OK, I didn't really want to open a debate on the merits of traditional vs simplified Chinese. Any comments on how MediaWiki treats Chinese? Does anyone think it makes sense to have zh/zh-tw/zh-cn/zh-sg/zg-hk language choices? Does anyone have a problem with making that a choice between zh-hans and zh-hant? To the developer-types, how hard is it to change these things? Brianna

True. We Chinese wikipedians will have different terminologies in different areas. On zh.wp we use the auto-converter to show the terminology the wikipedian wish to see. On zh.wp if you do not wish to use the auto-converter, you can use -{zh-cn: keyowrd term in CN; zh-hk: keyword term in HK; zh-sg: keyowrd term in SG; zh-tw: keyword term in TW}- to solve the issue. H.T. {{User:zh:Htchien}} Mark Williamson <node.ue(a)gmail.com> 說： The standard Traditional Chinese of Hong Kong and that of Taiwan have differences in terinology. I know that Hong Kong used to use different country names, but post-unification I think they adopted traditional transliterations of Mainland forms. Boohoo! But Hong Kong does have soem different ones. No idea about S'pore, despite my love for the country. NEver was able to find anythign about it. I do know that many Chinese in Singapore don't know Mandarin, thoguh. Mark On 08/06/06, Brianna Laugher wrote: -- Refije dirije lanm� yo paske nou posede pw犤 bato. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l ___________________________________________________ 最新版 Yahoo!奇摩即時通訊 7.0，免費網路電話任你打！ http://messenger.yahoo.com.tw/

Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@...> writes: Hi, And don't forget the Unicode character is not only denotes the Chinese Characters, also these Unicode ideographs also denotes to Japanese and Korean Hanji. It is not making this as big deal by applying that such converter, which makes more inconvenience for non-Chinese users. By the way, I hope I can translate part of Commons content into Traditional Chinese soon. :) cheers Man

It was my view that Vipuser promoted his side because he is a Simplified user and so has not had experience with such errors. Mark On 08/06/06, Shinjiman &lt;shinjiman(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: -- Refije dirije lanmè yo paske nou posede pwòp bato.

We are discussing its application to Commons, which is a separate issue. Please read the thread more carefully. I agree entirely that it is good on Wikipedia -- to have separate content on Wikipedia is not practical. But on Commons, it is. Mark On 09/06/06, Hsiang-Tai Chien &lt;htchien1225(a)yahoo.com.tw&gt; wrote: -- Refije dirije lanmè yo paske nou posede pwòp bato.

Singapore uses Simplified, officially. Mark On 09/06/06, Hsiang-Tai Chien &lt;htchien1225(a)yahoo.com.tw&gt; wrote: -- Refije dirije lanm�� yo paske nou posede pw��p bato.

Hsiang-Tai Chien <htchien1225@...> writes: the same thing due to the T. Also not a macro language I think. the language we live with it day by day. Generally the language codes ahould be all right, however that should be more correct form to using the language tags, by defination of language tags, IANA ( http://www.iana.org/assignments/language-tags ): zh: Chinese, only generally "Chinese" or Zhong Wen (中文) zh-hans: Simplified Chinese language zh-hant: Traditional Chinese language zh-cn: Chinese language used in Mainland China zh-hk: Chinese language used in Hong Kong zh-mo: Chinese language used in Macau zh-sg: Chinese language used in Singapore zh-tw: Chinese language used in Taiwan zh-hans-cn: Chinese language used in Mainland China, Simplified Chinese zh-hans-hk: Chinese language used in Hong Kong, Simplified Chinese zh-hans-mo: Chinese language used in Macau, Simplified Chinese zh-hans-sg: Chinese language used in Singapore, Simplified Chinese zh-hans-tw: Chinese language used in Taiwan, Simplified Chinese zh-hant-cn: Chinese language used in Mainland China, Trititional Chinese zh-hant-hk: Chinese language used in Hong Kong, Trititional Chinese zh-hant-mo: Chinese language used in Macau, Trititional Chinese zh-hant-sg: Chinese language used in Singapore, Trititional Chinese zh-hant-tw: Chinese language used in Taiwan, Trititional Chinese Don't forget there are many writing scripts besides the Simplified/Tratitional scripts and localised scripts ( and don't dorget there's have script language for Maacau too :) ). regards Man

Hsiang-Tai Chien <htchien1225@...> writes: should be implemeneted on many writing scripts should not many Chinese people to understand them, then I will accept it. Commons' community. The point is that not only Chinese users are using Commons, also the Japanese and Korean using Commons too. As currently the MediaWiki software are using the Unicode characters, the CJK ideographs not only denotes for the Chinese language, and also some ideographs applies on Japanese or Korean Kanji. Also being enable the auto-converter on the server, it needs to change the $wgContLanguage into "zh" which zh includes the auto-converter. Don't forget the Serbian language currently uses the auto-converter in language wiki sites also. This is messed up the language scripts among several languages if we apply the auto-converter in non-language based wiki sites, hence that any auto- converter should not be implemented on them. regards Man

Gerard Meijssen wrote: The written language is much more closely standardised than the spoken language. Speakers of mutually incomprehensible variants of Chinese write in a common script based on Mandarin. Differences in terminology do occur, and in some cases, such as "Cantonese colloquial", characters are introduced to describe words in the local dialect that do not exist in Mandarin. However, these differences are much easier to resolve in software than full translation between languages written phonetically. For conversion to zh-hk, MediaWiki uses a dictionary of 211 entries in addition to the simplified/traditional tables, and for conversion to zh-sg, there is only 15 extra entries. Is it translation? Or is it just an spelling and terminology change, like conversion from US English to Commonwealth English? Maybe somewhere in between. -- Tim Starling

Tim, please see yue: and proposed (and "approved") wuu: The "words" that don't exist in Mandarin aren't just words -- there are grammatical differences as well. And the differing words run very deep -- the Mandarin word for "where", for example, uses different characters than the contemporary Cantonese word. This isn't an issue for zh.wp because it's written only in Baihuawen (Mandarin-based written standard). Before the advent of Baihuawen (it was, I believe, invented by the Nationalists), the written lingua franca of China was Classical Chinese, quite different grammatically and vocabulary-wise from Mandarin. Perhaps comparable to Katharevousa and Dhimotiki in Greece. People might question the use of vernacular Wikipedias, but then, one could in a similar vein question the use of the Catalan Wikipedia, since basically all people literate in Catalan are also literate in either French or Spanish (or both) as well. One person gave the example of a child -- a child in Hong Kong could understand articles in the Cantonese Wikipedia if read aloud to them, but articles read from zh.wp would be confusing and in many cases incomprehensible (they won't learn Baihuawen until primary school). There seems to be a common misconception that thruought China, Baihuawen is read aloud according to the character pronunciations of the native regional dialect of the reader. This isn't true, though -- people reading Baihuawen aloud will almost invariably read it in Mandarin or, in Hong Kong and Macau, Cantonese. Other varieties are largely oral media. That isn't to say that nobody writes in Xiang or Wu or Northern Min, or that nobody is literate in it. Anyone who speaks Xiang and has a rudimentary knowledge of Chinese characters will be able to read written vernacular Xiang, and there are certain occasions on which it is written. And although colloquial writing can be found in every major regional variety of Chinese, as a popular phenomenon it is limited mostly to Cantonese, Wu, Minnan, and Hakka for a few reasons: Cantonese and Wu are both the languages of huge (HUGE) urban centers where people take pride in their local identity; Minnan and Hakka are used on Taiwan, which doesn't currently have a rabid government movement to eradicate local varieties so people who want to develop written forms for the native languages have had quite a bit of success. Having said that, most people who write Minnan do not write it in Peh-oe-ji. There is no single agreed-upon orthography, but most people use a mixture of Chinese characters and Roman letters (and occasionally Japanese characters as well). This is not currently practical for writing an encyclopaedia though, because a huge portion of the words in the language have no consensus as to what character should be used to write them. Mark On 09/06/06, Tim Starling &lt;t.starling(a)physics.unimelb.edu.au&gt; wrote: -- Refije dirije lanmè yo paske nou posede pwòp bato.

On 09/06/06, Hsiang-Tai Chien &lt;htchien1225(a)yahoo.com.tw&gt; wrote: So are you suggesting we should stick to these distinctions? And we should have four zh-versions of all pages and templates? Because the tendency I have noticed is to use "zh-hans" and "zh-hant" which are nothing official. It would be nice at least if there was some consistency. Brianna

Brianna Laugher wrote: Hoi, Well actually, zh-Hans and zh-Hant are less confusing than the other codes and they are absolutely official; these suffixes indicate the script used. In my understanding of Chinese, it is possible to replace one script with another, therefore zh-hk can be written in simplified if you so choose. Thanks, GerardM