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

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Jiang (talk | contribs) at 12:43, 6 March 2004. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

These guidelines are under development. Discuss it and improve it.

To write and edit China-related articles, please follow the conventions below. Note

Insertion of Chinese characters

This edition of Wikipedia is in English, so do not use characters or romanized forms excessively, such as for common words, making this a kind of English-Chinese bilingual edition. However, if the term does not have an established translation (i.e., have multiple translations or none), feel free provide the Chinese characters, which will be useful to the content of the article. Proper nouns' Chinese characters should also be supplied, unless it is Wikified and the target links contains the characters.

If there is a term you have trouble translating, please bring it up in the Talk page, then, if you wish, drop a short note at Talk:List of China-related topics for other Wikipedians' attention.

Also, to help establish a simple and clean appearance, if a term is Wikified and has an article, do not provide characters or romanization again. For example, the following is redundant.

Li Shimin (李世民), along with King...

It could easily be rendered as:

Li Shimin, along with King...

which simplifies the article. If the reader wishes to find out about the native text, s/he can simply click on the link (where the writer should direct the Chinese characters if not already present).

Introductions

All encyclopedia entries whose title is a Chinese names should include the Chinese characters and hanyu pinyin representation for that name in the first sentence.

The preferred introductory sentence structure is as follows.

  • Topic (characters; pinyin: pinyin, Wade-Giles: Wade Giles; also other-romanization, other-romanization...) ...
    e.g., Zeng Guofan (曾國藩; pinyin: Zēng Guófán; Wade-Giles: Ts'eng Kuo-fan)...

If the topic itself is romanized according to a particular system (and, in the case of pinyin, has tone marks present in the first sentence's bold highlight), then you should avoid re-listing the romanized form in the brackets following it. However, in the case of pinyin, it is acceptable to first list a the title without tones, and to re-list the title with tones indicated.

  • Tǒpīc (characters) OK
  • Topic (characters; pinyin tǒpīc) OK
  • Tǒpīc (characters; pinyin tǒpīc) Discouraged (note the repetition of Tǒpīc)

If the topic is one in which simplified and traditional characters vary, then you should add the alternate version. Order is potentially politically charged, and there is no solution to this problem. Either order is acceptable. The simplified version should be presented first for modern mainland/Singapore subjects and the opposite should be done for modern Taiwan/Hong Kong/Macau subjects. A suggested format is as follows:

Characters

Chinese characters on the English Wikipedia should be encoded in Unicode. Big5 and GB encoded characters are acceptable as a draft for people who have no other means of entering characters, but should be converted to Unicode later. After a Chinese text has been converted to Unicode, the Big5 or GB versions should be removed.

If you have trouble getting Unicode, try methods listed at Wikipedia talk:Wikipedians/China#Converting CJK text to HTML Unicode.

Simplified and Traditional

Main discussion (archived): Wikipedia_talk:Naming_conventions_(Chinese)/archive2

In order to accommodate all viewers, both sets should be used in all cases where a difference exists. Any order is OK, though note that it is potentially politically charged (see #Introduction above). If you do not know or cannot input the alternate character version, then it is OK to leave it out.

Romanization

We usually use Hanyu Pinyin. (See Talk:Transcription of Chinese) When listing multiple romanizations, try to use the following order:

  1. Pinyin (necessary)
  2. Wade Giles (optional, except in cases of famous ancient Chinese personalities or literature)
  3. others (not necessary)

Pinyin

Generally speaking there are two main ways to enter pinyin;

  1. Letters and numbers, ie: ni3 hao3
  2. Using unicode to combine diacritics, ie: nǐ hǎo

When creating new articles, please try to use the second method. If you use the first method, whether or not you include the numbers for tone, please italicise the pinyin to differentiate it from the English text.

Pinyin words are written similar to English in regards to capitalization, spacing and punctuation. (See Talk:Transcription of Chinese#Library of Congress Guidelines)

Tones

1 2 3 4 (0/5)   <--- tone
ā á ǎ à a
ē é ě è e
ī í ǐ ì i
ō ó ǒ ò o
ū ú ǔ ù u
ǖ ǘ ǚ ǜ (ü)

See also Pinyin#Tones and Mandarin (linguistics)#Tones

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