Hi there,

Wikipedia has a lot of Chinese history articles that would benefit from a fast way to mark up 'pinyin'. Pinyin is basically a romanization system for standard Chinese, in which syllables are represented as words built through the combination of a sound in letters, such as 'zhao' and a number for tone, such as 1. Thus, zhao1 would be first-tone.

The 'mark up' that I referred to was converting from this, uglier system of pinyin to the more attractive unicode system, whereby vowels are marked with various shaped lines in order to visually communicate the tonal direction.

(Better explanation at http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin )

There's a PHP function already written to do this, which I suppose could be modified and included as a new function in wiki markup. You can find it here:

http://www.foolsworkshop.com/downloads/pinyintounicode.txt

And an online demo (try some input like ni3 hao3 - 'hello' in Chinese), here:

http://www.foolsworkshop.com/ptou/

Regards, Walter Stanish

PS: I'm going straight off the list (I'm online via GPRS and can't afford to download heaps of messages - or the wikipedia codebase to make the change myself), so please CC me diretly on any response.