March 2024 (UTC)
During the GAN for Chinese characters, @ Kusma pointed out sections that really should include the characters and romanization for certain terms, even though they're linked—e.g. regular script in the the § History section. I agree: perhaps some class of exception to this guideline should be mentioned, while always being mindful of WP:CREEP. I'm not sure exactly what that class should be—perhaps "within a broad article, while summary style–ing what could be considered its subarticles", or "when omission would be conspicuous or confusing in light of other terms that are linked within an article" Remsense 诉 02:39, 13 April 2024 (UTC)