Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/China- and Chinese-related articles/Archive 8

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How should articles refer to China's ruling party?

The names "Chinese Communist Party" and "Communist Party of China" are both widely used in reliable sources. Should we exclusively use one form of the name across Wikipedia, or should this be an "optional style" where different articles can use different forms of the name?

My view is that, reflecting reliable sources, it's reasonable for different Wikipedia articles to use different forms of the name. Generally, I don't think editors should mass-edit hundreds of articles to change one form of the name to the other. (See User talk:Amigao#Mass changes and WP:ANI#More mass edits without consensus for context.)

What do others think? —Mx. Granger (talk · contribs) 20:24, 6 May 2022 (UTC)

• Pinging Amigao, since they are mentioned in the above statement. — Ⓜ️hawk10 (talk) 21:00, 6 May 2022 (UTC)

• The purpose of a discussion on an MoS talk page should be regarding proposed changes to the Manual of Style. Along those lines, it seems like it might be worthwhile to develop an RfC regarding the ways in which we might refer to the party. There's precedent for MoS providing guidance to exclude full abbreviations of official names (see MOS:USA). But that sort of guidance also appears to make exception for technical uses as well as contexts in which the fuller abbreviation (USA) is used as a part of a common name for a particular entity (Team USA). Based off of the above and other discussions (see: Talk:Chinese_Communist_Party/Archive_4#Requested_move_16_July_2020 and Talk:Chinese_Communist_Party/Archive_5#Requested_move_21_January_2021), users appear to be split into three camps on this:
  1. Camp 1: The term "Chinese Communist Party" is unacceptable to use when referring to the ruling party of China in almost all cases, since it is not the official name of the party. When writing the text of articles, users should avoid using this name and instead should only refer to the Party as the "Communist Party of China" when writing in wikivoice.
  2. Camp 2: Both "Chinese Communist Party" and "Communist Party of China" are both equally preferred names by which to refer to the ruling party of China. Editors are free to use either in an article, so long as the use is consistent throughout.
  3. Camp 3: The term "Chinese Communist Party" is ordinarily preferred to "Communist Party of China" when describing China's ruling party, as it is the dominantly common name that is used to refer to the entity.

I personally find appeals to the official name to be somewhat spurious, while there's good evidence that the "Chinese Communist Party" has been the dominant English-language name given to China's ruling party since its inception. I don't think either Camp 2 or Camp 3 are quite right, either. Camp 2 seems to be wholly neutral on which name is appropriate in an article, but WP:POVNAMING notes that [t]he best name to use for a topic may depend on the context in which it is mentioned. It seems quite reasonable to me that there are contexts in which the common name ("Chinese Communist Party") so completely overwhelms the use of the official name ("Communist Party of China") that it would be out-of-line with our sources to use the common name. Camp 3, on the other hand, needs to be clarified a bit—I don't think anyone has argued that "Chinese Communist Party" is superior to "Communist Party of China" in all contexts. As such, I propose that something along the lines of the following be added to MOS:CHINESE#NAMING under a new subsection:

There is a community consensus that the use of the name "Chinese Communist Party" dominates the use of the term "Communist Party of China" among reliable sources. While "Chinese Communist Party" should ordinarily be used to refer to the ruling party of the People's Republic of China, the best name to use may depend on the context in which the name is being used. In particular, in topic areas where reliable sources use the common and official names with similar frequency, either name may be chosen so long as the particular name is used consistently throughout the article.

— Ⓜ️hawk10 (talk) 04:46, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

• I roughly agree with "Camp 2", though I might say "equally acceptable" rather than "equally preferred". Both terms are widely used by reliable sources, and both are fine to use in wikivoice. I disagree with "Camp 1" and "Camp 3". When multiple terms are common in reliable sources, there's typically no need to pick one term to enforce across the wiki. Rather, the choice of term can vary by article. I'm not sure anything needs to be added to the MOS about this, but if something is to be added, I might suggest something like this (modeled after WP:SHIPPRONOUNS):

The ruling party of China may be referred to as the "Chinese Communist Party" or the "Communist Party of China". As with all optional styles, articles should not be changed from one style to another without clear and substantial reason.

As for the issue of different contexts – for the question of CCP vs CPC, I don't see the value of trying to determine which term is more common in which contexts. Are there any specific contexts that you have in mind? —Mx. Granger (talk · contribs) 09:38, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

My suspicion is that Hong Kong English and/or Singapore English might be different than other varieties of English in how they refer to the ruling party, but I don't really know how one would back this up with data. It's fairly clear to me that English, broadly, has always referred to the party as the "Chinese Communist Party" much more than it has referred to it as the "Communist Party of China". WP:SHIPPRONOUNS is a bit of a different situation, where there are arguments regarding whether the use of "she" is archaic (such as the use of "she" to refer to countries) and how to handle differences in the choice that different sorts of sources (i.e. technical v.s. popular press) use when referring to ships. — Ⓜ️hawk10 (talk) 17:11, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

I agree that WP:SHIPPRONOUNS is a different situation – I only borrowed the phrasing and don't endorse the same reasoning in that case. —Mx. Granger (talk · contribs) 19:46, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

I did a little searching in Hong Kong and Singaporean media and found both forms used (which has also been my experience in US and UK media). For instance, this SCMP opinion piece uses one form in the text and the other form in a video caption. For whatever it's worth, a search of recent (since 2018) Google Scholar hits finds close to the same number for each (slightly more for CPC) [1][2] – but again, I don't see the value of trying to count number of usages in different types of sources, and would prefer to keep this an optional style. —Mx. Granger (talk · contribs) 20:46, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

Both are equally valid, and there is precisely zero difference between them; no political connotations one way or the other, and to say or imply same is simply bull, pardon my French. Swings and roundabouts is what it is, What bugs me is that once a local discussion has decided on one variant, someone goes around and changes all other related articles on the basis of that consensus. Then a few months later comes another discussion citing more recent n-gram, and the name swings back to what it was before. The most recent name change flurry caused a number of these to appear on my watchlist, and I just wish do-gooders would just get a life and leave them the fuck alone. -- Ohc ^{revolution of our times} 22:33, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

• The difference between "Communist Party of China" and "Chinese Communist Party" is similar to the difference between "Democratic Party" and "Democrat Party". While the two names appear completely interchangeable, for whatever reason, one is viewed as pejorative, while the other isn't. CPC is the official name of the party, and has no pejorative connotation. CCP is somewhat pejorative, probably because of who uses it, and because (like with "Democrat Party") consciously refusing to use the official name of the party itself sends a statement. These connotations exist, and the question is whether the Wikipedia community wants to use the somewhat pejorative (but still relatively common) term, as opposed to the neutral, official name.

One more thing to note is that a while back, there was an effort to go through Wikipedia and replace all instances of "Communist Party of China" with "Chinese Communist Party". As part of this blanket replacement, all sorts of official titles and organizations that include "Communist Party of China" in their official name were relabeled. For example, we now have an article on the "General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party", instead of the actual name of the position, "General Secretary of the Communist Party of China". Of course, according to Wikipedia, the General Secretary is nominated by the "Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party", rather than the "Central Committee of the Communist Party of China" (the actual official name of the organization). If you look at these articles, a lot of them are plagued by edit-warring over the name.

If I can give my view on why this mass replacement of the official name with the more pejorative term happened, I would guess that it has something to do with the rapidly deteriorating view of China in the West over the last few years (specifically, since Trump's election, but also tied to the pandemic), which comes across quite dramatically in opinion polling. -Thucydides411 (talk) 23:24, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

• I'm slightly more concerned about the use of CCP instead of CPC even though I use the former when the rest of the article already adopts it, because CCCP and CCP are too similar and because there seems to be some sort of a word-play going on to tap into Cold War sentiments. As for the full name, I don't think it should be changed in situations where the official title, name, or the terminology used by the source of an edit would become altered, for the same reason you wouldn't change USAFA to AAFA just because "American" stands in for "United States" sometimes. CurryCity (talk) 06:51, 8 May 2022 (UTC)

The fact that "there's evidence that the "Chinese Communist Party" has been the dominant English-language name given to China's ruling party since its inception" is sufficient to nullify the "pejorative" cold war political narrative, IMHO. It fails to demonstrate that there has been any significant shift relative in usage over time, Trump notwithstanding. The preference of one form over the other can, I think, be ascribed more to how the English language works, and people's preference for the simpler form – it's like the majority of people would tend to say "Jesse's cat" instead of "the cat of Jesse". The "of" in the middle of the formal title just makes it seem more stuffy and cumbersome. This is however totally unlike the case of the "Publicity Department" versus the "Propaganda Department": in English, the term "propaganda" definitely has a negative connotation, whereas there is only one word for both terms (宣傳) in Chinese so that I believe some official documents in English have used the term "Propaganda Department" in the past. Some editors with political axes to grind go for the low-hanging fruit, as this one seems to be, ascribing negative connotations where none existed before. Maybe it's the same ones edit-warring over some content I don't know about, but this one over CCP vs CPC is just so lame. -- Ohc ^{revolution of our times} 08:05, 8 May 2022 (UTC)

@Thucydides411: I also believe official titles should stay official in style. "General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party" and "Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party" both seem sooo wrong. Applying that logic, they should perhaps advocate "Chinese Communist Party General Secretary " and "Chinese Communist Party Central Committee, yet nobody does. Funny, that. -- Ohc ^{revolution of our times} 08:37, 8 May 2022 (UTC)

"Democrat Party" didn't originally have any pejorative connotations either, but it does now. "CCP" just happens to have become a somewhat pejorative term over time. The official term, "CPC", was used across Wikipedia until fairly recently, until it was pretty aggressively edit-warred out of most articles. I don't think this was done simply because of WP:COMMONNAME. I would be similarly concerned if "Democrat Party" were aggressively pushed across Wikipedia, and articles like "Democratic National Committee" were renamed to "Democrat National Committee", or even worse, "Democrat Party National Committee". -Thucydides411 (talk) 08:45, 8 May 2022 (UTC)

I'm not sure that it can ever work the same way. Sure that words can take on positive or negative connotations through time and usage, as "discrimination" did. There's clearly a morphological change with your example which led to a semantic change, whereas there is none in the CPC vs CCP debate. If Trump had invented the term "Chinese Communistic Party", that would have been another matter. -- Ohc ^{revolution of our times} 09:02, 8 May 2022 (UTC)

BTW, I'm not a big fan of the ruling party in China. -- Ohc ^{revolution of our times} 09:07, 8 May 2022 (UTC)

I'm not sure what being a "fan" has to do with anything. We're all supposed to edit neutrally here, without regard to personal beliefs.

With CPC vs. CCP, I can only speculate why the latter is pejorative, while the former isn't. The two obvious explanations that come to mind are that intentionally avoiding the official name sends a statement, and that critics of China in American politics tend to repeatedly use the term "CCP" when discussing anything related to China. Nevertheless, "CCP" has clearly acquired a somewhat pejorative sense.

You say that there's no real difference between CPC and CCP, so the latter can't really be pejorative. There's a very similar issue in transliterations of Mandarin Chinese, which shows how something seemingly innocuous can become a political statement. During the Cold War, usage of the Yale Romanization or Wade-Giles romanization in place of pinyin became a political statement. This is seemingly just a boring technical question of how to render Mandarin Chinese in the Latin alphabet, but it became a political statement. If there were suddenly a big push by a few hyperactive editors to replace all occurrences of pinyin with the Yale romanization throughout Wikipedia, I would be similarly skeptical.

If you want an even sillier example of this linguistic politics, take this article in the influential conservative American publication, the National Review. The article argues that we should all start calling Beijing "Peking" again, in order to take a jab at the communist Chinese. The last line of the article gives some insight into the thinking that goes behind using terms like "Peking" and "CCP":

If “Beijing” is the name the Chinese Communist Party prefers, well . . . the last thing we should do is agree to it.

Wikipedia hasn't gotten quite this silly yet, but this type of linguistic politics is spilling over into the encyclopedia, and the mass replacement of "CPC" with "CCP" across virtually all China-related articles is a sign of that. -Thucydides411 (talk) 12:12, 8 May 2022 (UTC)

@Thucydides411: I said that I'm not a fan of the Regime because I actually prefer the formal title "Communist Party of China", and that's not me being doctrinaire. I'm just a bit of a purist.

I can understand the argument you stated, and how people can deliberately politicise names by mispronouncing or otherwise distorting its form. Of course they do, but this particular example doesn't work for the reason I already explained above. Warring over CPC vs CCP is lame.

It's true that the govt of the PRC made a huge effort to use pinyin to supplant other romanisation, I think mainly because of claimed precision, the benefit of which is real. But other attempts by westerners to phoneticise the Chinese languages were [perhaps correctly] regarded by Beijing as "colonial" relics (devised by westerners and imposed on the Chinese language). The fact that Wade–Giles is widely used to phoneticise in Taiwan would of course be an additional reason for the Regime to want to erase it from existence, so the political motive is obvious.

On top of that, all phoneticisation methods have their imperfections. Although "Peking" was pushed into "Beijing", its usage is still not universal. The capital of the country is still referred to largely as "Pékin" to this day in France, for example. I don't think it's due to a colonial mindset – some people clearly can't get to grips with how the Roman alphabet has been usurped by pinyin conventions. But pinyin only represents the Mandarin dialect and none or the other SInitic languages, such as Cantonese of Hokkien, which the PRC government doesn't even recognise as languages in their own right (against the views of many scolars of language), and is trying to eradicate or at least marginalise. -- Ohc ^{revolution of our times} 13:34, 8 May 2022 (UTC)

I'm not saying that Hanyu pinyin is the end-all and be-all of romanizations, and I know that it is based on Mandarin, not Cantonese (just like the most recent German spelling reform was modeled off of the phonology of Standard German, not of Allemannic German, which is also called a "dialect", but which is not really mutually intelligible). I'm just pointing out that seemingly boring linguistic choices like the use of Yale romanization over pinyin can be a political statement. The same goes for Beijing/Peking. I know that French and German use Pékin/Peking, but in English, "Peking" is rare nowadays, and its use can be political (as the National Review article makes clear).

I agree that edit-warring over CPC vs. CCP is lame. However, I think the fact that there has been a push to replace every instance of CPC with CCP is a sign of non-neutral editing in China-related topics. I don't really care about "Democratic Party" vs. "Democrat Party" - that's also silly. However, if a group of editors were to go around Wikipedia systematically replacing every instance of "Democratic Party" with "Democrat Party", that would be a red flag to me. It would just be a sign of non-neutral, probably highly polemical editing in the relevant subject area. -Thucydides411 (talk) 15:01, 8 May 2022 (UTC)

FYI Beijing as rendered in Wade–Giles would be Peiching. Peking is the pronunciation in one of the southern Chinese languages, I assume Cantonese (as well as not pinyin). Folly Mox (talk) 04:08, 9 May 2022 (UTC)

• I don't belong to any camp, but I would agree that the official name should be used for pages about CCP officials and offices. The rapidly deteriorating view of China in the West - brought on by the Chinese Communist Party over its response to the COVID-19 outbreak - should not be in the scope of this discussion. CutePeach (talk) 15:08, 8 May 2022 (UTC)
• This is one of those semantic issues which may engage a minority, but which most readers are likely completely unaware of. Either way readers will gain exactly the same information and meaning and impression, and in that sense the question doesn't really matter at all. (Others have noted lameness above, which is a similar point.) Given that, the general principle of preferring using whatever the article title is holds here (and I have not checked which one it is). Either way I don't see the need for a blanket rule; one name is clearly more descriptive and one name is official and there may be situations in which one or the other of these is preferable. Acronyms should follow whatever long-form is used in the article. CMD (talk) 15:25, 8 May 2022 (UTC)
  • Thanks to all above who joined in. I'm certainly glad that disputes are at the "lame" level. Just wait until the Regime unleashes its trolls on us, as we have already seen on zh.wp. God help us then. -- Ohc ^{revolution of our times} 16:00, 8 May 2022 (UTC)
• It doesn't matter I am unhappy that this discussion is happening due to the result of disruption. This discussion should not be interpreted as an official reason to go around mass changing pages!! It doesn't matter. Its so unimportant I can't believe that editor time is being wasted on it. This should qualify for WP:LAME. Whether an editor wants to use one term or the other shouldn't be this big issue. But if folks really can't just get along and not go around making useless changes, I'd support Camp 2 or 3. Camp 3 is the standard usage in media, evidenced by its abbreviation CCP. Camp 2 is also workable, and I see no reason to force the hand of users. I have no idea why we'd choose camp 1, that feels like we'd be toeing the party line, which is so against our ideals. CaptainEek ^{Edits Ho Cap'n!}⚓ 19:04, 8 May 2022 (UTC)
• Prefer Chinese government, unless specifically talking about political parties. I've noticed a trend among right-wing media to always refer to the Chinese government as the CCP or Chinese Communist Party. I suspect this is because they like to emphasize how "communist" China is, because they have weaponized that word and call a variety of their enemies and various evil-doers socialists and communists. As a result, I consider CCP to be a weaponized term, and I prefer to use the more neutral "Chinese government" where possible. When referring to the United States government or the Trump administration, we don't go around calling those two things the "Republican party". We should try to avoid this misnomer when referring to China, unless we are specifically talking about political parties. I have no opinion on CCP vs CPC, I merely want to point out how the term communist seems to have been recently weaponized and is, in my opinion, being over-used in some Chinese articles. –Novem Linguae (talk) 19:09, 8 May 2022 (UTC)

@Novem Linguae:The reason why we don't go around calling the United States government or the Trump administration, the "Republican party" is because of a different context compared with the PRC – it would probably be acceptable to conflate them to a certain degree because the Communist Party sits above the government of the People's Republic of China and the Chinese constitution. It's the modern day l'état, c'est moi. (BTW, do you agree with the redirects? I don't). -- Ohc ^{revolution of our times} 21:03, 8 May 2022 (UTC)

• Comment - just a quick comment, I know people have actually provided evidence above but 中国共产党 literally translates to Chinese (中国) Communist (共产) Party (党), however the accepted translation would be Communist Party of China, this is due to the structure differences between the two languages, and as another user mentioned it just falls into semantics. I personally don't think it matters too much. As long as the article sticks with one the whole way through, then that's fine by me. 万岁中华人民共和国. X-750 _{I've made a mistake, haven't I?} 01:17, 9 May 2022 (UTC)

  I can't accept 中国 as an adjective. It means "China" (these days), and can mean "Chinese" or "of China" contextually in colloquial translation, but when translated as a standalone word it's for sure a noun. "Communist Party of China" is indeed the more accepted translation, but I usually see 万岁 following the noun it's talking about. Folly Mox (talk) 04:31, 9 May 2022 (UTC)

  Yes, which is why I gave an example, posters will have the 万岁 proceeding the 中华人民共和国，not preceding. Another example would be “去哪儿呢？”, which is "where are we going", literally it is "going where?" Not to mention Western pronunciations of Chinese names such as Zhou Guanyu (whose name is normally pronounced Guanyu Zhou by commentators). X-750 _{I've made a mistake, haven't I?} 07:55, 9 May 2022 (UTC)

  Yeah, fwiw, none of these comments are correct, pretty much at any level.

  X-750 seems to misunderstand Chinese grammar (which is almost completely positional regardless of the 名 next to the word in a dictionary), misunderstand English grammar (which is easily but not completely positional—East China Sea and China Eastern Airlines are both fine but China Communist Party doesn't parse), misunderstand English words (the only difference between proceeding and preceding in this context is that one is just a misspelling of the other), misunderstand Chinese grammar again (the 万岁 goes at the end like Molly was saying), and misunderstand how names work (if Zhou Guanyu prefers to go by G.Y. Zhou in English more power to him but his actual Chinese name is Zhou Guanyu and commentators screwing that up because of how their forms are set up or because they assume their listeners aren't familiar with Xi Jinping, Mao Zedong, &c. yet has no bearing on anything).

  Similarly, FM links to an article which repeats a guy interested in astronomical history mistranslating 國 as region but that's not terribly authoritative. 中國 has always been the period understanding of the Chinese state, which context fits the bronze vessel being discussed just fine pending an actual discovery where it gets used to only mean a certain region within or outside of the realm. Likewise, it's not "colloquial" to translate it as "Chinese" or "of China": it's a simple requirement of turning Chinese thoughts into English thoughts. They are the literal meaning of the word in various contexts, including this one.

  Of course the completely literal translation of 中国共产党 is the Chinese Communist Party. It's [attributive] + [attributive] + [noun]. China Daily is still using it, Global Times is still using it, the MFA is still using it, &c. The Chinese equivalent of an actual CPC construction with a clearly noun-being-noun format would've been 中国的共产党, which they very obviously and sensibly preferred not to use.

  If for whatever reason (is it anything but consistency with the PRC and superstitious avoidance of USSR parallels?), they prefer to more generally use Communist Party of China as an official English name, we can absolutely respect that designation. It has nothing to do with the grammar.  — LlywelynII 02:06, 3 December 2022 (UTC)

• I prefer Communist Party of China in general, though Chinese Communist Party is also acceptable, and which is preferable probably depends on context. We should in general use the official names for organisations, and shy away from colloquial names, particularly when those colloquial names are typically understood to be derogatory in nature (even when the colloquial name is more common). So for example, it's more acceptable to use the GOP for the Republican Party (colloquial, but non-derogatory) than Democrat party for the Democratic Party (colloquial, and derogatory), but "Republican Party" and "Democratic Party" are the official terms and should normally be used. Going around changing CPC->CCP or CCP->CPC en-masse in a semi-automated fashion, which is what this spawned off, is inappropriate regardless of which direction you're changing it in. Endwise (talk) 11:08, 9 May 2022 (UTC)
• Needless timesink which needs a prompt close I'm just going to point everyone to MOS:RETAIN, and the recent discussion on she/it for ships, and say that the exact same kind of consideration should apply here. Unless there's a good reason to use a specific form in a specific article, then so long any individual article is internally consistent and clear (consistency might be less of a factor here, though, as varying the word order can make for a less monotonous read...), then there's really no need to waste editor time changing anything. And on the same grounds, somebody going off on a mass editing spree to change from one form to the other, in whichever direction, is equally a needless timesink. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 16:56, 11 May 2022 (UTC)
• Reading the above, I am slightly surprised that no one has objected to the use of the word "communist" on the ground that communism as implemented in various 'communist' states including PRC does not conform to the Marxist ideal. They might suggest that "communist" be replaced by some other more descriptive formulation such as "Stalinist", "social fascist", or "state capitalist". JRSpriggs (talk) 21:12, 27 June 2022 (UTC)
  • That's because we're tryna do a translate, for a general readership encyclopaedia, not be social theorists downfallen yea again by nomenclature. We describe, not prescribe. Blessings, Folly Mox (talk) 08:25, 29 June 2022 (UTC)
  • Adjusted indention. --魔琴 (Zauber Violino) (talk) 07:18, 29 June 2022 (UTC)
• Came from zhwiki. I suggest you use the "Communist Party of China" in formal contexts and the "Chinese Communist Party" in general ones, similar to what you do to the Republic of China (Taiwan) where you can see the "Government of the Republic of China" and "Elections in Taiwan." --魔琴 (Zauber Violino) (talk) 07:18, 29 June 2022 (UTC)

  @魔琴 I agree. It's ridiculous to have the names of the official offices be denoted under CCP, although I believe that CPC should be the preferred style everywhere, but should only be enforced in formal contexts, but keep the articles with CCP as it is, but standardize intra-article. Mat0329Lo (talk) 03:18, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

• WP:AINTBROKE -- plus, I see no evidence that "Chinese Communist Party" is peggiorative. I've followed China professionally for more than fifty years and Maoists and Cold Warriors alike have used it. The official "Communist Party of China" is fine for officials, of course.ch (talk) 16:58, 29 June 2022 (UTC)
• Who cares and early close per RandomCanadian and others. They're both acceptable phrasings, there's no need to specify a preferred style. Ban anyone who runs around edit warring one phrasing to the other. Problem solved. SnowFire (talk) 10:26, 1 July 2022 (UTC)

• I don't think we should force any particular way of writing onto editors, but if we must (although... I'll get again say: we don't need to!) then clearly it makes the most sense to go with "Chinese Communist Party" as that's clearly the most popular phrasing: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=%22Chinese%20Communist%20Party%22,%22Communist%20Party%20of%20China%22 Mathmo ^Talk 09:16, 6 July 2022 (UTC)
• Chinese Communist Party As this is how the general body of English-language press refers to the CCP. WhisperToMe (talk) 17:46, 22 April 2023 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Hong Kong#Request for comment for Hong Kong or Hong Kong, China?

Please see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Hong Kong#Request for comment for Hong Kong or Hong Kong, China? for an RfC regarding how to phrase the place of birth for people born in Hong Kong after the Handover of Hong Kong on 1 July 1997.

Please see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Hong Kong#Request for comment: British Hong Kong or Hong Kong? for an RfC regarding how to phrase the place of birth for people born in Hong Kong before the Handover of Hong Kong on 1 July 1997. The RfC also discusses a bot request to modify all affected articles to comply with the new guidance.

The RfCs could result in changes to this guideline.

Cunard (talk) 05:00, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

Use of 《》, 、, and【】

• This has been bugging me too! When exactly are you supposed to use Chinese fullwidth punctuation when not quoting? Ever? I always find myself trying to bracket and brace characters inline, especially with names of works, e.g. 《说文解字》; Shuōwénjiězì, but end up taking it out—because of that damn closing bracket and its space to the semicolon.

• 、 is really useful in my mind for separating characters, and that's how it's used, but does it scan to people who don't read any Chinese?

Remsense聊 04:03, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

[Modern] Standard Chinese

The 'Modern' is so clunky and unnecessary-feeling, I think it's much better to make "Modern Standard Chinese" discouraged, and if it seems necessary, mention that Standard Chinese is based off of the Beijing Dialect of Mandarin. Remsense聊 03:58, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

Related discussion with inline formatting and templates

There's a discussion going on here regarding the {{zh}} template, and perhaps generally how best to format Chinese text with any number of

• character-forms; transliteration; 'gloss'

which I meant to address somewhat starting with the creation of the {{zhi}} and {{zh2}} templates, and you're all invited here or there to share your thoughts! Remsense聊 15:59, 8 October 2023 (UTC)

Regarding {{zhi}}, it's my feeling that |labels=no should have been the default all along, but we're too far gone to change it now, sadly. It's such a bother to type that I'll often use {{lang}} |1=zh unless I need both character forms, and just manually format the transliteration, having usually introduced the gloss aprior.

If we're talking about general improvements to {{zh}}, as the nom at TfD suggested, an optional |separator= (or something briefer) might be nice, as well as changing the glyph bracketing the gloss to a regular double apostrophe " from the atypical single apostrophe ', for which I often see and implement workarounds adding an additional single apostrophe within the |l= parameter value to give the appearance of a double apostrophe. Folly Mox (talk) 16:45, 8 October 2023 (UTC)

Yes, regardless of style, i think having {{zhi}} as an alias is worthwhile.

are single-quotes atypical? I thought they were usual for glosses regardless of source language—plus, i confess i like the appearance much better. {{zh|tr=}} should probably use "" instead, though at that point I think the use of {{zh|tr=}} inline is quite limited.

what i'd like is to be able to include multiple glosses in {{zh}} without having to exclude only the outermost single-quotes, e.g.

{{zh|c=字|p=zì|l=character, word}} instead of

{{zh|c=字|p=zì|l=character', 'word}} Remsense聊 16:48, 8 October 2023 (UTC)

Disambiguation pages with Chinese character titles

A discussion has been opened at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/〇 (disambiguation) pertaining to Category:Disambiguation pages with Chinese character titles (383). Folly Mox (talk) 22:22, 26 October 2023 (UTC)

Spacing

Currently this guide doesn't really discuss spacing (other than a passing reference in the citations section). I propose that we add a note similar to WP:NCZH that "Pinyin is spaced according to words, not characters" and a link to the section of the pinyin article explaining how to determine word boundaries. Thanks to Jōkepedia for bringing this to my attention. SilverStar54 (talk) 03:38, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

Agree Remsense聊 16:03, 8 October 2023 (UTC)

Diacritics expert, please

Does anyone have an MOS-based opinion on this? Feel free to act on that knowledge: this is not a matter that I am able to discuss or have an opinion on. Thanks, Drmies (talk) 00:04, 13 July 2023 (UTC)

The relevant MOS section is linked at WP:PINYIN (emphasis added): "...Hanyu Pinyin without tone marks as the default Romanisation method for Chinese characters, except where an alternate form of a word is used by modern reliable secondary sources."

Based on this I would say the map labels you linked should not have those diacritics, especially because the pages they link to do not use them in their titles. If people want to know the tones, they can easily click the link and see the complete pinyin version. Exobiotic 💬 ✒️ 15:11, 4 September 2023 (UTC)

We should really add to that sentence "... except where an alternate form of a word is used by modern reliable secondary sources or where necessary for disambiguation within the article." Or something. This is how tone marks are already used in practice, although the way I've phrased it just here conflates the alternatives Pinyin with tone marks and non-Pinyin romanisations, so it would have to be rewritten for clarity.

That said, I don't typically remove tone marks when I come across them, even though the MOS would prefer it if I did. Pinyin is a deeply lossy conversion, and ditching the tone marks gives only an approximation, since the tones are lexical and not just there for funsies or as a pronunciation aide. It's always felt a bit parsimonious to me that we are expected to incorporate European glyphs like ç, ø, ö, ı, ğ, etc., while expected to remove the diacritics from Pinyin, which are equally if not more important to correct spelling.

I don't feel especially strongly about that, since the Pinyin with tone marks only identify proper pronunciation, and still don't offer a hint at what the underlying word might be, except in cases of syllables where only one or a few words is pronounced like that. I'm fine clicking through to look up the pronunciation if I really need to. The thing that I do feel strongly against in the MOS is cutting out the native words where an article exists. If I'm trying to understand what an article is talking about in comparison to something I've read in Chinese and have to keep tabbing back and forth between pages just to remember the name of a person or toponym, or the article I'm in is treating Chinese terms but the actual terms are hidden in a separate article, it just doesn't facilitate understanding, and thankfully this proviso is not always enforced. Folly Mox (talk) 19:17, 4 September 2023 (UTC)

Those strike me as reasonable concerns. I'm not a Chinese expert, but parts of this guideline have always seemed a little off to me, especially in comparison to treatment of diacritics and glyphs in Western languages.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:33, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

As a nuance: in my mind, I think it's important to use ü (generally not tone-marked) when writing transliterated Chinese words in pinyin, e.g. nüshu but not generally nushu or nǚshū. Remsense聊 04:07, 10 October 2023 (UTC)

CS1 with native names

Thank you @Folly Mox for being bold with that, I was thinking of replacing the passage as such, but I didn't want to just in case I was wrong about it being unideal somehow, thank you. :) Remsense聊 20:50, 25 November 2023 (UTC)

I'm not sure when or by whom it was added to the documentation, but I have fixed many instances of |last=(transliterated surname) |first=(transliterated given name) + (full native name). I view it as incorrect, and had no idea it was being recommended! Back when the |script-parameter= series of parameters was first added, I tried using |script-author= to hold native names, but it has never existed. Folly Mox (talk) 21:07, 25 November 2023 (UTC)

Putting the Chinese name in |first= is incorrect, but using |author= is worse: both of them mess up the metadata, but the second also messes up the refname used by {{harv}}, {{sfn}} and friends. Yes, that can be patched up with an explicit |ref= and {{harvid}}, but the proper solution is to push for |script-author=, |script-editor=, etc in the citation templates.

The examples also mix together two issues: (1) inclusion of the hanzi of the author's name and (2) presentation of the romanized name. On the latter, I disagree with the commentary disparaging the comma form. While specialist publications in East Asian topics tend to use the comma-free form in bibliographies, generalist publications, and those specializing in other areas, like Nature or Science, tend to use the same presentation for all authors. Wikipedia is also aimed at a general audience.

We are, after all, discussing structured references in a reference list rather than using a person's name in prose. Western names aren't being presented in citations the way they're used in prose either. Ease of picking out surnames is a key property. Kanguole 21:58, 25 November 2023 (UTC)

I did try to split out the presentation with / without comma from the native name bit, but the second thing had just been addressed, so I thought that would be a good spot for it. That is a good point about needing a |ref= to make shortened footnotes work as expected. The comma form looks super wrong to me, but of course I acknowledge it is standard in many scientific publications. I'm not really excited about recommending any incorrect methods. Could we have both or neither? Folly Mox (talk) 22:13, 25 November 2023 (UTC)

I think I've interfered with this a bit, but I agree with Kanguole entirely. Most pertitently for now is that putting the Chinese name renderings in either |firstn= or |authorn= is actually wrongheaded. The proper way to do this is clearly with the |authorn-mask= and should be the only method recommended here. But I also agree that "Family, Given" is not "wrong" for Asian names in bibliographies in English (it's entirely standard in many citation formats). All that said, I'm not as keen on |script-authorn=, etc., as Kanguole is, because the citation templates are already complicated, and |authorn-mask= will generally do what we need to do. Maybe there is a need for something like |last1=李|first1=四|script-author1=zh when we have no Latin-script names to use at all, but this is uncommon, and the sky has not fallen without it. It's not really "broken", just not as maximally informative metadata as it would be with such a parameter. But doing |last1=Li|first1=Si (李四) or worse yet |author=Li Si (李四) actually is broken.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:16, 26 November 2023 (UTC)

I'm satisfied with the guidance now, which shows only current best practice. For |script-author=, see Help talk:Citation Style 1/Archive 92#Proposed script-author parameter. Folly Mox (talk) 14:17, 27 November 2023 (UTC)

I object to presenting as a model the use of |author-name= to change the name formatting. Kanguole 18:51, 27 November 2023 (UTC)

Ok, how would you like to present changing the name formatting? Not all publications use last, first and not all articles do either. I'm fine with it as an option, but I don't want all the advice anywhere in the "Citations" section to prefer last, first without ever mentioning last first. Folly Mox (talk) 21:41, 27 November 2023 (UTC)

I note with some satisfaction that we are having a disagreement about a comma, as is the Wiki Way. ☺️ Folly Mox (talk) 21:43, 27 November 2023 (UTC)

I don't think this scheme should be presented as a model in the Manual of Style. It certainly doesn't belong in this example, which is about a different issue. Kanguole 23:06, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

Out of curiosity, what's the reason for your opposition to using |author-mask= to display East Asian names without the comma? Folly Mox (talk) 23:13, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

I object to it being presented as a model in the Manual of Style, and thus encouraging people to think that this complicated markup is what should be put everywhere. Kanguole 23:25, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

┌───────────────────────────┘
Kanguole, frankly, I have to disagree with your view here. The core of your position seems to be that the markup is complicated, and that this in turn makes either editing, the end presentation, or both more complicated and possibly more confusing. A few points to consider:

• Remember that the alternative before has been a hodgepodge of different styles, some of which include characters, some put them in different fields. This is far more difficult to deal with than some added complexity contained in one extra field, that is rather intuitive in what it does within the template. A ton of my time on here is spent trying to standardize within and between articles with stuff like this, so I can then go on to actually expand or work on the content of the article. (This is partially my problem.)
• Point being: having one specific recommendation that encodes all the information we need to encode makes it much easier to programmatically change to a different syntax if we change the template, or move to a different one. That way, I can just use a simple regex to switch an entire article, or change a single line of code in a module, rather than having to comb through the entire bibliography and cook up several distinct regexes or just go one by one, possibly because one complete solution was not being adequately advertised.
• I want to reiterate that it just really doesn't seem complicated compared to the baseline complexity of writing in multiple languages: it's a single extra parameter that basically means "what you write here is exactly how the name will be presented". If this is too complicated, we need to give up on a lot of other complexity here on Wikipedia, I dunno.

Remsense留 23:38, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

I don't really like |author-mask= either, and said as much at Help talk:Citation Style 1/Archive 92#Proposed script-author parameter (thank you for proposing that, Kanguole; I'm not sure my support did it justice, and the conversation is still there if you had any more points to add).

I suppose the problem we have is that using |author-mask= is best practice currently, according to the people who maintain the citation templates. I'm not really sure we have the option not to cover best practice at the MOS. I think there's a larger question here, about what level of consensus certain procedures and best practices should be subject to. For the most part, the people who do the actual work writing and maintaining the citation template code have outsized influence on best citation practices. I suspect, for example, that the vast majority of the community doesn't care at all about producing clean metadata for downstream reusers, but it's a priority for the people who write the code, so best practice reflects that priority.

Maybe instead of trying to change that culture though, a technical solution would be easier. If we had a template like {{zh-name}}, that accepted parameters for a Chinese name and spit out citation template parameters, it could wrap the tedious bits and let us get on with whatever we're doing, and could be updated whenever best practice changes. I don't remember enough programming to know if I could implement that or not, but it could probably be done (details, of course, may contain devils). Folly Mox (talk) 00:46, 30 November 2023 (UTC)

Oh! Right, thank you in turn for reminding me to add my support to the proposal, because it is the ideal solution, all talks of lesser measures aside. Folly, do you think that template would be worthwhile also? Because I would be very happy to whip it up if others will get use out of it. Remsense留 01:24, 30 November 2023 (UTC)

I also concur with Kanguole in objecting to presenting the comma-free version as an MoS-recommended option, because there is no consensus to prefer this or use it at all, and it is not a common practice in biolographic material in English (citations in journals, in book footnotes/endnotes, etc.); the idea that "Family, Given" order for East Asian names in citations is "wrong", is itself an error. Maybe the dominant practice in English citations/bibliographies will someday change, but it has not yet. Doing it when there is not reader expectation of or familiarity with it in English-language cite/bib material is simply inconsistent and potentially confusing.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:15, 30 November 2023 (UTC)

SMcCandlish, how much familiarity do you have with English-language sources writing about the sinosphere? because this form is very common in journals and books. plenty of other niches have particular citation conventions on Wikipedia. This is the case because it is more natural and easier to read and work with much of the time.
While Kanguole is correct in their characterization that display form is much less common in fields that aren't Asian studies of some kind, this is a recommendation that is only likely to be used in that scenario—if the journal Nature doesn't generally print the characters inline with the name, then there's no real reason to switch the name order or worry about this at all. this recommendation is for when one should be printing the native characters alongside the transliterated name. Remsense留 05:16, 30 November 2023 (UTC)

I know it is, within that specific topic of writing, but it is not common at all across English-language writing of citations and other biobliographic material in general, across all topics. Citations in most cases are written highly consistently (within one publication), for their easy and certain parsing, that being the overriding principle. You're arguing for a WP:Specialized-style fallacy. The fact that a Japanese or Chinese author is being cited has nothing in particular to do (other than a statistical skew) with what the topic is; it might not be something of concern to sinology, but be about albinism, or flea-borne illnesses, or cat predation on wildlife in Australia, or snooker championships, or whatever.

And no topics/categories have "particular citation conventions on Wikipedia" at all. Citation style is determined on a per-article basis (for better or worse). The most that has happened is that particular editors who favor one or a few topically-dominant citation styles because of their professional and/or educational focus, or because they are simply copy-pasting citations and (we hope they bother) building citation templates around the copy-paste, have a tendency to increase the frequency of that particular citation format in that topic on Wikipedia, simply as a statistical effect (e.g., you'll notice Vancouver style |vauthors= being common in particular subjects, virtually never seen in others, and universal in none). Most of them are nationally defined anyway (e.g. APA style and AMA style and ACS style are set by American organizations, and MHRA style by a British one) and are nowhere near universal across journals and such within that topic area, just common in ones published in or strongly influenced by a particular country's dominant professional body in that field.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:02, 30 November 2023 (UTC)

Per the essay, I don't understand what's fallacious about my view is. Vancouver is one of the examples I was thinking of for a specialized citation style, though this is lesser in scope than that, but I still think it's a worthwhile convention to consider. I'm going to restate my position cleanly, because I know we're talking about several different things at once.

---

Thesis: If one is in a situation where it would be appropriate to specify the native characters for an individual's Sinosphere name in a citation, it should be presented as some variation of LAST-FIRST-NATIVE. Whether there's a comma or brackets is beside the point for the moment. Situations where I think this is usually appropriate include:

• Sources that are themselves in a Sinosphere language
• Sources related to some field of Asian studies
• Sources in articles about Asian studies topics
• Instances where the individual is not well-attested in the English language, doesn't have their own article etc., so the displayed characters are necessary for disambiguation

---

Remsense留 17:35, 30 November 2023 (UTC)

I don't want to misrepresent Kanguole's viewpoint, but it seems like the objection stems from recommending usage of |author-mask= at all, and the comma is a separate objection.

It's true that last, first is not "wrong", and even in the now-removed Paragraph on commas I added, I called that out explicitly. I've even seen it in specialist works, although rarely.

It does – to me – look wrong. The comma tells my brain I should be thinking of the name in the opposite order, which is false. I've never seen a bibliography in a humanities topic work written or edited by a person with a Chinese name where authors with East Asian names are credited in last, first format. This might be sampling error, or it could be that I'm not the only person who thinks it looks wrong.

I don't care about consistency across articles (within articles is desirable) and I'm not tryna backdoor standardise last first as the only recommended practice. We currently recommend last, first in three of four examples, and I do think that here at the MOS:CHINA page, some guidance should be provided as to how editors can display the names of Chinese authors in the usual way. Folly Mox (talk) 05:41, 30 November 2023 (UTC)

I didn't say my objection was the same as Kanguole's, though I don't think I disagree with that one, either. Having a different rationale is why I wrote a different rationale. And "Family Given" without a comma is not "the usual way" in citations in English-language publications (that are using Family then Given order for everyone, the rest with commas), except within a particular sinological sphere of writing, and not universally within that sphere. This is all remind me uncomfortably strongly of WikiProject Birds trying for years to dictate that Wikipedia had to write common (vernacular) names of birds capitalized (and then later some of them pushed for it to apply to everything, like trying to move mammal articles to "Mountain Lion" and "Bottlenose Dolphin"), all based on the notion that because ornithology publications liked to do it (not all of them, and not general science journals publishing ornithology articles). It turned into several years of rancorous disruption. There's potential for that sort of outcome here. If you want citations to render as "Family Given" for Chinese and Japanese (and Korean? What about Hungarian? and ...?) authors, but render as "Family, Given" for everyone else, in citations all in the same article (i.e. to force citations to be inconsistent within the same article, despite a guideline at CITEVAR requiring them to be consistent), then I think that's a notion that needs to be put up for a site-wide RfC in a high-profile venue like VPPRO, to either adopt this as standard practice, reject it as one, or permit it by editorial consensus on an article-by-article basis.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:14, 30 November 2023 (UTC)

I don't view rendering the names of people from "Surname Given" cultures as last first, while rendering the names of people from "Given Surname" cultures as last, first, as a bibliographical inconsistency in violation of CITEVAR.

I'd oppose standardising last first almost as strongly as I'd oppose standardising last, first. I don't want a standard. I want a valid alternative to be presented as such. Folly Mox (talk) 12:13, 30 November 2023 (UTC)

And other editors will disagree with you, especially if they are, in a particular article, following a citation style that requires "Surname, Given" format. Remember that per CITEVAR, any attested citation style (used in English) that someone wants to use is permissible on Wikipedia as long as it is used consistently within an article. Is there a known English citation style that requires "Surname Given", no comma, for East Asian names? We have no need to exemplify in guidelines every conceivable citation style someone could come up with, especially not in an "I wish various citation styles didn't require 'Surname, Given' for East Asian names" activistic manner. But "Surname Given" might be worth illustrating as a possibility if some major off-site citation style that WP editors are sometimes using has actually codified this practice.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:36, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

I think it bears mentioning that so far the only one who's disagreed with this position is you. I don't really understand the meaning to the 'activist' characterization either. Everyone does what they do on here because they think it's correct or desirable, including discussing possible recommendations that people might find it useful to adhere to. Also, published style guides are not the only possible source for convention, WP:OR doesn't apply to policy/guidelines, otherwise Jimmy would've had to check out "how to make an internet encyclopedia" before starting.
Basically, there's this tone I'm sensing of "You do not have consensus/support/a reference point for this change you're proposing, so it doesn't seem worth it to discuss on the talk page, where consensus/support/a reference point may be discovered." Remsense留 02:39, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

There are only a handful of people in this discussion, most of them mired in sinology, so it is not even faintly surprising that that a few of them are in support of a specialied-style fallacy. Bring this up at a broader venue. People do what they do here, when they are being proper encyclopedists, because they think it is what is best for the project and the readers; when people try to do here what they think is "correct or desirable" for externally motivated reasons, then they are engaging in advocacy. Published citation style guides are the sources for citation styles; we permit them because editors are real-world familiar with them have a preference for them. In this kind of discussion, it is very meaningful whether any of them recommend an inconsistent "Family, Given" but for East Asian "Family Given" format, and if so whether this is showing up in more of them over time. This is exactly the kind of RS analysis we do on style guides all the time for deciding what our own style guide should advise. You are not approaching this as an MoS maintainer, you are approaching it as China wikiproject partcipant, but this is a site-wide style guideline maintained in step with the rest of our style guidelines, and is not owned by the wikiproject or subject to control by its participants. NOR certain does play a major factor in writing our style guide, since all of it (other that technical matters that are WP-specific) is based on evidence of what is done in other style guides and failing that what is done in the majority of reliable sources across English-language usage (no, not in particular categories; we don't write physics articles like physics journals do or write video game articles the way gamer magazines and websites do). There is extremely low tolerance among MoS editors (and watchlisters who don't edit MoS but are concerned about it) for adding changes to it that are not strongly supported by source evidence. This discussion among a tiny handful of editors is not like to produce a robust enough WP:CONLEVEL to effectuate changes that will affect at least tens of thousands of articles and their citations. Yes, have the discussion here (and why are you trying to chase me out of it simply because I disagree with you?), but if your goal is to implement "Family Given" output as a standard for East Asian names in citations, that's going to need to be a bigger discussion. If you want do this as some particular article you're the primary editor of, no one is likely to care, and it can be effectuated with |authorn-mask=. But recommending it as standard practice needs a broader discussion that four people on a talk page no one pays any attention to.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  10:01, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

I doubt there are many editors who follow a published citation style other than "do the syntax that the CS1 templates support this year". I have no idea what citation style is used by the dozens / hundreds of sources I see presenting Chinese names without the unnecessary comma, and no way of checking. The point is that it's very common and there's nothing wrong with it. The nearest physical book I had within reach at time of edit, published 1999 by Cambridge University Press, does exactly the thing where Western names are cited "Family, Given" while Chinese names are cited "Family Given".

I think there's not any attested published citation style guide that recommends bibcode, oclc, {{subscription required}}, |archive-date= + |archive-url=, etc., but we have those all over the place. There's also probably not a citation style guide that recommends roughly Chicago style bibliographical citations combined with roughly Harvard style author-date footnotes. That's also what we have, because the coders of the shortened footnotes templates went with author-date as their default instead of author-title.

SMcCandlish, I know you're kinda like the MOS ambassador and probably have way more familiarity with it and institutional memory about it than almost anyone else, but I'm finding it a little incongruous for you to be making a WP:CONLEVEL argument based on the essay Wikipedia:Specialized-style fallacy, which you created and still have 80% authorship of over a decade later. Folly Mox (talk) 12:24, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

Try posting "I doubt there are many editors who follow a published citation style other than ..." [whatever the rest of that meant, I wasn't able to parse it] to WT:CITE and see what kind of response you get. Ha ha. You must be happily unfamiliar with all the editors who are utterly adamant about using the citation styles on Wikipedia that they use professionally in their fields. They are immovable (which is why WP never settled on a single citation style like, well, every other publisher on the planet) and in some cases even aggressive about it, and there are quite a few of them. Anyway, no one said that zero publications exist that use the style you like. I've simply asked for any evidence it is condified in any major citation style(s). If not, then WP has no reason to promote it, since it is confusingly inconsistent from citation to citation.

The rest of these points, quickly: We include OCLCs, etc., as aids to finding sources, because there is an editorial consensus to do so, as something that is genuinely helpful for readers, and it doesn't conflict with or break any citation style to which it is added as an extra feature. No such consensus exists for the name formatting you like better. That some citations on WP mix elements from different off-site citation styles isn't really relevant; we don't have a collective editorial will to clean it up, and as long as it's done consistently within the same article, nothing is really broken; but we should not recommend doing this in a guideline. (And yes, sometimes we are kind of stuck with not-great decisions from a long time ago, like the {{Rp}} template I made back when, to quickly solve a real need at one article; it has since become common, but has been suprassed several years ago by CS1's |ref=, yet not systematically replaced despite being obsolete.) I am not making a CONLEVEL argument based on an essay. There is no such thing, really. I'm making a CONLEVEL argument based on CONLEVEL. I'm also, severably, referring to an essay which has been around for a long time and had considerable influence, because the reasoning in it is sound. It's not a rule, but it is a rationale. The nature of a WP essay is not that it's "cited" or "relied on", it's referred to as a spot at which a repeatedly needed argument has been written down once so it need not be written again and again every time it is needed. (There are handful of weird exceptions that are cited and relied on by the community as if guidelines or even policies, but which never had the {{Essay}} or variant tag changed for some reason. The only examples I can think of are WP:BRD, WP:AADD, WP:ROPE, WP:DUCK, WP:NOTHERE, WP:PURPOSE, WP:ENC, and the weird case of WP:5P which isn't tagged as anything.) Trying to dismiss anything on a "because you created it" argument is workable (see 1st section at WP:FOTROP; nominally about P&G material, it obviously also applies to essays or anything else). I kind of feel like you're reaching to find every possible point you can imagine to argue with me about, instead of trying to find codified and systematic evidence (i.e. a documented citation style) that supports the name formatting you like despite its troublesome inconsistency (not just random writers in random publications doing what you like). In the end, it is possible a consensus could come around to doing it your way without that evidence, but it would go a long way to convincing people.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  14:05, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

Anyway, I think a point that's been missed is that we're not advocating for adopting a different standard, just presenting multiple valid options. Folly Mox (talk) 12:48, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

That's just circular argument. Repeat: Do you have evidence of any published citation styles that require that formatting? If there aren't any, then it's not a citation style WP needs to illustrate, it's just advocacy of doing something inconsistent with names from one citation to another to suit personal ideas about what is "proper" or "best" for a particular class of those names.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  14:05, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

I think we've made our respective emphases clear enough, so I decided to try and provide the reference you're requesting, because I don't think it's an unreasonable point.

I looked at the 9th edition of the MLA Handbook from 2021, and the relevant section says:

In some languages, such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, the surname may be listed before the given name on the title page (fig. 5.12). Do not reverse the name in the works-cited list. When a name is not reversed, no comma is needed.

Shen Fu. Six Records of a Life Adrift. Translated by Graham Sanders, Hackett Publishing, 2011.

Fig. 5.12. Part of the title page of a book. The surname of the author is given first.

But some names from languages where the surname is normally listed first do not follow this order. Consult relevant parts of the work (like the introduction), a reference work, the author’s or publisher’s website, or writing by knowledgeable scholars for guidance on the order of the names. If the surname is given last, begin the entry with the surname followed by a comma and the rest of the name.

If we do recommend a single convention, I would be okay with adopting this one point-for-point.

References

Remsense留 23:25, 11 December 2023 (UTC)

I can live with or without the presence of a comma when printing a LAST FIRST (NATIVE) name, as it were. If the concern is merely about the comma, then I don't mind its recommendation. It is more ambiguous, but this is only really ever potentially an issue (in chinese names, at least) when the author has a one-character given name, which is to say, at a rate of maybe one to three sources in your average article. Remsense留 05:52, 30 November 2023 (UTC)

Surname–given name order in works cited (cont.)

Starting a fresh heading because the previous discussion is a bit tangled now. @SMcCandlish has reasonably requested an example of the style Surname Given, with no comma, being recommended by a published style guide.
I looked at the 9th edition of the MLA Handbook from 2021, and the relevant section says:

In some languages, such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, the surname may be listed before the given name on the title page (fig. 5.12). Do not reverse the name in the works-cited list. When a name is not reversed, no comma is needed.

Shen Fu. Six Records of a Life Adrift. Translated by Graham Sanders, Hackett Publishing, 2011.

Fig. 5.12. Part of the title page of a book. The surname of the author is given first.

But some names from languages where the surname is normally listed first do not follow this order. Consult relevant parts of the work (like the introduction), a reference work, the author’s or publisher’s website, or writing by knowledgeable scholars for guidance on the order of the names. If the surname is given last, begin the entry with the surname followed by a comma and the rest of the name.

If we do recommend a single convention, I would be okay with adopting this one point-for-point.

References

Remsense留 01:07, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

That's something at least. It's a "may" and "no comma is needed" rather than a "should/must" and "no comma is used". I wonder if any other major style guides are also headed this way.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:18, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

SMcCandlish, not quite—it says to use a comma or not based on the name order in the source, which is what may differ. Remsense留 02:18, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

Oh, well that's not encouraging then, since WP doesn't do anything like that. E.g., if in one of our articles we cited 2 books by the same author and each of them showed the name in variant formatting (Shen Fu in one case, Fu Shen in the other), we wouldn't [or at least most of us wouldn't] have the two citations confusingly give one name backwards from the one in the other citation as if they are two completely different people. That would verge on "user-hateful". Using templated citations, this wouldn't even be possible except with trickery involving the |author-mask= parameter (or misusing |author= as if the writer were mononymic). Anyway, it's probably at least a minor "win" for one side of this "What to do with such names?" question that one style guide so far is at least some of the time okay without the comma.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:43, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

Explicitly stating Taiwan as the COMMONNAME

It's come to my attention recently that

1. There is perennial confusion, especially among new editors, that "Taiwan" is the WP:COMMONNAME describing the ROC post-1949 all else being equal (well, I guess I already knew this), and
2. There has been an extensive deliberation that enshrined this as the written consensus.

Am I alright to add as such to this article? It is conspicuously absent. Remsense留 08:03, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

I've attempted to express the consensus starting with this discussion according to how I see it presently expressed, even though the discussion explicitly does not extend itself to other articles, it's clear enough to me that the underlying reasons can apply. Don't hesitate to revert and hash this out if you think I went too far. Remsense留 23:43, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

Excessive amount of rewriting

Just today alone I see a truly excessive amount of "rehape this in my own person idiom" editing, without any discussion for any of it. This is not how guideline changes are made, it tends to lead to mass-reverts and other disputation, and it casts doubt in community minds whether this is really a guideline or something that needs to be moved to WP:WikiProject China/Style advice and tagged as an essay. Doing typographic and code cleanup is one thing (maybe along with some objective structure and flow improvements), but it's quite another to be making so many actually substantive changes without any consensus discussion in support of them.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:50, 19 December 2023 (UTC)

I'll revert, and people can discuss changes they think are worthwhile. i am of a disposition where i can't merely copyedit a page i care about, but of course I wouldn't make edits to a policy page in my own idiom if i didn't feel safe about it also the consensus idiom. as you know, this started because of a minor headache regarding Taiwan that I wanted to prevent from recurring. But you're right, your reservations are warranted, and this is the process working—i just hope the sum of my contributions is a positive for the site and i don't just make messes for others to worry about.
if any consensus is reached, i will happy do the work to reintegrate whatever material so that this isn't its own mess for others to clean up in itself. Remsense留 04:11, 19 December 2023 (UTC)

Understood, got a bit carried away. SilverStar54 (talk) 06:02, 19 December 2023 (UTC)

In-article consistency

What we have now (due to someone reverting to it): 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.

What we should have again: If "China" or the "People's Republic of China" is used consistently in an article, it should not be arbitrarily changed. In many contexts, the terms are interchangeable: if China and People's Republic of China both seem appropriate, editors should use their own discretion. Or some blended version that still includes "used consistently in an article".

Someone absolutely should "arbitrarily" change a stray occurrence of one match the otherwise consistent usage of the other in the same article. On no style matter should we be veering back and forth confusingly, especially when it comes to names that may mean something different to different people. If you're going to use the short "China", then use it consistently and explain it at first occurrence (with a link or more textually) as referring to the PRC. If you're going to use the long version, then stick with it and use "PRC" for short as seems warranted.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:47, 19 December 2023 (UTC)

In this case, I disagree with the idea that articles should exclusively use one term or the other. This is not really a style difference but rather the usual term ("China") and the more precise official term ("People's Republic of China", abbreviated "PRC"). The main reasons to use the longer, more legalistic term are as part of an official phrase/title (like "Constitution of the People's Republic of China") and to avoid ambiguity in discussions of history and politics. It's reasonable and normal to use "People's Republic of China" once or twice in an article because of those considerations and "China" in the rest of the article. —Mx. Granger (talk · contribs) 15:26, 19 December 2023 (UTC)

Mx. Granger, conversely, there is a consistent issue in China-related articles where people insist on exclusively using People's Republic of China (etc.), either not realizing how awkward and artificial it sounds, or having some personal bugbear about doing so. Remsense留 20:13, 19 December 2023 (UTC)

Yes, I agree this is a problem. Similarly, I've noticed some Wikipedia articles about modern Taiwan use "Republic of China" repeatedly, even though "Taiwan" is more common in all but the most technical and legalistic of contexts. —Mx. Granger (talk · contribs) 02:20, 20 December 2023 (UTC)

I agree. An article is much more readable if the long and precise title is used once early on, and the shorter common name elsewhere. But there will be cases where the possibility of confusion requires more precision. Kanguole 18:52, 20 December 2023 (UTC)

Kangxi radical template/gloss

Another template that might tread on toes style-guide-wise, but I think is probably really worthwhile in some form? I wrote {{kxr}} this morning. I want to tweak it a bit more, but it only works by number right now, because by label will take a bit longer.

{{kxr|120}} → ⽷ 'SILK'

{{kxr|54|l=yes}} → ⼵ 'LONG STRIDE'

It uses small caps and boldface, but I really do think it's fine here, to distinguish from both regular texts and regular glosses. It uses the Unicode gloss for each Kangxi radical, but I also want to add positioned variants like ⺼, 爫, and 歺, etc. etc. But! I wanted to make sure people would find this useful before I put another few hours into it, and moreover don't actively hate it! Remsense聊 17:00, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

I can't see any purpose to either the bolding or the all-caps, most especially the all-caps. It appears to me (based on MOS:FOREIGN and MOS:SINGLE) that this should emit the character wrapped {{lang|zh}} (or equivalent bare HTML markup, like <span language="zh">...</span>), followed by the gloss in 'single quotes': ⼵ 'long stride'.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:46, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

I suppose I was drawing from templates more oriented towards character encoding, like {{unichar}} → U+2F35 ⼵ KANGXI RADICAL LONG STRIDE. It's almost a less-glossed gloss? Since the semantic meanings of the radicals are so broad and reified, it feels appropriate to potentially mark them up differently/make them appear as part of a set. But maybe I'm overfixated on the distinction?

Also, the character is tagged with lang="Und-Hani", since they are radicals and not characters assigned to phonetic language use per se.

Remsense聊 17:58, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

{{Unichar}} uses that format because it is conventional (not just within Wikipedia) to render the official names of Unicode code points that way. This is not true of glosses of Chinese radicals. It's kind of like deciding to render all names of video game characters in italics because you saw that italics were used for book titles. There's no connection between the subjects. Re: Und-Hani – sure, that makes sense.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:57, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

It's an oblique connection, but I figured it was worth trying out. I'll look at giving it a more canonical gloss style. Remsense聊 19:23, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

@Remsense: It's still rendering all-caps. This has been open a long time and people are already using this template "in the wild", so this needs to be fixed.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:43, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

I have at least one book where radical names are rendered this way: in all caps, single quotes. I am pretty sure it's used in a couple of my books, but I will have to check. It is certainly not the majority style, however. If presence in a couple relevant books is categorically not enough justification for the template's style, I will just change it.

References

Remsense留 22:02, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

When to include both character sets

I'm not sure whether my feeling is very rigorous, but it does seem there are instances where both simplified and traditional characters are supplied where the forms are similar enough that it does little but take up extra space. I do not know exactly how universal the knowledge of basic forms of both sets is, but it seems like it could be worthwhile to investigate a nuance in style policy here. For example, it seems potentially very wasteful when both forms of a word are given, but the only graphical distinction is the systematic simplification of a radical. Remsense留 08:02, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

I have the same feeling about cases where the difference is very slight, like 没 vs. 沒. For a case like 饭/飯 I'm inclined to err on the side of including both, as some of our readers will have very basic Chinese ability and may not know about systematic simplifications like those. I'm more inclined to include both forms in an infobox as opposed to a lead-sentence parenthetical, because I think long parentheticals can disrupt the flow of the lead. Also, I'm more inclined to include both forms, even if the differences are slight, when the article or term has strong ties to places that use different character sets (for instance, with topics related to cross-strait relations). The current guideline allows for case-by-case discretion, which might be better than trying to list all the relevant considerations, but I'm open to discussion. —Mx. Granger (talk · contribs) 21:04, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

I agree with Mx. Granger that we shouldn't drop one of the character sets just because the relationship can be guessed if you know about systematic simplications. But as suggested, I would support recommending infoboxes over long parentheticals, especially when the article needs to give both character sets and multiple romanizations. SilverStar54 (talk) 20:04, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

Suggested reworking of "Romanisation" section

What does everyone think of this as a reworking of the "Romanisation" section? Hopefully there's nothing controversial here. My main goal was to add clarifying details and improve the overall flow. I also replaced guidance that already exists more extensively at WP:NCZH with references to that page, to minimize duplication.

===Romanisation===

There are a number of systems used to romanise Chinese characters. English Wikipedia uses Hanyu Pinyin, with some minor exceptions outlined below. When using pinyin:

• Follow the established conventions for hyphens, spacing, apostrophes, and other parts of pinyin orthography (see WP:NCZH#Orthography)
• Follow MOS:FOREIGNITALIC for when to use italics. In general, use italics for terms that have not been assimilated into English, but do not use italics for the names of people, places, or groups.
• See below for where and how to use tone marks

If a source uses a non-pinyin or non-standard spelling, it should be converted into pinyin. Consider also providing the source's spelling to ease verification by other users.

Even where the title of an article uses a non-pinyin romanisation, romanisations of other Chinese words within the article should still be in pinyin. For example, Tsingtao Brewery is a trademark which uses a non-pinyin romanisation, but an article talking about Tsingtao Brewery should still use the pinyin spelling when talking about Qingdao city:

Correct: Tsingtao Brewery Co., Ltd. is located in Qingdao city, Shandong.

Incorrect: Tsingtao Brewery Co., Ltd. is located in Tsingtao city, Shan-tung. or Tsingtao Brewery Co., Ltd. is located in Tsingtao city, Shandong.

====When to use romanisations other than pinyin====

Articles should use a non-pinyin spelling of a term if that spelling is used by the clear majority of modern, reliable, secondary sources (see WP:NC-ZH for examples). If the term does not have its own article, the pinyin romanisation should be given in a parenthetical. For example,

The Hung Ga style Ng Ying Hung Kuen (Chinese: 五形洪拳; pinyin: Wǔxíng Hóngquán) traces its ancestry to Ng Mui.

Relatedly, note that systems of Chinese language romanization in Taiwan (the Republic of China) are far less standardized than in mainland China. Hanyu Pinyin has been the official standard since 2009, but systems such Wade–Giles, Gwoyeu Romatzyh, Tongyong Pinyin, and Chinese postal romanization remain in use for both personal and place names. In Taiwan, place names derived from Hanyu Pinyin rarely use the syllable-dividing apostrophe. For example, write Daan District, Taipei City, not Da'an District, Taipei City. SilverStar54 (talk) 19:59, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

SilverStar54, I think it's a good reorganization. — Remsense诉 23:15, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

@Remsense I see you've already added this to the article. Can you remove it? I'd like to get feedback from more users before adding it to the article. SilverStar54 (talk) 17:10, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

Suggested reworking of "Romanisation" section

What does everyone think of this as a reworking of the "Romanisation" section? Hopefully there's nothing controversial here. My main goal was to add clarifying details and improve the overall flow. I also replaced guidance that already exists more extensively at WP:NCZH with references to that page, to minimize duplication.

===Romanisation===

There are a number of systems used to romanise Chinese characters. English Wikipedia uses Hanyu Pinyin, with some minor exceptions outlined below. When using pinyin:

• Follow the established conventions for hyphens, spacing, apostrophes, and other parts of pinyin orthography (see WP:NCZH#Orthography)
• Follow MOS:FOREIGNITALIC for when to use italics. In general, use italics for terms that have not been assimilated into English, but do not use italics for the names of people, places, or groups.
• See below for where and how to use tone marks

If a source uses a non-pinyin or non-standard spelling, it should be converted into pinyin. Consider also providing the source's spelling to ease verification by other users.

Even where the title of an article uses a non-pinyin romanisation, romanisations of other Chinese words within the article should still be in pinyin. For example, Tsingtao Brewery is a trademark which uses a non-pinyin romanisation, but an article talking about Tsingtao Brewery should still use the pinyin spelling when talking about Qingdao city:

Correct: Tsingtao Brewery Co., Ltd. is located in Qingdao city, Shandong.

Incorrect: Tsingtao Brewery Co., Ltd. is located in Tsingtao city, Shan-tung. or Tsingtao Brewery Co., Ltd. is located in Tsingtao city, Shandong.

====When to use romanisations other than pinyin====

Articles should use a non-pinyin spelling of a term if that spelling is used by the clear majority of modern, reliable, secondary sources (see WP:NC-ZH for examples). If the term does not have its own article, the pinyin romanisation should be given in a parenthetical. For example,

The Hung Ga style Ng Ying Hung Kuen (Chinese: 五形洪拳; pinyin: Wǔxíng Hóngquán) traces its ancestry to Ng Mui.

Relatedly, note that systems of Chinese language romanization in Taiwan (the Republic of China) are far less standardized than in mainland China. Hanyu Pinyin has been the official standard since 2009, but systems such Wade–Giles, Gwoyeu Romatzyh, Tongyong Pinyin, and Chinese postal romanization remain in use for both personal and place names. In Taiwan, place names derived from Hanyu Pinyin rarely use the syllable-dividing apostrophe. For example, write Daan District, Taipei City, not Da'an District, Taipei City. SilverStar54 (talk) 19:59, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

SilverStar54, I think it's a good reorganization. — Remsense诉 23:15, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

@Remsense I see you've already added this to the article. Can you remove it? I'd like to get feedback from more users before adding it to the article. SilverStar54 (talk) 17:10, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

Pinyin usage in topics related to the late Qing Dynasty and Republican Eras on the Mainland

Hi! A user argued in WP:PINYIN for usage of pinyin. This makes sense with post-1949 articles about Mainland China and/or general about individuals loyal to the CCP. However, I think both Pinyin and old postal system names/other romanizations of cities should be used in late Qing Dynasty and Republican Era-related articles, as those spellings were used at the time. Also, IMO individuals who died in the Republican Era and/or were loyal to the KMT should likely use the non-standard romanizations. WhisperToMe (talk) 03:31, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

This has been discussed before; see Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Chinese)/Archive 14#Historical names of Chinese places for a recent discussion of a similar topic. Most modern sources use pinyin as the standard transliteration of Chinese terms from all periods of Chinese history. It's sometimes useful to provide another transliteration in parentheses to help readers who may be using older sources, but our default should be pinyin. There are exceptions for the unusual cases (e.g. Sun Yat-sen and Hong Kong) where a different transliteration is clearly more common in modern reliable sources. —Mx. Granger (talk · contribs) 13:47, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

Mx. Granger said it better than I could. It would be really confusing to readers if we changed romanization systems based on the historical time period. We should keep things as straightforward as possible. SilverStar54 (talk) 19:03, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

I posted responses to Talk:Kweilin_incident. Based on the discussion, I felt the outcome would be to retain pinyin for Mainland Chinese cities, but I indicated the old spellings in parenthenses because one key source (Gregory Crouch's book) uses the old spellings. I indicated aspects about the particular people on the discussion page, with at least one using a particular non-standard romanization of his name during his lifetime. WhisperToMe (talk) 22:06, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

WhisperToMe, parenthetically including alternate romanizations is overly clunky in the vast majority of cases. There's a reason {{Infobox Chinese}} exists. — Remsense诉 23:17, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

Infobox Chinese works for introducing various romanizations of the main article's subject. But when introducing multiple romanizations of a time period (for example, looking at an article subject set in the late Qing/Republican eras, when relevant documents and even some modern secondary sources use extensive Postal System romanization), one can't put all of the romanizations of each term used in a single template. Also expecting a reader to click-click-click multiple articles to see multiple romanizations of each term isn't ideal because many readers don't want to do that work. Now, footnoting them might be a possibility. WhisperToMe (talk) 23:21, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

WhisperToMe, I think in this specific case, since both characters and an alternate transliteration may be provided, footnoting is the best option. — Remsense诉 23:41, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

I went ahead and footnoted them! WhisperToMe (talk) 00:04, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

I like the footnoting approach WhisperToMe took in the Kweilin Incident article, and I agree with @Remsense that it's superior to putting the alternate romanizations in paranetheses, which interrupts the flow of the text. I would support recommending this as part of the guide if it's supported by other users as well. SilverStar54 (talk) 17:02, 19 January 2024 (UTC)

A few suggestions (Mar 2024)

• When to include characters — I think it may be worthwhile and not CREEP-y to explicate that characters for a term may be included if the prose is specifically talking about the graphical form of the character, or is comparing characters.

• Almost all methods of emphasis are bad emphasis, but it's hard to know what to do with characters sometimes—in general, I think double-underlining as facilitated by {{uuline}} is likely the best technique we have when we would like to emphasize a character:

  Posthumous name
  Emperor Qintian Lüdao Yingyi Shengshen Xuanwen Guangwu Hongren Daxiao Su
  欽天履道英毅聖神宣文廣武洪仁大孝肅皇帝

  This should be a logical last resort, though.

Remsense诉 04:21, 4 March 2024 (UTC)