Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/China- and Chinese-related articles

Logical exception to "don't include characters/romanizations for linked terms"

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)

I've been meaning to bring up here that the "don't include characters if a link exists" should make reasonable exceptions for tabular data (which is already common practice in many articles like e.g. 13th Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party and all in that series). I'm especially interested in adding characters to terms where translations vary, and no common name has been rigorously established at the target article, which is relatively common for literary titles.

I also think I agree with Kusma's comment referred to above, which I have not read in the original, in that for certain topics, including the native name of a concept in prose should not be prohibited. If you're ever talking Chinese calligraphy with someone irl, the term they'll employ in an English sentence will be kaishu, not "regular script" (which I literally had to click through to in order to ascertain that 楷書 was indeed the topic). Folly Mox (talk) 13:55, 11 June 2024 (UTC)

Yes. Having really immersed myself in writing a topic including a lot of native vocabulary from top to bottom, it now seems pretty common sense that this should be a class of exceptions to not including characters. Remsense诉 14:00, 11 June 2024 (UTC)

I think it makes sense to modify the guideline to explicitly allow for more flexibility. For instance, maybe we should add a sentence to the paragraph in question saying something like "Reasonable exceptions can be made when important for consistency or clarity." —Mx. Granger (talk · contribs) 14:06, 11 June 2024 (UTC)

This all sounds very reasonable. I support modifying the guideline as well. SilverStar54 (talk) 17:43, 11 June 2024 (UTC)

The existing wording is broadly in line with the main MOS, Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Text formatting § Non-English language terms:

Use non-English vocabulary sparingly; for more information, see Wikipedia:Writing better articles § Use other languages sparingly.

The latter link says:

Foreign terms within the article body do not need native spellings if they can be specified as title terms in separate articles; just link to the appropriate article on first occurrence.

Kanguole 14:33, 11 June 2024 (UTC)

The difference is that Chinese is the only major non-phonetic writing system, so it's reasonable that there would be a distinction on this point. Remsense诉 01:16, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

Japanese is also a bit major. But it's not clear that this argues for an exception for repeating the characters. It certainly doesn't justify repeating the pinyin. Kanguole 21:41, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

I think it does simply because articles are meant to be internally complete, not relying on other pages to adequately explain its subject. If I were on a desert island and I only had the one article, in many cases I would like to have the characters of certain key terms included in that article. I think the distinction requires careful thought though. Remsense诉 01:23, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

By the way, I've been pondering the viability of, say, {{Infobox sinogram}} or something like that, intended either for articles specifically about lexemes, or maybe even to provide an unobtrusive, modular explanation of a lexeme in other articles where its lexical properties are important. Remsense诉 01:25, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

Isn't that what Wiktionary does?

Your rule seems to be at odds with the quote above, also alone WP:SUMMARY and the very nature of a wiki. Kanguole 19:45, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

Wiktionary

There's a lot of boilerplate etymological prose in many articles which cannot simply be outsourced to wiktionary. It's possible that it could be better presented this way.

WP:SUMMARY

My distinction is that characters should be included when not doing so leaves other information in the article underexplained. One should not have to reference other articles to fill in specific details that are necessary to understand those already presented, which is what WP:SUMMARY also says. This is of course distinct from having other articles for a generally more detailed treatment. I stress that I think there's a distinction to be made between logographic and phonetic languages here also. Remsense诉 20:00, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

If you want to discuss the graphical structure of a particular character, then certainly it needs to be included. I think you want a bigger exception than that though, and it sounds like special pleading. Kanguole 20:50, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

I think there are other specific exceptions. For example, I think the inclusion of characters for script styles on Chinese characters as suggested by @Kusma is fully warranted and ideal. Remsense诉 20:58, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

Odd passage?

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.

This seems to be wrong. China is the WP:COMMONNAME, so it should be used unless there's a good reason not to. Remsense诉 01:19, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

Idk how I feel about this. On the one hand, I don’t know if it’s worth encouraging edit wars by allowing mass changes of PRC —> China, but on the other hand maybe it would be better for stylistic consistency.

If we were to change this policy, I think we should give some examples of where it’s necessary to make a distinction versus where it’s not. SilverStar54 (talk) 06:17, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

I'm all for pragmatism in our operations, but I hope it makes sense when I say that "implementing what is clearly site policy (assuming momentarily that this is the case) would lead to prohibitive levels of disruption" seems to necessarily require admitting "local consensus in this area inevitably trumps global consensus", which isn't a position you or I would find viable, of course

I think it'd be fine just removing this passage, as it just reads like a permission slip to ignore WP:COMMONNAME if one fancies. I don't think it really needs to be replaced with anything to the opposite effect. Remsense诉 07:03, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

Pinyin with and without tone marks

I think we should encourage articles to list pinyin with tone marks in parentheses even if the term itself is just pinyin without tone marks. It might seem redundant, but we can't just ditch showing the tone marks. They're essential to knowing how the term is pronounced in Chinese. SilverStar54 (talk) 07:36, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

To me, it's a fairly reasonable deduction from WP:LEADLANG that it's a superfluous term to include in a lexemic call-out, especially as it will be present in the {{Infobox Chinese}} if the term is the article's subject. Including characters is justified because it's necessary for disambiguation, even if they are not useful to most readers. Including identical pinyin but with tone marks is additionally useful to almost no one, as readers will either not find their meaning to have much utility, or they will already be able to read the characters and in all likelihood derive the tones from them. The sliver in between has to be very small.

Perhaps overly blunt, but surely Wikipedia is explicitly not a dictionary? We generally provide lexical and linguistic information in proportion to its relevance for the article, not for its own sake. {{Infobox Chinese}} is a general compromise that helps a lot to address a particularly needful case. Remsense诉 07:49, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

There have been a lot of recent edits to this MOS guidance. Am I correct in understanding that the question here is whether or not to include romanised terms used in running text should omit [tone marks] after Tone marks should only appear within templates, parentheticals, or infoboxes?

To me, using pinyin without diacritics inside the |py= parameter of {{lang-zh}} and its aliases seems fully incorrect, and seeing pinyin with tone marks in running prose feels a bit jarring, but it's not something I ever copyedit out.

What are some examples that have led us to this thread? It's been a busy couple weeks and I'm not really looped in. Folly Mox (talk) 10:08, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

Apologies for the confusion. The question is whether diacritical pinyin should be included in the brackets for terms that are themselves identically spelled but undiacritical pinyin.

That is, is the ideal form

Zeng Guofan (traditional Chinese: 曾國藩; simplified Chinese: 曾国藩; pinyin: Zēng Guófān; Wade–Giles: Tseng¹ Kuo²-fan¹)

Zeng Guofan (traditional Chinese: 曾國藩; simplified Chinese: 曾国藩; Wade–Giles: Tseng¹ Kuo²-fan¹)

That's all. Remsense诉 10:13, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

No apologies necessary: I'm confused about everything all the time, straight e.g. wandering around grocery stores in a daze like "what is this place??"

If that's the question, then yes I think we should include tone marks in the |py= parameter as stated above include the |py= parameter with tone marks, unless the second example is going to be rewritten "Zēng Guófān (traditional Chinese: 曾國藩; simplified Chinese: 曾国藩; Wade–Giles: Tseng¹ Kuo²-fan¹)", which seems less better. Of course, ideally this would all be relegated to {{Infobox Chinese}}, but if no infobox is present, we should include the pronunciation somehow. Folly Mox (talk) 10:39, 3 July 2024 (UTC) edited 10:58, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

I agree, the second form is preferable, as the tone marks are essential pronunciation information. I would guess our articles about China-related topics get a significant number of readers who know enough Chinese to read pinyin but not enough to pronounce all the characters that an educated native speaker knows. Tone marks are even more valuable for topics that include uncommon characters or characters with multiple pronunciations. —Mx. Granger (talk · contribs) 17:17, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

As one of those readers, I second this. SilverStar54 (talk) 17:19, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

Understanding that generally infoboxes are meant to summarize and not stand alone, though {{Infobox Chinese}} is a clear common-sense exception to that much of the time—the primary situation in my head is for the article subject itself, where the diacritical pinyin is assuredly listed. Is this a meaningful distinction for those concerned? Remsense诉 17:48, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

Are you suggesting including hanzi in the lead but putting the pinyin with tones in the infobox? That might be alright, but I think in that case I'd prefer to relegate both hanzi and pinyin to the infobox. I worry it might be confusing to have some of the extra details about the name in one place and some in a different place. I'm not sure. —Mx. Granger (talk · contribs) 18:31, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

In the absence of {{Infobox Chinese}}, the first form seems most readable. Combining tone marks with bolding can be harder to read in some environments. It's true that the way {{zh}} is commonly used stretches LEADLANG quite a bit. Perhaps there should be a preference for using {{Infobox Chinese}} instead if there are more than a couple of items. Despite its name, {{Infobox Chinese}} isn't an infobox presenting key facts about the article topic, but rather a box of a different sort, devoted to the name of the topic. Kanguole 21:37, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

Ruby characters

I think I've never seen these on en.wp (only on zh.wp and ja.wp), and the guidance ruby is not used for body text on Wikipedia seems accurate and appropriate. The explanation that follows, as it would display at too small a size, may be outdated. Maybe this was true for older skins, but in Minerva and Vector 2022, the text is no smaller than the text of a footnote or citation. Maybe we could trim that bit, or use an alternative explanation like as it disrupts line spacing?

Or, maybe it's my device, and it actually does display super teeny tiny for other people. Folly Mox (talk) 10:19, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

Template:ill

Template:ill does a reasonable job for most languages at providing sister language links for redlinked terms on en.wp. For Chinese, I find it totally useless, in every case worse than just including the native characters with no link to zh.wp at all. It creates a redlinked romanised term whilst completely hiding the characters: hover or long press displays the zh.wp url with the characters' unicode codepoints escaped for url compatibility, so if I want to know what / whom the redlink is supposed to indicate, I have to leave the website to a different Wikipedia, which feels like very bad design.

My method is usually linking the characters to zh.wp, but I know this isn't shared by everyone. Sometimes alternatively I'll just add the characters in {{lang-zh}} or similar following the transclusion of {{ill}}, although this feels inelegant.

What are people's thoughts on this? Should we provide any MOS guidance about it? Folly Mox (talk) 10:28, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

I know nothing about template design or url compatibility, but this doesn’t seem to happen to me. When I hover over an {{ill}} link to a Chinese page, Wikipedia displays the characters.

Is the issue browser-specific? If so, perhaps there’s a technical fix for this? Personally, I like how using {{ill}} cleans up the running English text. It’d be a shame to have to create call-outs for topics that already have a Chinese-language article. SilverStar54 (talk) 17:08, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

Oh right, I've been meaning to get back to this. It turns out this does seem to be browser specific. Fails in Firefox and DuckDuckGo, but displays in Chrome.

I kind of see the utility of this the other way round, though: a substantially higher proportion of readership is going to be interested in knowing the word for something / name of someone than the proportion who might click through to the sister language project to read about the topic in another language (which is likely a strict subset of the first).

In other words, displaying the graphs for the native name is what I see as the higher priority, and the link to zh.wp I see as a low-priority convenience thing. Folly Mox (talk) 13:43, 6 July 2024 (UTC)

I suppose we could do something like: Lao Laizi ({{ill|Lao Laizi|zh|老萊子|lt=老萊子}})

Which renders as: Lao Laizi (老萊子)

This doesn't feel better than Lao Laizi (老萊子), although the code for that is less clear:

Lao Laizi ({{zhi|[[:zh:老萊子|老萊子]]}})

Folly Mox (talk) 13:54, 6 July 2024 (UTC)

@Folly Mox I am not sure I follow. I tell my Chinese students (and Koreans) to use ill, see activity here: User:Hanyangprofessor2/Module/MoS (I'll be refining it in the future). Sample article by my students using Ill: Iron flower. What's wrong with it and how would you make it better? Note I tell my students to do a red link and add Chinese charas in the parenthesis if they cannot locate the zh wiki article for the notable concept that should be linked, but if there is one, ill works well enough. Why do we need do display the non-Latin characters for something that has an article? (additionally, today's digital literacy includes machine translating stuff in browsers, so any competent internet user who clicks on ill and goes to zh wiki should be able to read zh article with two mouse clicks). _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 14:21, 9 July 2024 (UTC)

I guess my perspective is that if I'm reading about a Chinese topic, and come across a transliterated name or translated title I'm not familiar with, I want to know its name. That's the basic piece of information I look for to determine whether or not I'm familiar with the topic and whether I want to read more about it.

Being unable to see the names of things in English language topic area sources is something that deeply bothers me, to the point where I'll discontinue reading a book or article if the native terms are not provided, and I don't want that experience for myself or anyone else whilst reading Wikipedia. Granted our case is different, because we can click through to a zh.wp article with {{ill}}, so we're not cutting people off from looking more deeply into a topic should they wish to, but not having the information present on the page is something that upsets my pedagogical sensibilities.

It does look like I hold something of a minority opinion here, and about half my concerns would be alleviated if I switched browsers, so I'm fine with not saying anything in guidance about this. I do think that it should be permitted to retain characters where {{ill}} produces a redlink locally, and people shouldn't remove them just because {{ill}} is present, but no further guidance seems necessary. Folly Mox (talk) 14:16, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

I see. I am not opposed to your example of Lao Laizi (老萊子 [zh]) although I am not sure it is necessary given the link. I most often use this template for Polish Wikipedia, and occasionally Polish words are different and even use diacritics, but unless they have been used in English works, I think we don't need the reader to know them. For Chinese and such, they are even more useless, as readers cannot read (pronouce) or memorize the characters. I certainly see the need to use them when no link is present, to allow people to research them, but otherwise... shrug; as I said, I am not opposing your idea because while I feel displaying the characters when zh link is present is IMHO not needed, WP:NOTPAPER, so why not. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 12:02, 12 July 2024 (UTC)

What about mask (Chinese charas) for publisher?

I was looking at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/China- and Chinese-related articles and I've noticed "publisher=Wenzi gaige chubanshe", with the following MoS note: "For publishing houses without a common name in English, their names are transliterated without tone marks, but not translated. ". Errr. Why? I think we should include original Chinese characters, at min, and why not both the transliterated and translated title? For example, it is important to tell the reader that something may be, for example, a publishing house or an academic journal. There are academic journals with only Chinese names, for example. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 14:17, 9 July 2024 (UTC)

It seems to me Chinese characters are more useful than pinyin for the name of the publishing house. Presumably we mention the publishing house to help interested readers get a copy of the cited source, and I think Chinese characters would help more than pinyin with that. Moreover, pinyin can always be derived from the characters (usually pretty easily), but the reverse is not always true. —Mx. Granger (talk · contribs) 16:07, 9 July 2024 (UTC)

Indeed; most times I search for pinyin I get nothing but Wikipedia, occasionally Google Books (the latter makes it a bit useful, but not as useful as finding info about the original, obviously). _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 06:12, 10 July 2024 (UTC)

This is probably a holdover from academic publishing, which itself is a holdover from days when Chinese characters were not easily included in printed material. Folly Mox (talk) 14:17, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

Infobox Chinese + other infobox redundancies

Many general-use infoboxes have a |native_name= parameter somewhere. Would it be worth specifying that listing the same native forms in both {{Infobox Chinese}} and an article's primary infobox is redundant and usually undesirable?

Moreover, the use of {{Infobox royalty}} in the Chinese context has been killing me: I'm not even sure I would remove the native form conventionally placed right at the top (cf. Kangxi Emperor or any other emperor), but I'm leaning towards that being ideal if we're not even making |native_name= a proper parameter for that one. Remsense诉 23:00, 13 July 2024 (UTC)

Is it redundant and undesirable? I really like the native names of subjects being visible on the first screen, before scrolling down. It makes a lot of sense to have the name at the top of the article, since a lot of people will be looking for that. I'd go as far as saying that if we were to remove either the native name or transliterated name from the header of {{infobox royalty}}, I'd remove the transliterated name, since it already introduces the lead sentence, and leave only the native name, but having both looks correct to me.

{{Infobox Chinese}} is a separate matter entirely. In my experience, it mostly exists to shove diacritic pinyin out of the prose, and then gradually become increasingly bloated with pronunciations. Most of this information seems crufty at first glance, although doubtless it's useful to someone, and removing pronunciations from people's own minority topolect probably feels like a personal affront. Removing the characters from this infobox would leave us without an "index item" (not a good term, sorry about my brain) to compare the pronunciations against. I suppose the characters could be moved to the bottom, if we're concerned about increasing the distance between appearances of the same terms.

I think I'm more pro–"sprinkle 漢字 throughout" than most. Someone in a thread somewhere above called Chinese characters something like unavoidable; I'd call them desirable. Our educational value is significantly enhanced by including them where they're not too obtrusive. Folly Mox (talk) 00:24, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

I really do think the {{Infobox royalty}} case is plausible—I just wish it was its own parameter.

I think the reason my particular opinions are what as strong as they are—maybe "ductile" is a better word? I like having deep justifications for opinions on these things, as long as I'm willing to uproot them and change my mind, as happens often—because I start as an editor with desiring a parsimony of data, i.e. within reason every piece of information appears in the specific place for it. Of course, this doesn't always align with what's good for readers or even other editors, which is why I appreciate the pushback when I lead myself to overly dogmatic positions. Remsense诉 00:56, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

What if we created a wrapper template? And by we I'm not really volunteering myself because I don't have any background coding templates here and am not really sure where to look for guidance, but as a hypothesis:

We could create a template that wrapped {{Infobox royalty}} or {{Infobox officeholder}} and bundled {{Infobox Chinese}} underneath? I'm not sure if that's technically possible or if we'd have to wrap the first template and just output the second based on input parameters.

But the idea would be that the native name goes up top, then the main infobox, then pronunciations at the bottom, without duplicating the native name. Or, if that's impossible to do, create a single template that doesn't wrap anything, but accepts all the parameters of {{Infobox royalty}}, {{Infobox officeholder}}, and {{Infobox Chinese}}, and spits out a single box for every applicable biography? Folly Mox (talk) 11:04, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

I guess before we commit to any such mad undertaking, I'd like to hear from other people active on this talkpage whether the duplication of characters between two infoboxes bothers them.

I definitely used to have a similar idea about how often information should be repeated (never), which came from a background in database programming. That was before the adult-onset ADHD. Now I'm a person who keeps copies of everything important in at least three places, because chances are one is lost and I've probably forgotten another on the way somewhere. I forget what's at the top of the first infobox by the time I've scrolled down to the second paragraph of the lead section.

Mainspace (and projectspace, now that I think of it) hugely duplicate information across a broad array of related pages, and I've come round to a position of inelegant and messy convenience: if someone is looking for information in a place, might as well put it there too, irrespective of wherever else it already is. This is just my opinion as an editor, though, not a firmly held belief. Folly Mox (talk) 11:04, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

Note that {{infobox royalty}} has |module=, which can contain {{infobox Chinese}}, which bundles it at the bottom, whereas |native_lang_name= would go at the top. (e.g: Michael Nylan, with a diffent infobox) Kanguole 11:34, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for the technical insights (and for creating that article; I always wanted her to have one, since I cite her all the time, but never got round to it).

Maybe if people are bothered by the duplication of characters, we could either get consensus to add |native_name= to the top of Infoboxen royalty and officeholder, then |module=Infobox Chinese them and remove the |c= from the child templates. Or construct a wrapper that does the same if consensus to change the widely used templates cannot be achieved. Folly Mox (talk) 13:44, 14 July 2024 (UTC)

`Infobox sinogram`?

I've had the idea of creating a derivative of {{Infobox grapheme}} specialized for characters for a while now. Use would likely be relatively niche, i.e. when a character is itself the subject of encyclopedic analysis while not running afoul of WP:NOTADICTIONARY, like on Dao. Any thoughts? Remsense诉 21:44, 30 July 2024 (UTC)

What should generally be included in the articles for emperors?

Also kicking this one off since it's probably of interest to several people floating around lately.

1. We currently use {{Infobox royalty}} for the lead, which has some specific niceties for Chinese emperors built in. I'm not convinced the template really needs changing at this moment, but naturally there's historically been an impulse to stuff these way past the function of an infobox. Specifically, I don't think there's any justification for including the Chinese calendar reckoning for dates of birth etc, as has often been added. Maybe some loose consensus could be made about this?
2. At the bottom of articles, there's usually a fairly bespoke nesting list showing every descendant an Emperor is associated with that someone decided to write down. It seems fairly trivial to me that it's always WP:UNDUE to this degree, and there would be very few cases where non-notable figures with no historiographical content whatsoever should be mentioned even once.

Remsense诉 06:07, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

I think the date reckoning stuff came about because there was a fairly high profile calendar conversion tool active till the end of the 2010s or so, and it was (and, often, still remains) easier to source vital dates and accession dates in Chinese sources then do the conversion, than to find a source that supported the dates using a Western calendar.

Genealogical information has been an area of cruft expansion due in part to the organisational schemata of official histories. The most recent thread on my usertalk, a tangent from an AFD, touches on this as well.

I have to go and don't have time right now to engage on substance, but I did want to provide my impression on where these informal conventions came from. Folly Mox (talk) 11:15, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

Why here "China" not "mainland China"

−

when editing articles concerning China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau

+

when editing articles concerning mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau

(I)t should (only) be used when a distinction with Hong Kong, Macau, or Taiwan is required.

— WP:NC-CN

Donttellu8 (talk) 16:30, 7 September 2024 (UTC)

Because that would sound strange, and we still probably need to specify HK + MO for some. Remsense ‥ 论 20:41, 7 September 2024 (UTC)