Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 12:03, 7 June 2002

There are a number of special issues with regard to Chinese names....

Characters

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

Chinese characters on the English wikipedia should be encoded using HTML entities with unicode numbers. Big5 and GB encoded characters are acceptable as a draft for people who have no other means of entering characters but be converted to HTML entitied-unicode when it is possible.

Romanization

Romanization presents some difficult issues in that it is a highly political issue. The most often used romanization is pinyin but many outside of the People's Republic of China dislike it because of its association with that government.

In general, Chinese entries should be in pinyin except when there is a more popularly used form in English or when the subject of the entry is likely to object to romanization in pinyin. When an entry is not in pinyin form, there should be a link to the article from the pinyin form.

Names

Chinese names unlike English presents names last name first. Unlike other instances were this occurs, it is standard practice in English to also present a Chinese name last name first (i.e. Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping). Chinese names should be in pinyin unless there is a more common name used in English (i.e. Chiang Kai-Shek, Sun Yat-sen) or when the subject of the article is likely to prefer a non-pinyin phonetization as is likely the case with personages from Taiwan (i.e. Lee Tenghui).

The encyclopedia should reference the name more familar to most English readers. For most historical figures the means that encyclopedia entry should reference the Chinese name rather than the English name (Soong Chuyu rather than James Soong for example). However, there are exceptions for figures whose English name is more familar (Confucius) and for figures who were raised in non-Chinese societies and whose Chinese names are unfamilar (Vera Wang and Maya Lin).

When using pinyin for a Chinese name, pinyin spacing and capitalization conventions should be used. This includes keeping the last name separate and the given name capitalized with the different characters not indicated by spacing, hyphenization, or capitalization.

Names of Emperors

Emperors before the Ming dynasty should be refered to by the posthumous temple name rather than by reign name. Where there is any ambigious, the temple name should be preceded by the name of the dynasty.

The Ming and Qing dynasty emperors should be refered to be reign name rather than by temple name. Because these are reign names and not personal names, the correct phrasing is the "Kangxi Emperor" rather than "Emperor Kangxi".

Personal names for emperors should not be used except to refer to the founders of dynasties who used personal names before becoming emperor (e.g. Liu Bang) and except for the special case of the last emperor Puyi whose reign name and temple name are unfamiliar.

Political NPOV

Misplaced Pages entries should avoid taking sides on issues such as the status of Taiwan and Tibet. In particular the word China should not be used to be synonymously with areas under current administration by the People's Republic of China or with Mainland China. The term "Mainland China" is a non-political term to be can used when a comparison is to be made with Taiwan, and "China proper" is a non-political term which can be used when making a comparison with Tibet. Although the used of the term "Manchuria" is considered by some to be somewhat objectionable when used in Chinese, it is largely considered a non-political and non-objectionable term when used in English.

Taiwan should not be described either as an independent nation or as a part of China. When it is necessary to describe the political status of Taiwan, special note should be made of Taiwan's confused political status.

Also note that there are potential landmines when using the term Chinese. In particular some find a distinction between "Chinese" and "Tibetans" or between "Chinese" and "Taiwanese" to be objectionable and the terms "Han Chinese"/"Tibetans" and "Mainland Chinese"/"Taiwanese" are more politically neutral.

The term "Mainlander" poses some issues. It is sometimes ambigious whether this is refering to a resident of Mainland China or a member of the group that fled with the KMT to Taiwan in 1949. In refering to the latter group, the name is mildly objectionable when used in English and strongly objectionable when translated literally in Chinese. Preferred unambigous names for the two groups are "Mainland Chinese" and "wai sheng ren".

Hakka is the preferred name for that group even though the Mandarin word for that is something completely different.

In general, one should avoid using the term "Chinese" to be synonymous with the spoken Mandarin Chinese.

Excellent ideas on naming conventions! --maveric149

--- "All entries with Chinese names should have the Chinese characters for the name included in unicode."

One has to have a Chinese Communicator installed on an PC to do so. When the document was typed on computers of publoc domains which only offers IME (like Microsoft IME that doesn't convert Chinese characters in Unicode), presenting every single character in unicode is a tiresome work since typers have to search for them. I'm against this proposal. By the way while using Pinyin romanization, readers who don't know Chinese characters at all can search for the them if they have a Communicator or dictionary handy.

I don't think I was clear in my proposal. I've clarified it a bit.

"Chinese characters on wikipedia should be encoded using HTML entities with unicode numbers. Use of either 8-bit characters or non-unicode encodings such as big5 or gb should be discouraged. Unicode is preferably because it has the highest available and also avoids political issues."

As I said earlier, typing every character in unicode is tiresome. Although I agree that big5 and gb encoding may invoke political issue simply because of Traditional and Simplified Chinse, readers who are proficienct in Chinese will feel more comfortable typing more. If one doesn't like to read Chinese characters at all, the typers can just list the Pinyin romanization without accompanied by any sort of Chinese encoding, saving time for both the typers and readers.