Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Chinese)

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Contents 1 railway stations 2 Requested moves of tai chi chuan-related articles 3 Chinese "(linguistics)" 4 Chinese "(linguistics)" continued 5 NPOV section is deadlocked? 6 Breaking deadlock 6.1 Identification of common names using external references 7 Should ROC government be called "ROC" or "Taiwan side"? 8 How to refer to civil aviation authorities of the Republic of China 9 Linguistics and related boxes: Please make distinctions 10 UTF8 not allowed? 11 China or PRC? 12 Guidelines for "China" vs. "PRC" usage 13 Apostrophes! 14 Naming convention for Chinese foods and usages of Wikitionary

[edit] railway stations

Some editors argue that all the railway stations in China should use pinyin, even for the places whose titles are different from pinyin, for example Geermu railway station in Golmud and Kashi railway station in Kashgar. They argue that "railway station is not city, it has its own naming system". I don't think so. The current naming convention prescribes that "Railway Station articles should have the city's name..." There is no reason to create a different naming system for the railway station's place name. A railway station should be identical to its place's name. Another issue is the capitalization. The current naming convention requires to capitalize Railway Station, but almost all the station articles lowercase railway station now. I am neutral on this issue. But if we decide to lowercase railway station, we need to change the rule in the convention. Thanks. --Neo-Jay (talk) 18:54, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

See also Talk:Geermu_railway_station Python eggs (talk) 19:20, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Besides, the China railway tickets and ticketing system use pinyin as latin station name officially. Python eggs (talk) 19:22, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

User:Yao Ziyuan gave no evidence at Talk:Geermu railway station except a picture of a board at the station and it may not be very authoritative. Even it does not use a proper pinyin form. Do you want to move Geermu railway station to Ge Er Mu railway station, as the board shows? By Google Search, there are 611 hits for "Golmud railway station", including this article of China Daily and this article of Xinhua News Agency, while there are only 108 hits for "Geermu railway station", many of which are wiki cites. By the way, do you know the proper pinyin of 格尔木 should be Ge'ermu, not Geermu? Again, by Google search, there are 1,310 hits for "Ürümqi railway station" and only 54 hits for "Wulumuqi railway station"; and there are 5,560 hits for "Lhasa railway station" and only 185 hits for "Lasa railway station". It clearly shows which one is the common usage. I noticed that you redirected Lasa railway station to Lhasa railway station at 17:34, 29 June 2006. Do you want to reverse it? As for the ticketing system, please provide evidence. Even if it's true, it does not trump the Common Names Convention. --Neo-Jay (talk) 19:27, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Evidence:

Besides, I suppose Beijing west railway station should be located at Beijing Xi Railway Station. Python eggs (talk) 20:19, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

The official latin station names could be found in book 《铁路客运运价里程表》 published by China Railway Press, ISBN 9787113032579 Python eggs (talk) 20:21, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

You actually have not answered any of my questions. Do you want to move Lhasa railway station to Lasa railway station? This is English Wikipedia. Why the Chinese tickets should trump the common name convention? --Neo-Jay (talk) 20:25, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

I believe Lhasa railway station should be named as Lasa Railway Station. But I will not move it until consensus is made. Python eggs (talk) 20:32, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for your respecting the consensus, not just following your personal belief. But we already have consensus in Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Chinese): "Railway Station articles should have the city's name..." If you can respect the consensus for Lhasa's railway station (it's you that created Lhasa railway station at 16:46, 29 June 2006), then why not also respect the consensus for Golmud and Kashgar's railway stations? --Neo-Jay (talk) 20:48, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

According to 汉语拼音方案:

a，o，e开头的音节连接在其他音节后面的时候，如果音节的界限发生混淆，用隔音符号（'）隔开，例如： pi'ao（皮袄）。

In case of Geermu, I suppose there's no confuse issue, so ' should not be added. Python eggs (talk) 20:29, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

That's fine. --Neo-Jay (talk) 20:48, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

I guess this one bothers me, too. I consistently use "Erenhot" rather than "Erlianhaote", given that "Erenhot" is the correct name in Mongolian (actually known as "Eren" in Mongolia itself). But I was disturbed to find that the Chinese authorities show little respect for the local name. When I was there, I seem to remember the name on the station building being "Erlianhaote" in English.

I find this insensitive and arrogant on the part of the Han Chinese, but there is no use being PC about it if the practice on the ground is to use the pinyin romanisation rather than the correct local name.

Bathrobe (talk) 02:12, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

Per the common name convention, we should use the common name for a railway station in all reliable sources in English world including newspaper, publications, websites, etc, not just the train tickets and the boards at the stations. Wikipedia is written for all readers, not just for the actual passengers. Considering all the relevant sources (see the Google Search I made above), I think that the city's name, not its pinyin, should be the title of the railway station.--Neo-Jay (talk) 03:18, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the clarification. I can talk for all reliable sources in the English world (including newspaper, publications, websites, etc), but a quick google of "erenhot train station" and "erlian train station" reveals the following:

erenhot train station: 3 results

erlian train station: 64 results

erlianhaote railway station: 9 results

erlian railway station: 8 results

Nothing for "eren train station", "eren railway station", "erenhot railway station", etc. Not sure where that leaves us.

Bathrobe (talk) 07:12, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

Let us exercise some common sense here. Pinyin is not English. Let me propose a comprehensive solution:

• The standard naming convention is [pinyin(city name)] Railway Station, with Railway Station capitalized. I personally do not have to time to move them all. But for most Chinese railway stations where there is no dispute, it should follow this convention. I.e. Beijing railway station.
• For any railway station attached to a direction', e.g. Beijing West, it should follow the English convention of Beijing West railway station, with West capitalized. It should also have a redirect from Beijing Xi Railway Station for confused users reading off pinyin on their train tickets.
• For any railway stations with an ethnically recognized non-chinese transliterated name by the PRC, such as Urumqi, Hohhot, Golmud, Kashgar, and Harbin, it is simply tedious and unnecessary to make pinyin the standard (for this it is best to use the standards of their government websites), but you can redirect the pinyin entries in the unlikely event that users are searching for these entries from their train tickets (which are in pinyin only).

Some of the railway stations, like Erenhot, is too peculiar to find on the web anyway. Doing a Google search does not justify naming it the Erlianhaote Railway Station. But because train tickets to Erenhot only say "Er lian", then it is useful to have a redirect from Er Lian Railway Station.

That is my take. Colipon+(T) 10:21, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

I agree that the railway station should use the city's name, not just its pinyin. As for the capitalization, do you support to capitalized Railway Station (your examples still lowercase railway station)? It seems that railway stations in the United Kingdom are lowercased (e.g., see this), while the stations in the United States are capitalized (e.g., see this). I don't know which style should be applied to China. I hope we can come to some consensus. Thanks. --Neo-Jay (talk) 10:51, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

I'd go with capitalized. It's more formal. Colipon+(T) 05:35, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Requested moves of tai chi chuan-related articles

A number of requested moves of articles related to tai chi chuan, part of Category:T'ai Chi Ch'uan, are being discussed at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Martial arts. (One issue is appropriate pinyin.) Please feel free to join the discussion there if interested. — AjaxSmack 00:57, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Chinese "(linguistics)"

I would like to contest the convention of adding the tag "(linguistics)" after high-level divisions of Chinese. I'm not advocating a return to the language/dialect debate, but "(linguistics)" is inappropriate for several reasons, and there are other perfectly good workarounds.

Problems with the current situation:

• The tag "(linguistics)" is inaccurate. The articles aren't restricted to linguistics, nor are the terms "Mandarin" etc. specifically linguistic topics, nor are they technical terms, the way, say, register (linguistics) is. "Taiwanese (linguistics)" is even worse: linguistically, Taiwanese is not even a coherent concept the way Mandarin is. Rather, AFAIK it is several Hokkien dialects which happen to be spoken in Taiwan; there is nothing linguistically to unite them again the rest of Hokkien. In addition, Taiwanese Mandarin would have equal claim to being to topic of "Taiwanese (linguistics)".
• The tag treats Chinese as abnormal. It's not used for any other language family (we don't have an article named "Galician (linguistics)", or "Swabian (linguistics)", for example), and therefore singles out Chinese in a way that is not justified by the situation. There are many dialect continua which speakers consider to be a single language despite a lack of mutual intelligibility, but we don't treat any of them this way.
• It is awkward and aesthetically displeasing. Okay, that's a minor offense, but the page title is the first thing our readers see.

Proposed workarounds:

• The very first guideline of the naming conventions is to "Use the most easily recognized name". The customary English expressions for these lects are "Mandarin" or "Mandarin Chinese", "Wu Chinese", "Hakka" or "Hakka Chinese", etc. This is parallel to the situations in other dialect continua, as can be seen in Swabian German, Bernese German (which are not mutually intelligible), etc. In the case of Cantonese, IMO the single word is best; for Mandarin, either the single word (moving the disambig page) or the phrase (personally, I prefer the latter), and with all other primary branches, "X Chinese". There are objections to doing this with Hakka, because of the Hakka people. However, this is no different than the case of German, and a 'see also' tag at the top of the page is sufficient to take care of this.
• Another possibility for lects like Wu would be "dialects": Wu dialects and Min dialects make no claim as to whether Wu and Min are themselves separate languages or dialects of Chinese, nor do they specify whether their various dialects are all mutually intelligible. This would not work for Mandarin, which has a separate dialects article, but would for the others.
• Taiwanese requires a different approach. Since there is also Taiwanese Mandarin, I think Taiwanese Hokkien would be appropriate, but perhaps best would be to "Use the most easily recognized name" and simply call it Taiwanese, moving what we now have there to Taiwanese (disambiguation).

Altogether, this would involve the following changes:

Current location		Proposal A (common expressions)	Proposal B
Mandarin (linguistics)		Mandarin Chinese	Mandarin
Wu (linguistics)		Wu Chinese	Wu dialects
Hakka (linguistics)		Hakka Chinese	Hakka dialects
Cantonese (linguistics)		Cantonese	Cantonese dialects
Taiwanese (linguistics)		Taiwanese	Taiwanese Hokkien

We could mix & match, of course. kwami (talk) 23:34, 21 September 2008 (UTC)

Eminently sensible suggestions. The use of the term "linguistics" is actually quite amateurish, and represents a rather unsophisticated view of the field. No real place for this usage on a decent encyclopaedia.

Bathrobe (talk) 01:12, 22 September 2008 (UTC)

Good. I thought I might have a fight on my hands. Although I thought when I wrote this section that the "(linguistics)" tag isn't used for any other languages, it turns out I was wrong: I've now found a few other cases as well, originally justified by these Chinese articles, and then more justified by those secondary articles. One of these is Flemish (linguistics); Flemish isn't even a single dialect of Dutch, but two, and so has no purely linguistic justification (sociolinguistics, maybe). Then there's Swiss German (linguistics), Swiss French (linguistics), and Swiss Italian (linguistics)—again, not coherent units from a traditional linguistic point of view. And then I found that someone's been going through Ethnologue and creating an "X (linguistics)" stub for every lect in Australia that Ethnologue lists as a separate language but which Dixon et al. classify as a dialect of another language. What a mess. kwami (talk) 02:20, 22 September 2008 (UTC)

In general, I can accept either ‘current location’ or ‘proposal A’. ‘Proposal B’ is somewhat problematic (as it involves the word ‘dialect(s)’ albeit in the plural, which gets us back to the ‘language’/‘dialect’ debates, alas). – Kaihsu (talk) 08:26, 22 September 2008 (UTC)

I prefer A over B as well, but didn't want to make it an all-or-nothing proposal. We could also take some from A and some from B if you like. kwami (talk) 09:33, 22 September 2008 (UTC)

I prefer A. I think we should give an article the most commonly searched term. No one would seriously search for "something (linguistics)". Also calling the language "Taiwanese Hokkien" will anger some Taiwanese independence supporters who would not tolerate having any connection with mainland China or having the language being described as a subset of another language. So I think we should avoid that argument at first place.--pyl (talk) 12:25, 22 September 2008 (UTC)

Okay, it's been a couple days and it's 4 to nothing in favor of A. I'll change the conventions, and then if we still agree on it, we can start on the articles.

People have objected to everything in B except the first, "Mandarin". Anyone in favor of "Mandarin" rather than "Mandarin Chinese"? kwami (talk) 01:52, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

I don't think proposal A and B can work. Both proposal does not fit into Sino-Tibetan languages, Spoken Chinese or any academicly known forms. It is half and half with some hua (話) put in the same category as yue (語). Vice versa. There is nothing wrong with (linguistics) for the time being. By sound, every one of them is different. Therefore it is technically correct to just call them individually a linguistics. Benjwong (talk) 02:16, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

But calling them "a linguistics" is not English. Besides, many are called either 話 or 語 according to the author, and in any case it is arguable whether these terms have exact English equivalents.

What do you mean by "do not fit into any academically known forms"? kwami (talk) 02:36, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

It's important that commenting editors read the archives. We have both Mandarin (linguistics) and Standard Mandarin. One is a spectrum of dialects (both modern and historical) and the other is a fixed modern language. That's why we used the terminology we did. The same is true with Cantonese (linguistics) and Standard Cantonese. Badagnani (talk) 02:48, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

But this solution has nothing to do with the contents of the articles. Standard Mandarin and Cantonese are just as much a part of linguistics as the Mandarin and Cantonese languages, so "Mandarin (linguistics)" could just as easily be used for Standard Mandarin as it can for Mandarin as a whole. Since there is no clear way to say "all the lects called Mandarin" and "all the lects called Cantonese" in English, anything we choose will need disambiguation. Meanwhile, the (linguistics) tag is factually incorrect. kwami (talk) 03:12, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

When I suggested academically known forms earlier. I was referring to some form that is already widely accepted. Proposal A uses common expressions, but that is hardly considered common. I am not aware of people saying "Wu Chinese" or "Hakka Chinese". Proposal B is based on the fact that some are dialects, some are not. But this varies. Because Cantonese itself could be considered an entire language if Written Cantonese can be considered official. But it really isn't etc etc. It gets complex. Badagnani has a point about archived discussion too. Benjwong (talk) 02:52, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

I have heard/seen people say & write "Wu Chinese", "Hakka Chinese", etc. Not particularly common, but then "Wu" & "Hakka" themselves are not common in English. (Most Hakka in the US are astounded that I even recognize the term.) I have never in my life heard anyone describe Wu or Hakka as "linguistics".

("Hakka Chinese" gets 23k hits on Google. "Wu Chinese" gets 66k.)

You misunderstand proposal B. "Wu dialects" only means that Wu is composed of several dialects, which is clearly true. It has nothing to do with whether Wu itself is considered a dialect of Chinese or a language in its own right.

Whether a language has an official written form has little to do with it being a language, though of course that does play into popular conceptions. The whole point of saying "Wu dialects" instead of "Wu language" or "Wu dialect" is to avoid precisely this issue. But it's irrelevant, as no-one wanted proposal B. kwami (talk) 03:06, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

It's important that editors read the archives before commenting. The distinction between the articles Mandarin (linguistics) and Standard Mandarin, and Cantonese (linguistics) and Standard Cantonese, were not addressed in the above comments. Badagnani (talk) 03:10, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

They were addressed, if indirectly. Primary branches of Chinese go by their name alone or by "xxx Chinese". Lower branches go by "xxx dialect" or "xxx (name of primary branch)". It's clear by the examples that standardized registers are to be treated as dialects for naming purposes, as would Beijing Mandarin & Hong Kong Cantonese. The only difference from the original format is that the tag "(linguistics)" is either removed or replaced with "Chinese". The differences between Mandarin-in-the-broad-sense and Standard Mandarin have nothing that I can see to do with this issue: (linguistics) has nothing to do with "primary branch of Chinese", and its removal has nothing to do with language standardization. The difference between "Mandarin Chinese" and "Standard Mandarin" is just as clear—or unclear—as the difference between "Mandarin (linguistics)" and "Standard Mandarin", or "English language" and "Received Pronunciation", for that matter, or "Spanish language" and "Castillian Spanish". It has the additional benefit of not being an amateurish misuse or the term "linguistics". kwami (talk) 03:27, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

To user Kwami please stay away from the google counter comparison. That method only makes sense assuming every book and source is scanned, and it isn't. Linguistic basically assumes everything has a unique sound. Which is why it is "enough" for now. I'll admit it has flaws too. Proposal A also wouldn't work. As clearly Cantonese Chinese characters is based on the same set as Mandarin Chinese characters. Again, this is a circular debate. Benjwong (talk) 03:20, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

I agree that Google counting isn't very reliable. However, it does show that the phrases "Hakka Chinese" are used in English precisely as I have indicated. This is not a circular debate: The current system is incorrect. Because it is wrong, we need to correct it. You haven't given any intelligible reason that proposal A won't work as its replacement. kwami (talk) 03:27, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

Linguistic basically assumes everything has a unique sound. I'm sorry, I'm totally unable to make sense of this statement, which appears to be the heart of Benjewong's argument.

Bathrobe (talk) 06:29, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

Proposal A would also make the naming convention of these articles parallel to Arabic: Maghrebi Arabic, Najdi Arabic, Hassaniya, etc. (Arabic and Chinese are the two exceptions mentioned in the naming conventions, due to the conflict between the conceptions of language and dialect.) kwami (talk) 08:12, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

I think Kwamikagami misunderstood the "(linguistics)" tag. It is not to be taken as a countable noun in the sense of "a linguistics", but to indicate that the article "Taiwanese (linguistics)" is an article within the discipline of Linguistics, rather than, say, an article about the people from Taiwan. By the way, for Proposal A to be adopted, it needs to trump not just Proposal B but also the status quo ("current location"). – Kaihsu (talk) 20:08, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

'"Taiwanese (linguistics)" is even worse: linguistically, Taiwanese is not even a coherent concept the way Mandarin is. Rather, AFAIK it is several Hokkien dialects which happen to be spoken in Taiwan; there is nothing linguistically to unite them again the rest of Hokkien. In addition, Taiwanese Mandarin would have equal claim to being to topic of "Taiwanese (linguistics)".' I find little factual content in these statements. – Kaihsu (talk) 20:11, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

The "a linguistics" wording comes from Benjwong. That's not how I interpreted it. My problem is that

(a) Mandarin, Taiwanese, etc. are not particularly linguistic concepts; they're simply language lects. Titling an article "Mandarin (linguistics)" is like having an article "Saturday (astronomy)". It's gobbledygook. Taiwanese (linguistics) is not "an article within the discipline of Linguistics". Language articles are treated with linguistics, but there's more to a language than just the study of it. What "Taiwanese (linguistics)" is saying is that the Taiwanese language (using "language" in its generic sense) is a concept of linguistics, and does not exist outside the field of linguistics. This is obviously ridiculous: You don't need to know anything about linguistics to know what Taiwanese is.

(b) the (linguistics) tag does not differentiate these articles except through arbitrary convention. Why shouldn't Standard Mandarin be the lect that is tagged "linguistics"? It's just as linguistic as Mandarin as a whole is. Why not have Chinese (linguistics)? This is like saying that the W. African four-day week will be titled four-day week, and to keep things clear, the European seven-day week will be renamed week (astronomy). How does that make anything clear? Neither has any more to do with astronomy than the other, and neither is a particularly astronomical subject. Or maybe we could redirect the yuan to "Chinese dollar", and the US dollar to "dollar (economics)", as if the Chinese currency had nothing to do with economics. The title "Mandarin (linguistics)" is just as ridiculous. kwami (talk) 20:50, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

I see your point; and with your line of thinking, I can see that Proposal A may have certain advantages over the status quo. Since I am ambivalent between Proposal A and the status quo, this shall be my final comment on the matter. For the avoidance of doubt, I cannot accept Proposal B. – Kaihsu (talk) 21:02, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

Fair enough. I thought that maybe giving some alternatives would spark a debate on the exact wording we should have, but the wording in A doesn't seem to be an issue. kwami (talk) 21:11, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

"Ethnologue" uses "Chinese, Wu", "Chinese, Mandarin", etc. [1].

How common something is in actual use is a difficult point. The original rationale for "Wu (linguistics)" (for example) is that the concept of Wu Chinese, Wu dialects, or whatever else you might want to call it was a concept embraced only by linguists, with no recognised social reality. In other words, neither Chinese speakers nor English speakers have the foggiest notion that these dialects actually form some kind of coherent whole. Thus the use of the tag "linguistics".

This has a certain logic, but unfortunately leads to the very messy and, from the point of view of the linguist, illogical situation we now have. After all, linguistics is not just about identifying dialect continuums that are below the general consciousness; it also includes the fields of sociolinguistics, language planning, etc., which are very much concerned with entities like "Standard Mandarin" or "Standard Written Cantonese", etc. That's the problem that Kwami has picked up on. It's fine to add the tag "linguistics" to identify entities that linguists, but not the general public, have discerned, but it really is a distortion of the term "linguistics".

Bathrobe (talk) 02:26, 25 September 2008 (UTC)

I may be wrong here, but I believe most Chinese are aware of at least Mandarin, Cantonese, and Hakka as discrete units that are mutually unintelligible. kwami (talk) 05:38, 25 September 2008 (UTC)

You are right. And indeed, Cantonese (linguistics) redirects to Cantonese. But the reason that Mandarin (linguistics) exists is because of a discrepancy between the concept of Standard Mandarin (or putonghua), a well-known concept, and the concept of a family of Mandarin dialects, a construct known purely to linguists. What Chinese speakers refer to is 北方话 (beifanghua, northern speech), which doesn't include Southwest Mandarin (eg Sichuanese). Southwest Mandarin is not considered by Chinese speakers as Beifanghua. Beifanghua and Sichuanhua are different and separate animals in the normal way of referring to things, and it is only linguists who put them together. That's why we have an article on "Mandarin (linguistics)" separate from the article on Standard Mandarin.

Bathrobe (talk) 09:03, 25 September 2008 (UTC)

Disagree, keep status quo The discussion above is rather complex, so forgive me if I've missed some points, but I'd suggest some flaws in the original proposals:

• Proposal B uses dialect. I'd suggest that no title should use the words 'language' or 'dialect' where the lect's status is disputed, in accordance with NPOV (see Varieties of Chinese). Wu dialects strongly implies that Wu is a dialect or group of dialects.
• The problem with 'Use the most easily recognized name' is that some of these names are used for several other things too. Proposal A means messing with the Mandarin and Taiwanese articles, which are rightly dabs. We'd have to edit a vast number of articles that link ambiguously to them.

kwami, I agree that that (linguistics) is an ugly fudge and an arbitrary convention, but it avoids those flaws and treats all the relevant topics (major subdivisions of the Sino-Tibetan language family that primarily use Chinese characters??) in the same way. Can you come up with a scheme that avoids the two pitfalls I've mentioned? Matt's talk 09:29, 25 September 2008 (UTC)

Proposal A suggests "Mandarin Chinese"; Mandarin would stay as a disamb. If we borrow B's suggestion of "Taiwanese Hokkien" and use A for everything else, then everything is peachy keen. To wit:

Current location		Proposal C
Mandarin (linguistics)		Mandarin Chinese
Wu (linguistics)		Wu Chinese
Hakka (linguistics)		Hakka Chinese
Cantonese		Cantonese
Taiwanese (linguistics)		Taiwanese Hokkien

Note that Cantonese (linguistics) was already moved a few days back to Cantonese, and a violent uproar failed to result, so I'd be happy to keep it there. Jpatokal (talk) 11:01, 25 September 2008 (UTC)

Okay, I think we agree on everything except maybe the last. Pyl thought that "Taiwanese Hokkien" would spark protest, but didn't personally object. Is there anyone who personally objects to "Taiwanese Hokkien", keeping the parallel to "Taiwanese Mandarin"? (There are, after all, a lot of Taiwanese who don't speak Hokkien.) kwami (talk) 15:01, 25 September 2008 (UTC)

Matt, moving to "Taiwanese" would only require redirecting 50 articles, which could be done with AWB in about 15 minutes. Most of those articles need to be cleaned up anyway, as they should point to [[Taiwan]]ese, not to a dab. [Done] So the question is whether we want to encourage people to link to a dab, or make it obvious that they need to do better by making the Taiwanese page more specific. kwami (talk) 15:20, 25 September 2008 (UTC)

The above proposals are highly problematic in that they ignore (despite repeated posts pointing this out) the distinctions between the Cantonese dialects and Standard Cantonese, and between the Mandarin dialects and Standard Mandarin. Badagnani (talk) 15:51, 25 September 2008 (UTC)

But the current convention also ignores this distinction, so I fail to see how this is a valid objection. Besides, that's what "see also" tags are used for with every other language.

Do you have a better suggestion? kwami (talk) 15:54, 25 September 2008 (UTC)

I personally prefer Proposal B. Mutual intelligibility is not the only criterion for defining separate languages. The term "dialect" is used in English because most of these lects don't have an official standard language, or even necessarily a native-speaker consciousness that they belong together. How many Chinese speakers say they speak Wu dialect? Most people say they speak Shanghai-hua or Ningbo-hua or Suzhou-hua or whatever. People recognise that they are "similar" to each other, but don't necessarily use terms like "Wu Chinese" or "Wu language" to express that similarity. That is why I don't find "dialect" problematic. While linguistically it may be possible to recognise them as a single "language", they don't have the full set of features of a fully-fledged "language" in a political or social sense. That is, they don't have a fully operating native script, the higher reaches of the social continuum are occupied by putonghua, and there is no consciousness among native speakers that the Wu dialects actually constitute a coherent group. So "dialects", as a group of lects without a unifying consciousness as a single language, is an acceptable term as far as I'm concerned.

Bathrobe (talk) 01:07, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Yes, it's acceptable to me too. However, I think that many people will object on the misunderstanding that we mean "dialect". The whole reason for this silly (linguistics) tag was to get away from the language-dialect debate, and a lot of people won't notice the s at the end—this has already happened in this discussion. There's also the problem that "dialect" has negative connotations in English, that it's somehow not a legitimate language. And finally, there's a Mandarin dialects article that's distinct from Mandarin (linguistics). Given the strong opposition already expressed to B, I think it's better we drop it. kwami (talk) 02:06, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

So far not one of these proposals really fit. You guys are making moves without final consent. Can someone explain why Cantonese (linguistics) was moved to Cantonese? I don't understand why 1 dialect was singled out. If anything Cantonese (linguistics) should have been Yue. And Standard Cantonese become Cantonese (dialect). But even that would be a very controversial move as "Yue" is hardly ever used anymore. Similar decisions should be made for the mandarin etc. Or otherwise treat them all generically like before as (linguistics) or (dialects). Also it is messy to move while leaving the talk pages in the redirects. Benjwong (talk) 02:24, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

I undid the moves and restored the headings. Please don't make any more moves until we have more of an agreement. The talkpages are also restored to where they were before. I am going to archive the linguistics page some more. Benjwong (talk) 02:59, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

I haven't moved them since the start of this discussion. kwami (talk) 06:57, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Have no idea why Cantonese was moved. 粤语 is still used as far as I know. Do you have any proof when you say that it's hardly used any more?

(I think Cantonese was merely left over from when I moved all of the articles, before I found this forum to discuss it on. Other langs were moved back, pending discussion, but Cantonese was ignored. kwami (talk) 20:08, 26 September 2008 (UTC))

As for "not one of these proposals really fit", the current situation has an even worse fit. The article about Standard Cantonese says: "Historically, Cantonese was the most common form of Chinese spoken by overseas Chinese communities in the Western world". And yet, the article on Cantonese (linguistics) says that it was Taishan dialect, NOT Standard Cantonese, that was ubiquitous in overseas China towns. Guangzhou Cantonese was, however, the lingua franca among Overseas Chinese communities. The page on Cantonese (linguistics) says "Cantonese is the de facto official language of Hong Kong". That is true but also kind of misleading, because it is the standard variety that is standard in Hong Kong, and not just any old Cantonese dialect. These could all be rewritten to make things a bit clearer, but the problem is, these are just a couple of points that show how fuzzy the distinction is, and how messy the distinction between the two articles is. The article on "Cantonese (linguistics)" touches on "Written Cantonese", while actually discussing mostly the written standard of Hong Kong.

"Cantonese (linguistics)" is, in the end, a completely misleading title for the article. What the article is really about is the wider area of Yue or Cantonese dialects, including Standard Cantonese. It's not about the linguistics of Cantonese dialects at all; it's about both the Standard dialect of Guangzhou AND other dialects that are recognised as non-standard. So why is it called "Cantonese (linguistics)"?

Bathrobe (talk) 08:43, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Wading in at a late point - but I'd just like to express my support for option A too, the (linguistics) DA has long confused and irritated me, as various people have pointed out, it has many flaws. As far as option A goes, these ARE used in English, most commonly Mandarin Chinese, the others are usually used withouth the word Chinese behind them and believe me, I get asked often enough if I speak Mandarin/Cantonese/Hakka since I'm half Cantonese.

As far as the Standard Cantonese goes, inofficial languages rarely have standardised forms and even some official languages don't have a standardised form (Scots Gaelic for starters). It is true that HK Cantonese is the most commonly heard variant spoken on TV/Films/etc and has long been viewed as the high status register amongst Cantonese speakers but that doesn't really make it standard. Reversing the naming might work better, by simply having Cantonese (the same way French is just French) and then referring to individual varieties as Cantonese (Taishan), Cantonese (HK) etc.

Benj, what exactly do you base your statement on that Yue isn't used anymore?

Umm what else LOL, oh yes, Bathrobe, the level of awareness of speaking the "same variety" varies between chinese languages, a lot of that has to do with status and social factors. For example, Cantonese speakers abroad will almost invariable resort to Cantonese when meeting speakers of other Cantonese dialects, recognising them as part of "us" - which in no small way is helped by the fact that Cantonese has historically been seen as a high status variety of Chinese (the HK thing) and through having a vibrant oral media scene which has helped cross dialect communication. Hakka speakers will also be very aware of the fact they're Hakka but due to the larger dialectal differences (it never had the kicks Cantonese had) they will often resort to Mandarin or another language to communicate. Wu is a different kettle of fish yet again (I have many Wu friends, just thought I'd mention it). While they often recognise the fact that such a thing as Wu exists (even though only educated people call it that) they will usually resort to Mandarin unless both speakers are from the Shanghai area, another high status variety (with a limited amount of SH oral media, there even used to be news in SH on state tele, dunno if they still do) within that group. The father of one of my friends even used to write political speeches in Wu during the revolution (using special Wu characters, rather fascinating). What I'm trying to say is that many people do realised these groupings at some level but that the outcome in terms of the language chosen to communciate mostly depends on other factors. Akerbeltz (talk) 10:11, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

粤 "the word" is where I was saying it is hardly used, not the language. There are honestly not too many words that use yue 粤 in daily life. Most of it is for old art forms and the likes. However if you moved Cantonese to Yue, it would be more encyclopedic. Except nobody really says Yue in English. Benjwong (talk) 04:19, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

I suggest Proposal D and Proposal E:

Current location		Proposal D		Proposal E
Mandarin Chinese		Chinese Mandarin		Mandarin language
Wu Chinese		Wu language		Wu language
Hakka Chinese		Hakka language		Hakka language
Cantonese		Cantonese language		Cantonese language
Taiwanese		Taiwanese Hokkien		Taiwanese Hokkien

Pages like Cantonese, Hakka and Mandarin should be disambiguation pages. Articles concening defacto languages should be moved to xx language page, just like English. Hakka Chinese and Wu Chinese are not suitable in this circumstance because these names may give people strong impression or hint that Chinese is a single language, while Hakka and Wu are dialects (see Identification_of_the_varieties_of_Chinese). On the other hand, "language" is a neutral word, and dialect is a kind of language variant; the term "Hakka language" tells people that the article is describing language, not people. It gives people impression of pure language-about description; it is much more suitable than "xx Chinese". --Anativecantonesespeaker (talk) 13:22, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Chinese "(linguistics)" continued

Okay, it's been five days, and A clearly has it. Most editors support A or could at least live with it. As for "Yue Chinese" and "Taiwanese Hokkien", that's something to debate on the individual pages, as both fall within the wording of the current naming conventions. (Since those are used as examples on the naming conventions page, however, if people do decide to change them, the examples should be changed to match.) kwami (talk) 00:08, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

Moved. I'm now cleaning up the redirects. kwami (talk) 00:38, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

Kwami, proposal A did not have full agreement. Five days is really nothing considering these topic has been running for a year+ already. What is this rush to move the pages? It does not make sense that every language on wiki go to a disembiguation page, English, French, Japanese, Egyptian, but Cantonese automatically go to the language. It should be Cantonese language, dialect, linguistics or something to distinguish it from the people etc. Mandarin, Mandarin Chinese, Mandarin dialect, Standard mandarin should have been dealt with first. Now I am tempted to move it back. But I am even more undecided than before. Benjwong (talk) 04:19, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

If we make piecemeal moves, then people object that it's inconsistent with other articles. Five days is pretty standard for a discussion. kwami (talk) 06:15, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

Well, articles concerning Cantonese are quit pell-mell. Take a look at English: it is a disambiguation page, not an article describing English language nor an article describing English people. To make it clear, Cantonese should also be a disembiguation page. The article describing Cantonese language should be moved to Cantonese language.(But now Cantonese language redirects to Cantonese!) --Anativecantonesespeaker (talk) 08:47, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Wait? It seems like according to a previous discussion the hakka folks were also complaining about the different loaded interpretations of the word hakka used in the writing system, a spoken family of languages etc. Benjwong (talk) 04:50, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

I tend to agree that "Cantonese" should point to a disambiguation page.

Bathrobe (talk) 04:57, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

I have put up an an admit request to move the page back. Kwami, the moves you are making are somehow not carrying the talkpages over. The history are getting lost, and is taken me some time to move them back. Some are stuck and require admin help. Please avoid anymore moves until we have a figure out the right names. Benjwong (talk) 05:07, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

Well, I already moved them all, and I checked that the talk pages moved too. (I don't know why that's a problem with these articles. I've never seen it before.) Please show me where they didn't move properly. Maybe I can figure out what's going wrong.

The specific points on Hakka and Cantonese should probably be taken up on their individual talk pages, since it doesn't affect the Chinese language articles as a whole. There are several independent choices that can be made for each. kwami (talk) 06:15, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

The admin just moved the pages. Which explain why there are no more errors. Anyhow the focus should really be with Mandarin first. That is the bigger dialect with way more complexities than Cantonese. All the others should follow suit. The #1 request is that the first page "must" go to a disambig page. To be consistent with all other languages, that should be the way. French, Mandarin, Cantonese etc, these are all currently disambig pages. Which is good. All we should be doing is moving the linguistics/language/dialect pages. Benjwong (talk) 06:22, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

Okay. I don't have much preference either way. kwami (talk) 08:14, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

No, Benj, don't move pages back to the (linguistics) tag. If you want 'Cantonese' to be a dab, find an acceptable title for the language article. I don't care much what it is, as long as it isn't what most of us agree it shouldn't be. kwami (talk) 08:20, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

Noooo.... you moved the page a third time without the talkpage. How can this be?! I informed you earlier to avoid making any more moves until we figure out a name. Now we have to ask the admins again. See how Talk:Cantonese is actually the talk page that belongs to Cantonese (disambiguation). And the Talk:Cantonese_(disambiguation) is just a move-comment that is stuck in the middle of nowhere. This is creating extra work for everyone. We are going to find an acceptable title. For now we have to move the page back to Cantonese (linguistics) to recapture the talkpage history again. Benjwong (talk) 09:06, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

Yes, Benj, it is creating extra work. I'm glad you see that. kwami (talk) 09:54, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

I think the above remark is unhelpful, to say the least.

Figuring out what something is and then figuring out what to call it usually is a far less friction and heat producing process than trying to do things the other way around.

What is really needed is (1) a description of all languages that shows what current languages can be traced back with some certainty to Indo-European or some other prehistoric source beyond which it appears to have no connection with other languages. (2) for each language "trunk" a history of development that shows the points where one language, e.g. Latin, splits into two or more languages that have different courses of development (and vocabulary and/or syntactic differences) from then one, and so forth.

In linguistics books written in Chinese the current way of handling the Chinese language uses the term 語系yǔ xì and works in the way I describe above. These studies identify a limited number of divisions coming out of a somewhat murky common source, one is the similar languages spoken in roughly the area of Canton, another is the group of similar languages spoken roughly in the area of Fujian, etc. For the sake of clarity, whatever we call such a branch should be the same for each one. The reason is that if Wikipedia speaks of, e.g., "the Cantonese tongue", and the "Fujianese tongue" and distinguishes them from "the Cantonese people", and "the Fujianese people," it may be needed for simple clarity. (English can be disturbingly imprecise, as when even some of my Chinese friends announce, "We are going to eat Chinese." ;-) The problem with not having a parallel term for "Mandarin" is that it suggests that Mandarin is somehow on a different level of specificity. Tie that in with the tendency in English to speak of "the Cantonese dialect," "The Fujianese dialect," and "dialects of Mandarin," and the potential for confusion in the minds of readers trying to get a quick fix on the entire field is immense. We need to consider what is right for the average well-informed reader, rather than concentrating on some formulation for which there is a 轉到牛角尖 arguably "correct" solution.

If memory serves, Norwegian and Swedish are called different languages in the Wikipedia and elsewhere even though they are perhaps no farther apart than Sichuan hua and Beijing hua. So what is accepted in "common language" terms is not good enough for science, and actually it creates a false picture. It would be bad enough if it just created a false picture in words, but there is also a danger that it may create a false picture in the reader's mental mapping of his/her world -- a picture that will later need to be erased so that a corrected version can be drawn in its place.

The image of a single river coming out of the Himalayas, splitting around some huge granite protrusion, the two resultant sub-rivers splitting again into sub-sub-rivers, and the resulting flows getting close enough to sometimes contaminate each other by intercourse via interposed swamps or even occasionally flowing back together occurs in some discussions even though the common experience humans have is with situations in which springs produce rivulets in one place, rivulets of spring water are joined by run offs from minor watersheds, the resulting brooks flow together to make creeks, the creeks flow together to make major rivers like the Platte, and the major rivers flow together to make huge rivers like the Missouri which may then join to form even larger units like the Mississippi (which gets called by the name of its other northward-reaching fork). As you can see, we do not even have very precise terms for relatively major and relatively minor flows of water. In biology the situation with entities like "Cantonese" and "Fujianese" might be paralleled to species, and the internal regional variations of these groups have about as much mushiness (or swamp linkage) as what are called subspecies. It would probably make a nasty problem worse to speak of the Cantonese species of the Chinese genus, the Fujianese species of the Chinese genus, and the Mandarin species of that genus. What is needed, it seems to me, is a "tag" that identifies Mandarin as being on the same level of specificity as "Cantonese," "Fujianese," etc. P0M (talk) 16:54, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

If you are looking for a tag, I was suggesting just changing (linguistics) to "Chinese dialect". And put all of the mandarin, hakka etc on the same level. See below. When someone say Hakka Chinese, the first thing that comes to mind may be Hakka people. Not so much the language. Which is why the first page still should be a disambig. Benjwong (talk) 23:12, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

• Mandarin (Chinese dialect)
• Cantonese (Chinese dialect)
• Wu (Chinese dialect)
• Min (Chinese dialect)
• Xiang (Chinese dialect)
• Hakka (Chinese dialect)
• Gan (Chinese dialect)

I am also open to more specific like the following but that may be inconsistent and too specific. Benjwong (talk) 23:15, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

• Mandarin (Beifang dialect)
• Cantonese (Yue dialect)
• Wu (Chinese dialect)
• Min (Chinese dialect)
• Xiang (Chinese dialect)
• Hakka (Chinese dialect)
• Gan (Chinese dialect)

The problem with this is that you've returned us to ground zero, the dialect/language debate. We can't use either 'language' or 'dialect' in the titles for the primary branches of Chinese. That's the whole reason for the (linguistics) tag in the first place. kwami (talk) 23:19, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

But how will you separate Mandarin (the people) from Mandarin (the language)? You need to call it by something. Benjwong (talk) 01:11, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

Why? We don't have an article on "Mandarin people", so the point is moot. Is there even a sense of people being ethnically Mandarin, the way there is for Hakka? I've never heard of this. The main reason Mandarin etc. are considered dialects of Chinese is that people feel their ethnicity is Chinese, not Mandarin etc. If people said, 'I'm not Chinese, I'm Mandarin', then they'd say their language was not Chinese but Mandarin too, and we wouldn't have had this problem in the first place. kwami (talk) 05:53, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

I am just saying in general you need something to distinguish between the people and language. You could say XYZ (dialect) or XYZ (people). I don't mind. Benjwong (talk) 17:09, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

Dialect is a lesser evil than "(linguistics)". As long as these languages don't have official status as languages, and are regarded by their speakers as varieties of "Chinese", what is the problem with calling them dialects? The dialect/language opposition is not only controversial in China. It is a problem everywhere, although often papered over by official and popular attitudes. For example, the page on Low German, which discusses whether Low German is a language or a dialect.

Bathrobe (talk) 01:52, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

Dialect is NOT a lesser evil. It might be worthwhile remembering that until the 1913 Conference on the Unification of Pronunciation set up by the new Ministry for Education was contemplating more than one official (Chinese) language and remained deadlocked on the issue until Wang Zhao (the head of the Mandarin faction) called for changes to voting. A new system was introduced - 1 pronvince 1 vote and the southern delegates were suddenly outvoted and Mandarin became the only variant which was to be the national language. The fact that everything else has been branded dialect in China ever since has a lot to do with that conference and the subsequent massive push to promote Putonghua. So common "usage" in Chinese publications is not necessarily a rational/scientific standard.

And as for Yue, it's quite common in Cantonese linguistics (cf 粵音 (Yuet Yam), the Cantonese counterpart to Pinyin) and colloquially; even my mother is quite au fait with the term and she's by no means a linguist or even highly educated. Akerbeltz (talk) 11:05, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

I will un-indent here before things get squeezed too far to the right.

Judging by the Chinese language counterpart articles, there need to be four different levels, which that article calls: 語, 片, 小片, and 話 (with some accomodations to commonly accepted names for the speech of one group or another). In Europe, the equivalent terms might be something like "language families" (e.g., the Germanic language families), Languages (e.g., English, German, etc.), and then something that we might still be willing to call dialects (e.g., High German, Low German (platt Deutsch). English does not break down into dialects that are as clearly distinguished as the high/low versions of German. But I don't know any Plattdeutsch so I can't really make a good comparison myself.

Is there a term, or are there terms, that distinguish between languages that have many idiosyncratic differences (e.g., ren in putonghua and lang in Taiwanese) vs. languages that sound very different on first exposure but resolve into a set of fairly easily "guessable" transformations with a little study?

A few years ago there was a fair amount of controversy among some groups of speakers whose individual modes of speech were called dialects. Part of the trouble was that there was an implicit "correct English" and an implicit "(incorrect =) dialectal English" judgment. Anyway, the entries for the 十大方言：官話 | 晉語 | 湘語 | 吳語 | 徽語 | 贛語 | 客家話 | 粵語 | 平話 | 閩語 ought to all be named in English for the article titles according to the same naming convention. P0M (talk) 13:05, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

Well when you say it ought to be named in English, it pretty much already is. We call 粵語 as Cantonese, not Yue, not Guangdonghua. Also the roman-based languages like English and Spanish are alittle different as they have their own alphabets. In Chinese everybody use characters of the same set. Maybe everyone should propose something like Kwami did. I think Kwami has some good points earlier, but I still don't believe "Hakka Chinese" is the language necessarily. It can be used to describe the people and add confusion. Benjwong (talk) 17:09, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

Benj, not that old hat again. I cannot speak for all chinese languages but you can write Cantonese and Wu with special characters that Mandarin speakers can't read. The reason the characters "appear" to be common is because written Putonhua is taught in schools as the written standard but that does not mean you cannot write Cantonese. Anyway, they way a language is written has little bearings on the linguistic factors that determine whether something is a language or not. Farsi is written with a slightly modified Arabic system but it's definitely not an Arab language...

I agree, colloquially Cantonese is called Cantonese but English linguistic publications often use the term Yue(t).

I'm still in favour of proposal A, failing that, let's follow the general wiki system of using (language) in brackets. We're not here to tow the party line of the chinese government, this is a free encyclopedia ;) Akerbeltz (talk) 17:42, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

This depends on your definition of "special". If you refer to something like 咩, 唔 that are used widely in Cantonese, it isn't that special. It still belongs in the same character set, except no mandarin users would touch it. Now if you were hitting deeper like Suzhou characters in ancient guangdong publications, that would be entirely something else. So going by what you are saying, everything should be called a "language" to be fair without towing the party line. Benjwong (talk) 18:18, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

P0M, is there any general agreement to the use of 語, 片, 小片, 話? If so, we could try translating them directly. But AFAIK, the same lect that is a 語 in one source is a 話 in another. kwami (talk) 18:10, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

In what I wrote above I simply report on what is done in the Chinese Wiki 漢語方言列表。 Occasionally in that list they use 語/話 in inconsistent ways, but only (I guess) when something has a commonplace name like 官話 and making it 官語 would just seem too precious. My suggestion is still to look at the phenomena, i.e., the degrees of relatedness and of mutual intelligibility, and determine meaningful names for each level. The Chinese article manages to make do with 4 levels. The use of the word 片 reminds me of the use of the word "clade" in modern genetic studies. Anyway, Indo-European is called a "language family," and there are said to be 12 main "branches" (meaning Baltic, Celtic, Germanic...), and then within each of those "branches" there are the units we ordinarily call "languages" such as English, Flemish, Dutch, German, and so forth. The sub-groups of English we ordinarily call "dialects." It has a pejorative connotation to some people, but it means, basically, "differentiated speech" (within a certain language). If we compare those four levels to Chinese we might speak of the ten "branches" (十大方言 usually = xx 語), numerous "languages" (片) such as 京師片, beneath them "dialects" such as 北京話。The way Wikipedia is using "Mandarin" vs. "Standard Mandarin" would make "Mandarin" a language family. The language of instruction is sort of an artificial unit, or at least it is a planned regularization of the language. It seems to me that it would fall in at roughly the "dialect level." It's somewhat different from 北京話, but it probably has roughly the same level of differentiation from, e.g., 成都話，as does 北京話. Calling Mandarin a "language family" is roughly like calling the Germanic languages a "language family," so then 京師片 would be a language (the capital area language?), and 北京話 and 普通話 would be dialects of the Jingshipian language. Jingshipian would stand on the same level as do English and German, and Beijinghua and putonghua would stand on the same level as do High German and Low German. It doesn't matter to me whether High German and Low German are called, dialects or languages. If they are called languages then we would have to have "super language" or some such term for German, and the term "branch" would be used for the group consisting of German, English, Flemish, etc.

For the average well-informed reader, being able to identify one language as I.A.3.a, a very similar language as I.A.3.b, and the distingush those from a third "dialect" that might have a "scientific name" of II.B.4.a. It would be instantly clear that the first two should be very similar and that the third should be very different from either of the first two. P0M (talk) 06:29, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

The "language family" / "branches" / "languages" / "dialect" thing (especially the language / dialect part) is tailored for European languages. It's based on the idea that each nation-state has its "standard language", and the genetically-related vernacular languages are "dialects" of that standard language that vary from it in various ways. For instance, there is a standard French, and the local patois of French are simply dialects or non/sub-standard variants of the standard language. Even in Europe it's well known that this model doesn't really work (e.g., Scandinavian languages each have their own country, their own standard form, and thus what would normally be considered dialects elsewhere are treated as separate languages.)

People try to bring in "mutually intelligibility" and other tests as an objective yardstick for defining separate "languages", but these don't work well at all. If you look at German, you'll find plenty of mutually unintelligible dialects, which must by this test be considered languages. Then the "dialect continuum" is invoked, whereby two dialects may not be mutually intelligible, but there is a string of dialects between the two mutually unintelligible varieties that are mutually intelligible with each other, therefore they all belong to a single continuum and thus a single language. How far can you go with this kind of thing?

Trying to apply the Western European concept of languages and dialects works even worse in China. Unlike many of the vernaculars of Europe, the vernacular dialects of China have not developed standard "languages". Their standard was traditionally the written variety of 文言, which unfortunately didn't provide for unity of pronunciation. In the modern era this has been switched to 白话 'baihua', which forms the basis for putonghua. Trying to provide neat parallels to the European situation is simply unrealistic. It's no use saying that "Cantonese and Hokkienese are as far apart as Spanish and Italian", because Spanish and Italian are fully-fledged languages in fully-developed nation states. Cantonese and Hokkienese are not.

The word "dialect" is, admittedly, somewhat pejorative for the layman because the belief has been inculcated into their minds that "dialect" = "non-standard variety of the correct language". It is also a poor translation of the Chinese word 方言 'fangyan', which has convincingly translated as "topolect" by some linguists. A "topolect" is the language of a particular place. Thus 四川话 or Sichuanese is the topolect of Sichuan province. No claim is made as to whether Sichuanese is a dialect of Mandarin, Cantonese, or any other language variety. It simply means "the speech of Sichuan province". In that sense, Sichuanese, Cantonese, Shanghainese, and Xi'anese are all equals in the eyes of Chinese, because they are all 方言. The only concession that is made is that "we can't even understand some of those southern 方言". This is actually an admission that "those southern 方言" may even be equivalent to separate languages, but this is not implied in the word 方言 at all.

So in that sense I think it's somewhat fruitless and perhaps even slightly "imperialistic" trying to impose the language hierarchy mentioned above on the Chinese situation.

Bathrobe (talk) 01:05, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

It goes way beyond 咩 and 唔, there's over 500 Cantonese specific characters in Unicode alone and that's a fraction. I agree that some are used by other Chinese languages too but not always in the same way. To put it differently, non-Cantonese speakers generally can't read the joke section of HK papers without a large amount of guesswork because they're routinely written in "real" Cantonese. So yes, I'm in favour of having Hakka/Hokkien/Wu/Xiang/Gan/Cantonese (language). It's the only approach which can be defended from a purely linguistic angle. This does not prevent us in any shape or form to have Cantonese (Hog Kong dialect) for example or Wu (Shanghai dialect).

Kwami, yes, there's little agreement. If a publication uses 粵, it normally goes with 語; if they use 廣東, it usually goes with 話, as does 廣州 and the rarely encountered 香港話. Within Cantonese publications it feels to me as if 粵語 is seen as the abstract/overregional concept of Cantonese as a language whereas 廣東話 is any subdialect of that. For example, Yale Pinyin (粤音) is not entirely the same thing as HK Cantonese - the most obvious example for that is the use of the high falling tone which in HK has merged with the high level tone but Yale Pinyin has it because many mainland varieties have it.

The other dimension is that of where a book was printed. Mainland publishers most commonly use 廣州話 (for example the 广州音字典简明 [Guangdong People's Publishing House]; but note there's also 粤英词典 [Guandong Higher Education Publishing House]), HK publishers are happy with any but primarily 廣東話 and 粵語 (such as the CUHK Cantonese dictionary 英粵字典). Akerbeltz (talk) 21:39, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

So you're saying there is consistency: 粵語, but 廣東話. We could represent these as Yue language and Cantonese dialect. However, does this consistency obtain with other primary branches of Chinese? Is it true for 吳語 and 上海話? What about the term 方言? Do people argue over whether Yue is 粵語 or 粵方言, or whether Wu is 吳語 or 吳方言? If so, then choosing the title "Yue language" would be favoring the 粵語 POV over the 粵方言 POV, and we could be accused of bias.

I take issue with the idea that Yue, Wu, Hakka etc. as separate languages is the only linguistically justified stance. There's also sociolinguistics: Languages do not exist without their speakers, and speaker attitudes of their languages are of primary importance. It's just as wrong to call 粵 and 吳 languages if their speakers feel they're dialects, as it is to call Portuguese, Polish, Dutch, and Hindi dialects when their speakers feel they're distinct languages.

Meanwhile, we might want to consider the intermediate step of Yue Chinese (currect Cantonese) vs. Cantonese dialect (current Standard Cantonese), analogous to Wu Chinese and Shanghai dialect (both subsumed under "Shanghainese" in common English), and to Min Chinese and Fuzhou dialect (both subsumed under "Fujianese" in common English). kwami (talk) 22:04, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

Intermediate steps is only good if you need a quick solution. This topic comes up every month. I am against any language that ends in "XYZ Chinese" for the reason that it does not distinguish the people. Hakka Chinese can mean the language + the people. It leads to confusion. People might be offended if Dutch or German point directly to the people's page. Benjwong (talk) 22:53, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

Also check a thesaurus, there are really NO good replacement for the word "dialect" or "linguistics". Benjwong (talk) 22:58, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

Again, we're in a pickle because these terms are not used for the people. Therefore there is no need to distinguish the language from the people. Hakka is one of the very few exceptions, since there is a Hakka ethnic identity. But there is no "Wu people", "Xiang people", or "Mandarin people". The analogy with Dutch & German is spurious, because the Dutch in Germans do consider themselves to be distinct peoples. kwami (talk) 01:37, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

If you are limited to only thinking about "Xiang people" and "Mandarin people", because they don't exist then that is not the right approach. I can tell you it doesn't stop there. Try Toishanese (my first thought) and everything else listed on the List of Chinese dialects page. Notice how Danjia dialect points to the Tanka (ethnic group)?! So Cantonese points to the language, but Danjia points to the people?? What a mess. Now if every language ends with "dialect" and every group ends with "people", that is consistent. Benjwong (talk) 04:02, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

Ben, that happens in a lot of stubs where there isn't enough info for two articles. Both the people and language are found in one, so the other is a redirect. That has nothing to do with the specific problems of Chinese. As for Toishanese, are they a distinct ethnic group? If so, there's no problem with having two articles, Taishanese people and Taishanese dialect, because the language-dialect debate is pretty much restricted to the main divisions of Chinese. kwami (talk) 05:54, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

Of course languages don't exist without their speakers but there are certain distinctions that lay people are not good judges of. The language/dialect issue is one of them. To begin with, even within English the word can refer to any number of things - in US English anything not English is often called a dialect. Or take an example closer to home - many French will call Breton, Basque and Occitan dialects or argots. Anyone care to argue Basque is a dialect of French? ;)

There is consistence but only in the way that 粵 goes with 語 and 廣東 with 話, but there is little consensus of whether Cantonese is 語 or 話. 吳語 and 上海話 - yes, the others I'm not sure about, I've only ever heard 客家話 but a quick Google search throws up a number of results for 客語 too.

That aside, I'm happy enough with the Yue Chinese etc option, it may not be the most common English expression but certainly not unheard of. Akerbeltz (talk) 23:48, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

Well saying that two people speak a different language does not necessarily mean they regard themselves as two different ethnicities... ethnicity is a notoriously hard to pin down and flexible concept. I agree that most speakers of all those Chinese languages will usually define themselves as 漢 (Han) - but note the much more common 中國人 (person from China) which really sidesteps the issue of ethnicity by relating to shared geography.

Taishanese is generally seen (by the Cantonese and Taishanese that I've met anyway) as a subdialect of Cantonese, albeit a rather weird one but people are quite adamant about Taishan being Cantonese. So the dialect label there is appropriate. The people page - personally I don't have a problem with it, to me, even Hakka People and Cantonese/Yue People would work. We may just be bristling a bit about Xiang People because we're so unusued to the term Xiang fullstop - let's face it, who outside linguistics/ethnography has heard of the Xiang? Akerbeltz (talk) 10:21, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

Notice this userbox

呢個用戶係廣東人。 This user is Cantonese.

is a good example of why people think the term "Cantonese" deals with the people and not necessarily the language. If the focus is only on the 8 languages and nothing else (yes it seems rather biased), then the discussion just got much shorter. And maybe we should move "Cantonese" the language to Cantonese (Yue), which is just enough to separate it from the "Cantonese people" article. Benjwong (talk) 00:18, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

That's not bad. It might work. However, we currently have a user (Strawberry somebody) angrily deleting the word "Yue" from the Cantonese article, and angrily accusing me of some sort of cultural propaganda for putting it back in. But there will be someone opposing us no matter what we do, so we shouldn't let that stop us. kwami (talk) 01:10, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

Ohhh beaut, gonna add that box :) and yes, Cantonese (Yue) is a good solution. Akerbeltz (talk) 12:33, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

Looks like nobody else responded or disagreed in some time. Why don't we move Cantonese the language to "Cantonese (Yue)" and move Cantonese to the disambiguation page. I don't see this strawberry person complain here. If Kwami and Akerbeltz agree, then we might be done with the 8 big dialects. Benjwong (talk) 05:51, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Go for it. Akerbeltz (talk) 10:13, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Does Kwami user want to make the move? Benjwong (talk) 02:26, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Someone did disagree recently, but just above the section heading 'Chinese linguistics (continued)' Matt's talk 03:59, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

[edit] NPOV section is deadlocked?

Could someone let us know what the issues are at the moment? Nothing has been in active discussion for over 6 months. I don't think it is sensible to have a disputed tag over the section for such a long time with no progress: what should we follow? Should we even follow what's currently up there at all?--pyl (talk) 12:33, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

If you had read the archive you would have found the answer for your questions. The issue continues to be the use of the names "China" and "Taiwan". If you speak with someone in the street, read a newspaper, read a dictonary, or whatever about "China" everybody is refering to the current country (official name being: People's Republic of China). This is the current use in the English language.

The same happens with "Taiwan". Almost everybody and everything refers to the country (official name being: Republic of China). IMHO it has more or less the same legal status as Kosovo. This is the current use in the English language.

However "here" in the English Wikipedia the current use of these names in the English language is not respected for dubious reasons (claims of POV). The article "China" is about the Chinese civilization. The article "Taiwan" is about the island. Several users tried to change this but other users disagree. The second group wrote that NPOV section and it conflicts with other policies of Wikipedia. To cut it short: the section (not even speaking about the use of "China" and "Taiwan") continues to be disputed. Flamarande (talk) 12:58, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply. I went into the archives and I didn't see any recent discussion on anything that you were talking about. I believe the last active discussion was about adding the Republic of China for Taipei City and Kaohsiung City. And that was in January this year. That's why I removed the tags because the proposal wasn't even added into the convention anyway.

If you check the logs, the tag was added by as follows:-

02:43, 20 June 2007 Folic Acid (Talk | contribs) (30,492 bytes) (I think having the POV tag here is warranted - there is a legitimate dispute about this section being discussed on the talk page.

Given that there is no dispute going on and there hasn't been for 6 months, I didn't think the dispute is still ongoing.

What you are saying is a fundamental disagreement with the convention, and that means the whole section is unusable. But it seems to be that the current Chinese-related articles have more or less followed the naming convention. Given the large number of articles, are we going to accept that the current convention is the convention to follow? I am not sure if we want to reopen the can of worms and throw what we have right now into chaos.--pyl (talk) 13:16, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

I'm not sure if they have followed this naming convention in particular, as most articles follow the "common usage" of the two names (including the two wiki-taskforces who use "Taiwan" and "China"). The titles of the article are the true apples of discord. The issue is deadlocked but it constantly reappears inside the talkpages of "China", "Taiwan", "People's Republic of China", and "Republic of China" (and will continue to do so until...). It's hard to correct anything of this magnitude and importance when one side provides proper evidence, the other side preaches, and the law enforcers fail to take the correct action. Flamarande (talk) 13:48, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

They do follow the convention, more or less, as far as I can tell. It appears to me that with the two wiki-taskforces at work, they seem to settle at this convention.

That's why I removed the tag, as I see that people are settling down along the lines of the convention and no discussions have been taking place here for a while.

So you still think we should just stick with the convention but leave it as "disputed"?--pyl (talk) 14:07, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

Leave the tag, as it is warranted (there is a dispute). Flamarande (talk) 19:39, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Breaking deadlock

Perhaps breaking the deadlock needs some dynamite. I have no interest in the PRC/ROC problem. I do have an interest in seeing that Wikipedia is the most useful resource it can be. And to this end, having China direct to the article China rather than the People's Republic of China is extremely problematic. Overwhelmingly, in popular use, whether spoken, printed, internet, or on television, in English the word China is used to refer to the People's Republic of China. Wikipedia should reflect this.

Yet, Wikipedia should not take a position on whether the PRC or ROC is the legitimate government of the territories of the PRC and ROC. So lets have this. The guideline, as I've reformulated it, states that any time the usage of China may have a political meaning, the PRC or ROC should be explicitly stated.

This is what people have been trying come to for a long time. It may make some uncomfortable to have used China refer to People's Republic of China here, but this is the way things are in real life, and Wikipedia, in WP:NAMING and many other places upholds that it reflects this. Mostlyharmless (talk) 00:40, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

I feel that the changes you made to the naming convention are highly contentious, and it appears to me that you are aware of that as well. I think it would be more appropriate to discuss the changes here and get consensus before the actual changes are made.

WP:NAMING you quoted said:-

"Convention: Except where other accepted Wikipedia naming conventions give a different indication, use the most common name of a person or thing that does not conflict with the names of other people or things; use the naming conflict guideline when there is a conflict. Where articles have descriptive names, the given name must be neutrally worded and must not carry POV implications." (my emphasis added).

It is established that it is not neutral to assert China as the People's Republic of China. It then follows that redirecting China to the PRC would not be neutral either. This redirect also conflicts with a minor but significant assertion that the Republic of China represents China. China means more than the modern states, and equating China with the PRC is also problematic. I think the notes in the China article is sufficient to get readers to the PRC when that's what they are looking for.

The most common usage may not be the correct usage, and a good encyclopaedia prioritises correctness over commonness. I was told an example and I think it can be offensive, but I can't think of a better example right now so please bear with me. The most common usage of the word 'bitch' refers to an unpleasant person, especially a woman, not the correct literal meaning of a female dog. The article starts with the correct usage then gives all different usages so the readers can get a more global perspective. I think the article China has also done essentially the same things. It explains the different claims to China as well as a general background of China while acknowledging that the most common used meaning for "China" means the PRC. The way things are in real life is, the PRC is part of the long history and complex cultural entity of China. The PRC is also one of the many political entities that represent China in its long history. But the PRC is not all of China.--pyl (talk) 02:27, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

To quote at length from WP:Naming Conflict

[edit] Identification of common names using external references

A number of methods can be used to identify which of a pair (or more) conflicting names is the most prevalent in English.

• The Google test. Using Google's advanced search option, search for each conflicting name and confine the results to pages written in English; also exclude the word "Wikipedia" (as we want to see what other people are using, not our own usage). Note which is the most commonly used term.
• International organisations. Search for the conflicting names on the websites of organisations such as the United Nations, NATO, OSCE, IMF, etc.
• Major English-language media outlets. Use Google News and, where possible, the archives of major outlets such as BBC News and CNN to identify common usages. Some media organisations have established style guides covering naming issues, which can provide useful guidance (e.g. The Guardian's style guide says use Ukraine, not the Ukraine).
• Reference works. Check other encyclopedias. If there is general agreement on the use of a name (as there often will be), that is usually a good sign of the name being the preferred term in English.
• Geographic name servers. Check geographic name servers such as the NGIA GNS server at http://gnswww.nga.mil/geonames/GNS/index.jsp .
• Scientific nomenclature. Check usage by international bodies like CIPM, IUPAP, IUPAC, and other scientific bodies concerned with nomenclature; consider also the national standards agencies NIST and NPL. Consult style guides of scientific journals.

That China is used to refer to the PRC overwhelmingly, and forms the "correct" usage is obvious when every one of these tests is applied. Whenever there is any doubt, or political recognition might be implied, PRC or ROC are used. Why, for the life of me, we can't use the same standard as everyone else is beyond me. Mostlyharmless (talk) 04:45, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

Google does not contain every book and source there ever is. It certainly mostly contain English-only sources. Too much emphasis on a search engine. This way is flawed. Please see archive discussions. Benjwong (talk) 04:55, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

The test isn't only limited to online sources. If I take a completely random book from my bookshelf (Reading National Geographic) and see how the word is used, I find that China is used to refer to both pre-1949 China and the PRC. In any other print source you care to name I find "general agreement on the use of [the] name". Mostlyharmless (talk) 05:09, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

There is clearly no consensus to make changes you are asking for. I don't understand why you insist on changing the main text before the discussion is complete.--pyl (talk) 05:15, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

I started it, because as far as I could tell, discussion was stalled, and rather than mucking round with discussions for ages, it is often better to be bold, make a change and see if the community works with it.

I believe Wikipedia says that we should be bold until there are issues, then we should discuss instead of being bold. As you clearly were aware they were issues, you still went for bold and insisted on changing stuff before discussion. That's what I didn't understand.--pyl (talk) 15:58, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

Anyway, I found the discussion from earlier this year (although strangely I didn't find a link from here). The dispute resolution so desperately needed was never engaged in. I don't have the time to engage in opening the process, so I'll have to leave it as is. I'll keep this on watchlist, and if it is ever opened will participate enthusiastically. Mostlyharmless (talk) 05:25, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

This dispute isn't just stalled, it's intractable. It's not just from earlier this year, it's more than five years old. SchmuckyTheCat (talk)

Mostly Harmless is repeating things I've said multiple times on this page, and Wikipedia policies and guidelines are distinctly at odds with what this page has been deadlocked in saying. The attempt to "gain consensus" to change this page is impossible, for either side. If there is no consensus to reach, then the NPOV section about the wording of "China" should be removed entirely from this text. SchmuckyTheCat (talk)

This proposal falls under the same category as the proposal to merge the PRC article into China. I doubt any consensus would be reached. --Joowwww (talk) 11:39, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

IMO this proposal is much worse than the former proposal. Most references (links) to China here have nothing to do with the PRC so a redirect would be plain confusing--Jiang (talk) 16:55, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

the NPOV section about the wording of "China" should be removed entirely from this text. I strongly disagree. We need to have some sort of guidelines. What we have isn't deadlocked simply because we can't agree on anything. It's deadlocked because we can't agree that anything is better. The guidelines at very least provide a way to yank the more extreme wordings back to the region of NPOV. If we get rid of the guidelines, the articles may begin thrashing about wildly as people struggle to get their interpretation accepted as the new "concensus". Given the difficulty we've seen of agreeing to anything, the struggle will be conducted mostly through never-ending edit wars. Readin (talk) 13:13, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

OK this discussion is so convoluted I've only managed to skim through it but all I will say is this; come on, get a grip and redirect "China" to "The people's Republic of China" already. This is laughable, unhelpful, and damages wikipedia's reputation. A kid searching for China on google does not want to be confused by decades obsolete cold war politics. And besides, Taiwan is Taiwan, it isn't even part of "China". ʄ!•¿talk? 16:40, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

SmuckyTheCat removed a couple selected sections and did some rewrite. I put them undid them because we don't have consensus on something new. Before we make changes, let's discuss. Do we still have a dispute. What, in particular, is disputed about the section? I'll go first:Readin (talk) 17:01, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

• The section says that we should not refer to Taiwan as part of the "People's Republic of China". We should add that we should not refer to Taiwan as part of "China". We might add that China articles can include information about Taiwan so long as they note that it is not universally accepted that Taiwan is part of China. Readin (talk) 17:01, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

For text to exist in a guideline it needs consensus. This text has never had consensus. We don't need consensus to change it, we need consensus to include it. The "default" or "status quo" is for non-consensus text to stay out. Text with the disputed tag on it for several years needs to go. SchmuckyTheCat (talk)

For Readin, Taiwan is part of Republic of China and there is no debate about it, so Taiwan is part of China (Republic of). When people say Taiwan, they may refer to the island Taiwan, or country Republic of China that is now sitting right on Taiwan, or both, there is no consensus about which reference has the absolute prevalence. The current China page is giving good balance and presentatiing a worldwide view from different groups. If we redirect China to the Communist country, it will no longer NPOV. Unless Republic of China is formally change their name to something else, the current China page should remain impartial and not being redirected to either ROC or PRC.--Da Vynci (talk) 03:07, 31 October 2008 (UTC)

Taiwan is part of the Republic of China, but the Republic of China is no longer in China, it is in exile in Taiwan. Some have a different POV on this. To avoid contradicting the POV that Taiwan is part of China, we have a guideline that says "Taiwan should not be described either as an independent nation". But that is not the only POV that needs to be included. Readin (talk) 13:31, 31 October 2008 (UTC)

And by denying the proper and correct use of Taiwan and China Wikipedia makes a fool of itself. I'm truly glad that healthy common sense and accuracy won over political correctness and hipocrisy in the Kosovo-article at least. We really should follow this example one of these days. Flamarande (talk) 18:34, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

Removed "Wikipedia treats the Republic of China as a sovereign state with equal status with the People's Republic of China, yet does not address whether they are considered separate nations." because it is not a guideline (does not tell editors what to do) and uses political terms with ambiguous meanings that blunt the effectiveness of the sentence. The difference between a state and a nation is not clear.

Edited "Taiwan should not be described either as an independent nation, as a part of the People's Republic of China, or as part of China." because it is partly contradicted by its succeeding sentence if the meaning of nation is to be taken broadly.--Jiang (talk) 18:57, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

I put back some of the good stuff and tried to address Jiang's concerns that the guide actually say what the text should do.

I disagree with the concerns about the words "nation" and "state". I agree that the word "nation" is indeed ambiguous, but we've had concensus for describing the ROC as a state for a very long time because the word "state" is pretty well-accepted as (quoting Merriam Webster) "a politically organized body of people usually occupying a definite territory". The ROC as a political body occupying defined territory is not disputed.

One of the main reasons we say we shouldn't make claims whether PRC and ROC are separate nations is because of what Jiang rightly points out, the meaning of "nation" is rather vague. Some equate it with politics, others with culture or race, still others with regions, and still others with shared history, and most with some combination of those. It is right that we should warn against using these vague terms to describe the PRC and ROC. Perhaps we should put "nation" in quotes on the page to indicate we are warning against the term rather than any and all concepts associated with it.Readin (talk) 19:35, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

Since this discussion seems to have ended. I'm going to try removing the "disputed" tag to see if anyone still disputes. Readin (talk) 18:35, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

User:Huaiwei put the tag back but beyond asking "Since when did the dispute cease?", provided no explanation. I put a message on his web page asking about this. Readin (talk) 10:34, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

The tag is needed because a)there is a dispute, b)the current use of the names 'China' and 'Taiwan' is not followed because of dubious reasons, and c)the reasoning behind the current status-quo is AFAIK not an official Wiki-policy. I also wish to remark that you had removed the tag previously before and the situation was explained to you already. Flamarande (talk) 12:27, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

Addressing your points:

• a)there is a dispute - That's what I was trying to find out. We made changes. We fixed problems. No one seemed to be disputing anymore. If there is no longer a dispute we shouldn't keep the tag. If someone still disputes, that person should tell us what they dispute.
• b)the current use of the names 'China' and 'Taiwan' is not followed because of dubious reasons - I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to say here. Where are the names 'China' and 'Taiwan' not being followed? And what reasons do you consider dubious?
• c)the reasoning behind the current status-quo is AFAIK not an official Wiki-policy - What is "AFAIK"? NPOV is an official Wiki-policy and perhaps along with verifiability the most central. What specifically do you see as a problem? What specifically do you believe violates official Wiki-policy?

I also wish to remark that you had removed the tag previously before and the situation was explained to you already. And there was productive discussion that followed and improvements were made. I had hoped that the improvements were enough to remove the dispute. It seems that you and Huawei disagree. But your disagreements need to be specific for them to be addressed. Readin (talk) 12:37, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

a)Your changes are sadly by far not enough. A far better example would be the article Kosovo (especially its name).

b)Type 'China' or 'Taiwan' and what will you end up with? The first is an article about 'Chinese culture' and the second is about the island. Both articles simply disregard the current use of the two names in common speech, international English-speaking media, and encyclopaedias written in the English language, and last but not least use in international organizations like the UNO.

c)NPOV is not being disputed here. What is disputed is the policy that appears inside of 'Naming conventions (Chinese)'. 'Kosovo' follows NPOV. 'China' or 'Taiwan' don't follow NPOV. They follow 'Naming conventions (Chinese)'. Said policy is not an official Wiki-policy.

'Naming conventions (Chinese)' is widely disregarded anyway exception made for the name of the articles. Userboxes, wiki-projects, and most articles follow common sense. The names of the two articles should follow common sense too. Flamarande (talk) 13:11, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

The Kosovo article defines Kosovo as a "region". The China article begins similarly "China is a cultural region, an ancient civilization, and, depending on perspective, a national or multinational entity extending over a large area in East Asia."

I agree with you that the Taiwan article is more of a problem because in common usage Taiwan generally refers to more than just the main island. I've tried to address that on the Talk:Taiwan page without much luck. However, the section you're disputing doesn't say anything about whether the Taiwan article should be about the island or about more than that.Readin (talk) 13:25, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

But the Kosovo article uses the common name for the country/renegade province/whatever, and the article is about the current political entity (de facto about the partially recognized country). The use of the two names ('China' and 'Taiwan') is 99% of the problem. 'China' should be an article about the PRC (the current country). 'Taiwan' should be about the ROC (the current country). Relevant issues should be explained inside of the two articles, simple as that.

1)In the English language when someone speaks about "China" he is talking about the country (PRC). When someone is speaking about "Taiwan" he is talking the ROC. Fact

2)The same happens in the English-speaking media (TV - CNN, BBC, Sky News, NBC, etc, ad nauseam). This is also the case with newspapers and magazines e.g.: The Economist's number of September has two main articles which refer to "China" and they do mean the PRC. Similar articles exist about Taiwan (and they do mean the ROC) Fact

3)The overwhelming majority of international organizations use the name 'China' for the PRC (it begins with the UNO, the G8+5, etc). Look for the little name-cards upon the tables; the representative from Beijing (i.e.: representing the government of the PRC) gets the one with the name "China" upon it. An example of this can be found here. Fact Taiwan's unclear status is known to us all and shouldn't hinder us as Kosovo clearly shows.

4)In international events, like the Olympic Games, the representatives of the PRC receive the name-tag "China". this can be seen here. Fact Again: Taiwan's unclear status is known to us all and shouldn't hinder us.

5)The overwhelming majority of academia uses "China" and "Taiwan" for the two political entities. This is also taught at school. Fact

6)Written encyclopaedias and dictionaries use "China" for the PRC and "Taiwan" for the ROC. Seriously, get your geographic encyclopaedia at home and take look in the "China-entry" and guess what you will find? The PRC. Or go the Encyclopaedia Britannica website type "China" in the search-field and a list will appear with the first number being "China (country)" click upon it and what will you find? The PRC, none other Fact. They avoid making the same to Taiwan using "self-governing island" instead, but at least this acknowledges the local government (far better than Wikipedia)

Almost all "country-articles" in Wikipedia use the common name of the country in question. This is not the case of "China" and "Taiwan". This should be changed. Make the moves and create proper history-articles and resolve the issue.

While the precise status of Taiwan is debatable, the issue can be easily explained as the article Kosovo clearly shows.

The truth is that in the English-speaking world the PRC is simply recognized and named as "China". The ROC is simply recognized and named as "Taiwan". Wikipedia seems to be one of the rare exceptions. Flamarande (talk) 14:02, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

Looking at Flamarande points, I think most of the data may not be as valid as it seems. For example, Almost all "country-articles" in Wikipedia use the common name of the country in question, as majority of the contries on earth are the non-dispute ones, the usually naming convention may not be applicable here. Moreover, popularity doesn't mean accuracy. We should look at more examples in special situation, such as

• Korea - is about the civilization, not North Korea nor South Korea
• Ireland - is about the island , not Republic of Ireland
• Congo - point neither to Democratic Republic of the Congo nor Republic of the Congo

I suggest we should keep the China page just about the civilization. --Da Vynci (talk) 12:50, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

I see that you have a different understand of "almost" and that you failed to challenge a single of the facts/examples that I listed above. It seems that almost the entire world (including professional encyclopaedias) uses the names 'China' and 'Taiwan' in a different fashion that Wikipedia. Might I suggest that the rest of world, including the Encyclopaedia Britannica, is right and that it is truly Wikipedia which is wrong? Flamarande (talk) 13:58, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Disagree! We shouldn't equate China to PRC! As I said, most of the examples u used are undisputed countries (with exception of Kosovo). This is a special situation and require special treatement. What I am saying is that we should take example from articles like Korea, Ireland and Congo.

Furthermore, given the long history and extensive culture of China (and no, PRC doesn't has a long history and extensive culture, because it only established recently in 1949), we cannot let everything that belongs to the article China to just land on People's Republic of China. We need an article that is about China, seperated from the PRC, because a LOT of cultual, art, philosophical related articles link to China, thousands of those articles are not talking about PRC, but China. For example, the article Confucius indicate that the philsopher was born in China. Equating China to PRC will make Confucius born in People's Republic of China. We shouldn't equate China to PRC.

Well, this is wikipedia, does your professional encyclopaedias contain articles such as Principality of Sealand, Republic of Indian Stream, Fucking, Austria, Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, The Bus Uncle?!? Wikipeida is different from those professional encyclopaedias if you haven't noticed by now. Quote from Pyl The most common usage may not be the correct usage, and a good encyclopaedia prioritises correctness over commonness.--Da Vynci (talk) 21:46, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

You managed yet again to avoid all the listed examples of the current and common use of the names "China" and "Taiwan" (media, international organisations, academia, and school) besides the article of Kosovo. The sentence of "given the long history and extensive culture of China (and no, PRC doesn't has a long history and extensive culture, because it only established recently in 1949), we cannot let everything that belongs to the article China to just land on People's Republic of China" is very unclear.

The part of long history and culture doesn't seem to be a problem in the nearly all the other country-articles like France, Germany, Italy, Iran, etc. Some of these countries can also be argued to be quite recent creations (re-incarnations, whatever) but their articles correctly include information from the past. Are you going to argue that these articles are wrong?

"We shouldn't equate China to PRC" because of exactly what may I ask? I honestly believe that you are seeing the whole problem upside down: "Equating China to PRC will make Confucius born in People's Republic of China" is a flawed argument. If we make the changes (move PRC towards China and move ROC towards Taiwan) will result in: Confucius born in the China - and the PRC government is simply the currently recognized government (making no judgement about it). The article of 'China' also including a unavoidable and mandatory paragraph about Taiwan and its current government and the common history.

You last argument boils down to the following: Wikipedia is right, and it is reality which is wrong ('reality' being the use of the names of 'China' and 'Taiwan' in the English language - I listed the examples again below). The other professional encyclopaedias, (example being the Encyclopaedia Britannica) are wrong.

1)In the English language when someone speaks about "China" he is talking about the country (PRC). When someone is speaking about "Taiwan" he is talking the ROC. Fact

2)The same happens in the English-speaking media (TV - CNN, BBC, Sky News, NBC, etc, ad nauseam). This is also the case with newspapers and magazines e.g.: The Economist's number of September has two main articles which refer to "China" and they do mean the PRC. Similar articles exist about Taiwan (and they do mean the ROC) Fact

3)The overwhelming majority of international organizations use the name 'China' for the PRC (it begins with the UNO, the G8+5, etc). Look for the little name-cards upon the tables; the representative from Beijing (i.e.: representing the government of the PRC) gets the one with the name "China" upon it. An example of this can be found here. Fact Taiwan's unclear status is known to us all and shouldn't hinder us as Kosovo clearly shows.

4)In international events, like the Olympic Games, the representatives of the PRC receive the name-tag "China". this can be seen here. Fact Again: Taiwan's unclear status is known to us all and shouldn't hinder us.

5)The overwhelming majority of academia uses "China" and "Taiwan" for the two political entities. This is also taught at school. Fact

6)Written encyclopaedias and dictionaries use "China" for the PRC and "Taiwan" for the ROC. Seriously, get your geographic encyclopaedia at home and take look in the "China-entry" and guess what you will find? The PRC. Or go the Encyclopaedia Britannica website type "China" in the search-field and a list will appear with the first number being "China (country)" click upon it and what will you find? The PRC, none other Fact. Encyclopaedia Britannica avoids making the same to Taiwan using "self-governing island" instead, but at least this acknowledges the local government (far better than Wikipedia and Wikipedia can handle this point better that Encyclopaedia Britannica) Flamarande (talk) 16:03, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

Disagree To distill your argument down, it's quite simple. You argue that the common name "China" is equated with the PRC (which is very true). Therefore, "China" should redirect to the PRC article. Opponents point out that there are neutrality issues with the proposal. Also, there are the examples of Congo, Ireland, and Korea that have been pointed out. Does using common names trump neutrality? I don't think so. We're not claiming that everyone else is "wrong." Rather, we're claiming that here's a case (I'm sure you're aware of the controversial political mess that we shouldn't take sides in.) where common usage butts heads with neutrality. The articles of both the PRC and ROC clearly note what the entities are commonly referred to up front, and the civilizational article points to the other articles for each regime someone might be interested in. You had earlier called Taiwan a "country." FWIW, that statement is itself non-neutral. Hence the current compromise. Ngchen (talk) 00:02, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

China shouldn't redirect towards the PRC article. The entry of "PRC" in the 'search-field' should result with a proper China-article ('PRC' should be a re-direct towards 'China' and 'ROC' should be a re-direct towards 'Taiwan'). I stand by the statement that Taiwan is a country (currently widely unrecognised, in a similar situation like Kosovo). Your argument that this statement by itself isn't neutral is pointless. Flamarande (talk) 19:46, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

From WP:NAME, Wikipedia's policy on naming:

Generally, article naming should prefer what the greatest number of English speakers would most easily recognize, with a reasonable minimum of ambiguity, while at the same time making linking to those articles easy and second nature.

Using "China" for the PRC and "Taiwan" for the ROC definitely fits this directive.

While all of us (we who have a special interest in this topic) are aware of the complex history of the ROC and PRC, the policy goes on to say The names of Wikipedia articles should be optimized for readers over editors, and for a general audience over specialists.

On the subject of "Controversial Names", the policy says The purpose of an article's title is to enable that article to be found by interested readers, and nothing more.

I'm would like to get things settled, and am willing to compromise. But when it comes to Wikipedia policy for naming the articles, it is clear that the "China" article should be about the PRC (and its predecessors). Readin (talk) 01:58, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

And the history-section should be of all prior governments (i.e. a proper paragraph which explains everything with a link towards Taiwan) as the other country-articles. If I'm reading Readin correctly he agrees with me (I hope that I'm not mistaken). Readin also shows that proper and official Wiki-policies don't agree with the current situation. To answer to Ngchen main argument (We have to be neutral): Do you see the article Kosovo? There we have a similar situation where common sense won over so-called "neutrality". The article Kosovo is neutral and it uses the common name. Exactly this approach (common name and a good neutral article) is what 'China' and 'Taiwan' need and deserve. Not 'Naming conventions (Chinese)'. Flamarande (talk) 19:46, 16 December 2008 (UTC) I also want to add that the articles Made in China and Made in Taiwan show again the use of the two names in the English language.

The policy Readin cited from WP:NAME says "Generally, article naming should prefer what the greatest number of English speakers would most easily recognize, with a reasonable minimum of ambiguity, while at the same time making linking to those articles easy and second nature.".

This is not a general situation, thus that particular policy isn't quite applicable here. The China (civilization) article fits well for the neutrality requirement, so as the current PRC and ROC article naming. Mixing those names up will just spark more controversy and confusion to readers. --Da Vynci (talk) 05:21, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Can you explain us exactly which readers will be confused if we use the 'common use approach' instead of the current 'Naming conventions (Chinese)'? To which controversy and confusion are you referring to? Flamarande (talk) 18:23, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

First, for those who are reading Confucius wouldn't agree Confucius was born in PRC instead China. Secondly, the idea "China" consist of Republic of China and People's Republic of China. Just like Korea consist of both North Korea and South Korea. As PRC always claim Taiwan is part of China, this in turn means China wouldn't be completed without Taiwan. ROC isn't currently completed either, as they also claim ROC includes the mainland. We shouldn't direct the article "China" to any country unless PRC and ROC have settled the issue, like what Germany did with West Germany and East Germany, otherwise we will risk "taking side" which is not neutral. So u have to wait. If you can't wait, why don't u try to edit something else? such as re-directing Korea to Republic of Korea instead, and see if ur theory will be ridiculed there? --Da Vynci (talk) 20:17, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

I guess that the articles about other ancient figures, like for example Seti I who was born in Ancient Egypt, show us the proper guidelines for articles about ancient Chinese figures like Confucius. Comparing South and North Korea, West Germany and East Germany, with China and Taiwan is simply unwise as the meaning of the names of the first two couples is widely understood in the English language. If you ask an educated English-speaker about "Korea" he will ask you: "Which one?". The same happened with East Germany and West Germany 19 years ago. However if you ask him about "China" he will speak about the current country (official name being People's Republic of China). The same thing happens with "Taiwan", he will speak about the island-country (official name being Republic of China). I'm not arguing that we take any side, I'm and Readin are just arguing that we simply follow the English language in the English Wikipedia. It isn't any personal theory of mine or Readin, it is a fact that quite honestly you have been unable to argue against with proper facts and evidence. The English language doesn't have to wait for the agreement of politicians and governments and neither does Wikipeia. Flamarande (talk) 21:44, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

If you say Congo, I (and other ppl who r unfamilar w/ African politic) wouldn't ask you whether it is Democratic Republic of the Congo or Republic of the Congo, simply becoz there are people who am not familar with the African politic . The same with China, there are people who are not familar with Asian politic who wouldn't care the difference between ROC and PRC. It is important for wikipeida's address facts with accuracy, not base on the simple popularity that you cited. As I said , popular isn't mean being correct. So we can't equte China to PRC or ROC. --Da Vynci (talk) 22:32, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

I think we should redirect China to PRC....I didn't bother to read the mass of arguments above (so forgive me if I am repeating something), but, the definition of China is "a cultural region, an ancient civilization, and, depending on perspective, a national or multinational entity extending over a large area in East Asia." which I agree totally. But lets include the younger users of Wikipedia. What if one of those children clicked on "Republic of China" instead of PRC?? ...that might lead to confusion. Anyways, let us remember that the ROC is EXILED. When the Republican Spanish Government was exiled from Spain and moved to Mexico, Mexico wasn't considered part of Spain. International law states that an exiled government does not affect sovereignty, so Taiwan (which was liberated by the San Francisco Peace Treaty) is a country under the Administration and occupation of the ROC... Correct me if I'm wrong. --Taiwanrox8 (talk) , 1 March 2009 (UTC)

First, the contention that the ROC is exiled is actually hotly disputed, and I'll refer you to the article Legal status of Taiwan for the gory details as to why. Second, it is unlikely that someone would enter "Republic of China" when looking for information on "China." And FWIW the article itself clearly points people to where they should be looking, if they get the article wrong. Ngchen (talk) 13:33, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Should ROC government be called "ROC" or "Taiwan side"?

Pyl and I have gotten into a discussion about the proper term for calling the ROC government when describing relations between the ROC and another government such as the PRC or Ireland that does not formally recognize the ROC. In both cases, we have a situation where the other government refuses to call the ROC "ROC". In the case of relations with the PRC, it seems the ROC is called the "Taiwan side".

What term should be used in each case?

I would prefer to get some answers before Pyl and I start arguing it here so that perhaps we could get some unsullied opinions. Readin (talk) 19:11, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

In cross-strait relations, it is Taiwan side vs mainland China side as there is a "Taiwan side" and a "mainland China side" across the Taiwan strait. It is also used that way to avoid taking a position whether mainland China and Taiwan are two states or two regions within one state (China). If you say ROC and PRC, then it is clear that Wikipedia has already taken a position that they are two states.

Diplomatically, it is clear that they were two states (or political entities) of ROC and PRC competing against each other for the representation of China. We should call them for what they are, which is ROC and the PRC. It makes no sense for normal readers to call the ROC "Taiwan side": "Taiwan side" as opposed to what?--pyl (talk) 01:33, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

I see you couldn't wait for anyone to state an opinion before trying to push your POV here. Readin (talk) 06:23, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

If you believe the PRC is a state, and you believe the ROC is a state, then perhaps seeing ROC and PRC together in one article will cause you to believe that there are two separate states. That's not our problem. We don't say they are separate states in the article, would just identify the governments having the relationship using the names those governments prefer to use for themselves. Whether or not you believe those names imply separate states largely depends on whether you already consider them separate states. If you're a PRC guy who believes the ROC is not a states, then seeing the term "ROC" used to describe that illegitimate government isn't going to change your mind.

Now we've each had a chance to state a view. How cutting our your trial lawyering for a bit (we know from your user page you have legal training) and let people put in their opinions. You seem to have too much time to spend endlessly arguing with and reverting people you disagree with. Give some other people a chance to respond. Readin (talk) 06:29, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

Please stop using my legal training against me. You have done that a couple of times, and I tried to ignore it. I believe that you had only presented half of the picture (only said "Taiwan side", without saying "mainland China side") so I felt the need to elaborate it. For the rest of your comments, I will refer the matter to Wikipedia:Wikiquette alerts as I don't find them civil.--pyl (talk) 07:09, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

You seem to have too much time to spend endlessly arguing with and reverting people you disagree with. Given the reasoning at Wikipedia:Wikiquette alerts, I guess it is not uncivil for me to say that I feel the same way about you. Looking at your own contribution, it appears to me that this is your behaviour of late. Also, I guess it would be fine for me to make a smart arse comment about your qualification and job?

I don't think I prevented anyone from making a comment by me making my own case. You do not own Wikipedia and this is an open discussion that anyone can join, including me.--pyl (talk) 13:49, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

I am not sure why you kept mentioning me in terms of the cross-strait relations article. I am not the person who wrote up "mainland side" and "Taiwan side". When you posted a question on this issue on the discussion page, I said "I have no opinions on" these terms. In fact, ROC and PRC are mentioned as two governments in cross-strait relations. It appears to me that you just selectively read stuff and have problems with them, like your issues with "information about Han Chinese [being] repeated" in Demographics of Taiwan. As I pointed out to you, they weren't.--pyl (talk) 13:49, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

Throw in "Chinese taipei" please for when Taiwan is represented in international view. Benjwong (talk) 17:01, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

I would support calling it the ROC or Chinese Taipei, per Readin's arguments. It wouldn't be a violation of NPOV, because all of our articles on this issue clearly state that the ROC is not universally recognized as legitimate.--Danaman5 (talk) 00:21, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

I was hoping to get more comment, but I suspect a lot of people don't want to get in the middle of a dispute between Pyl and me.

I think "Chinese Taipei" doesn't work in either case. "Chinese Taipei" is used generally used where there is agreement between Taiwan and some organization that "Chinese Taipei" will be the official name within that organization. For example, at the Olympics, "Chinese Taipei" isn't a nickname, it is the official name for Taiwan at the Olympics. On the other hand, it is in no way the name of Taiwan in general. It is not the common name (what most people use in a neutral setting). It is not the official name.

When discussing government-to-government relations between the ROC and governments that are not part of the ROC, I believe we should be consistent in applying names. NPOV is one of the highest goals of Wikipedia. As editors we should take that responsibility seriously. One good way to be neutral is to apply standards consistently from article to article. We should avoid making POV distinctions where none are necessary or informative. Using different names in the cross-strait relations article and the diplomatic missions of Ireland article would implies that there is something different about the relations. On the other hand, consistently calling them by their preferred names from one case to another causes makes no implication. Were I to write an article about relations between South Korea and California, using their official names would not suggest that both are sovereign states.

Due to the political situation, we have often used a standard of writing "Republic of China" when talking about the government and "Taiwan" when talking about other things. It is totally consistent to use "Republic of China" when talking about the government's negotiations with the People's Republic of China.

Pyl has argued that in the context of cross-strait relations calling the ROC the "Republic of China" and calling the PRC the "People's Republic of China" would imply that there are two states involved. However there is no such implication unless one already believes that the "Republic of China" is a state and that the "People's Republic of China" is also a state. Using the two names together neither changes nor reinforces that belief. On the other hand, if one doesn't know what the two governments are called, or if they indeed know nothing about the situation, it is hard to see how hiding the names of the governments will be less of a bias than using their names. Choosing different standards to achieve different results in the articles appears to be a deliberate attempt to avoid the agreed on facts in order to further an ideology.

I can think of two ways we can be consistent. One is to use the official names preferred by both governments. This would be consistent with the commonly used standard of writing ROC or PRC when talking about the governments. Or we could write the names used in the relations. For the cross-strait relations article these are "mainland side" and "Taiwan side" while the diplomatic missions of Ireland would use "Taiwan" per the language used by the Minister of Foreign Affairs in explaining the relations. Readin (talk) 06:12, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Yes, that's one reason I haven't said anything! I personally would prefer the option of using the official names preferred by each government for itself. Go by what the stamps say ;) The "Chinese Taipei" thing I must say is - apart from questions of aesthetics - really weird. Until I saw someone carrying the sign at the Olympics, I had never heard of this and it left me struggling for a moment to figure out how that was even grammatical! I suspect it would equally confuse the majority of folk who are not well-versed in cross straits politics. Akerbeltz (talk) 10:17, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

[edit] How to refer to civil aviation authorities of the Republic of China

In China Airlines Flight 140 the article refers to civil aviation authorities of the Republic of China. I believe that the use of "ROC aviation authorities" or "Aviation authorities of the ROC" is consistent with the naming conventions guide and the manual of style as civil aviation authorities are parts of the Republic of China government. Another user believes that "Taiwan authorities" should be used, as Taiwan is common way to refer to the ROC. Are there any additional thoughts? WhisperToMe (talk) 20:29, 25 December 2008 (UTC)

Either should be fine. SchmuckyTheCat (talk) 20:35, 25 December 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Naming_conventions_(Chinese)#Political_NPOV says to use "Republic of China" "When referring to the state in article space after appropriate disambiguation has been given (Do not replace all instances of "Republic of China" with "Republic of China (Taiwan)" unless explicitly part of the official title.)." WhisperToMe (talk) 22:13, 25 December 2008 (UTC)

That said policy is not an official Wikipedia policy. Flamarande (talk) 22:47, 25 December 2008 (UTC)

Flamarande: the page says "This page documents an English Wikipedia naming convention. It is a generally accepted standard that editors should attempt to follow, though it is best treated with common sense and the occasional exception. Any substantive edit to this page should reflect consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on the talk page." - While it is not absolute, it's not like one can totally ignore it. You have to justify why it would be not used in a specific scenario. WhisperToMe (talk) 22:54, 25 December 2008 (UTC)

I know what the page/box says, but its factual accuracy is quite doubtful. The official Wikipedia:Naming conventions in particular the 'Use the most easily recognized name' part is clear in this matter: "Generally, article naming should prefer what the greatest number of English speakers would most easily recognize, with a reasonable minimum of ambiguity, while at the same time making linking to those articles easy and second nature." 'Taiwan' is more easily recognized by the greatest number of English speakers rather than 'Republic of China'. Flamarande (talk) 23:15, 25 December 2008 (UTC)

"but its factual accuracy is quite doubtful" ? Flamarande, I don't think there is any question of factual accuracy here. There is a reason why we have specific guidelines (like the China conventions); some issues are very complex. I must add that Wikipedia:NPOV is a policy and it trumps the "most common name" where it conflicts. Believe it or not, the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China issues are very politically contentious. We, as a community, have decided that in some cases Republic of China is best and, in other cases, Taiwan is best. Please look at the archives. Thd discussion is here Wikipedia_talk:Naming_conventions_(Chinese)/Archive_8#ROC.2FTaiwan_Naming_Conventions_.28Here_we_go_again....29. WhisperToMe (talk) 01:06, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

I must also add from this discussion: - User:Jiang said: "Unlike news articles, we don't need to simplify facts and situations for our audience - we can explain them in their entirety. How do we best educate people? I think the current setup best accomplishes this.-" Wikipedia_talk:Naming_conventions_(Chinese)/Archive_9#I_humbly_propose_a_change_of_the_.22Political_NPOV.22_section WhisperToMe (talk) 01:17, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

Jiang has an agenda that prefers the term ROC and that quote was probably disputed by others, so I don't understand its value to this discussion.

As presented, I don't see any need to prefer either term. If it said ROC authorities, fine. If it said Taiwan authorities, fine. This terminology and arguments about it are usually dependent on political views. Wikipedia guidelines are not going to solve this blue/green naming debate. Taiwan and ROC are functionally equivalent terms most of the time. Changing one to the other without a strong reason is disruptive. You'll have to live with that. SchmuckyTheCat (talk)

1. Please do not presume bad faith about other posters. Let's talk about the issues. Jiang's quote is correct in that we do not have to simply things in the manner that many news agencies do.

2. If it wasn't for the "civil aviation authorities" bit, then maybe Taiwan and/or ROC would be interchangeable. However, Schmucky, the "civil aviation authorities" bit is a huge giveaway that we are talking about national government employees. There is no "Taiwan" government - You have the ROC national government, Taiwan Province, Taipei, and Kaohsiung all governing Taiwan.

3. At this rate the "Taiwan/ROC" section is what we have to deal with, and it is our guideline. Let's work with that guideline in mind. WhisperToMe (talk) 21:00, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

Be realistic! While Taiwan Province is a nominal political division of the ROC, in terms of government it is quasi-defunct, and that is precisely why the terms "Taiwanese government" or "Taiwanese authorities" are not ambiguous and assumed at all times to mean the ROC government. There is a "Taiwan government" and it is understood to be the ROC government. It is the Taiwan Provincial Government that has to disambiguate itself. The fact that "civil aviation authorities" is of the national level is the precise reason we don't need to be explicit. The MoS/Chinese is there to address political sensitivities. When there isn't, it's back to "use common name". MoS/Taiwan is there to reduce POV/sensitivity/disruptive editing. Oversensitizing something unnecessarily can lead to the same disruptiveness. HkCaGu (talk) 04:13, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

I am being realistic. First, the statement does not properly explain "Taiwan Government" because the ROC also covers Kinmen, Matsu, and the Pescadores. It would be like calling the U.S. Government the "Mainland U.S. Government" and therefore neglecting that it also covers Alaska and Hawaii. If the ROC only covered Taiwan, then, yes, you could use "Taiwan government" - But, no, it does not only cover Taiwan, and it also claims an even wider territory and it, to this day, maintains its wide territorial claims. In other words, all you did is prove my point that there is no "Taiwan government." As for imprecise "colloquial" usage of "Taiwan government" - it is not Wikipedia's goal to be colloquial; Wikipedia's goal is to be precise, and more precise than a newspaper or a news site can be. Also, By definition, civil aviation authorities are related to "political sensitivities" as they are members of the national government. Anything national government-related can trigger "political sensitivities." It is not "oversensitizing" to follow this very guideline. Using ROC in this sense follows this guideline as the subject is related to the ROC government, and it is inappropriate to "simplify" things.

Plus, when you describe a "Taiwan Government" in the sense of the national government it follows the Pan-Green point of view that the ROC should rename itself and declare independence. It is not "oversensitive" to be mindful of following NPOV.

WhisperToMe (talk) 07:30, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

Unfortunately, I don't think you understand the reality, especially of the use of "Taiwan". The best example I can give you is current president Ma Ying-jeou (KMT). He would never say he was running for "President of Taiwan". (A DPP candidate might just say that on purpose.) "President" goes with "ROC". But when he talked about issues, he would say Taiwan this and Taiwan that. People understood he meant more than the island or the province. People in Kinmen and Matsu never criticize every politician that said Taiwan for excluding them. They all understand in some sense they are part of "Taiwan". Saying "Taiwan Department of XXX" is most likely less than appropriate and that's what MOS/Taiwan addresses. Saying "Taiwanese XXX authorities" is not problematic, because there's no sensitivity. If that "authority" is multi-leveled or is at an unclear level, that we need to be more accurate. If there could only be one, then there is no need to be over-accurate. HkCaGu (talk) 08:16, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

I understand that a lot of people colloquially use "Taiwan" to refer to the ROC. I understand that, HkCaGu. But not everyone refers to the ROC when saying "Taiwan" - it could mean the island too. I understand that distinguishing what it means is up to context. But why bother? Wikipedia's goal to be precise. Wikipedia is a professional encyclopedia, not a personal blog, a MySpace post, or a simplified news report. There is no "over-accurate." Wikipedia strives for accuracy. - While I haven't heard of people from Kinmen and Matsu criticizing people who use Taiwan from excluding them, there are people who do not want to see "Taiwan" as labeled "independent from China" and the use of "Taiwan government" can imply exactly that. As I have said before, there are times when ROC and Taiwan can be interchangeable. This isn't one of them, as it specifically refers to the national government. As Wikipedia is to be more carefully written than a news article or a blog post, we are to be accurate. WhisperToMe (talk) 08:24, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

'A lot of people colloquially use "Taiwan" to refer to the ROC'? Try rather the overwhelming majority of the English-speaking world (including Encyclopedia Britannica, among other true professional encyclopaedias). Wikipedia isn't a professional encyclopaedia (it never was, and probably never will be). Its writers aren't paid professionals, and most of them aren't experts of the relevant fields. Wikipedia isn't sold in stores.

There are also people who don't want to acknowledge the unilaterally-proclaimed independence of Kosovo. BUT that doesn't mean that the articles of Wikipedia don't use the commonly used and widely accepted country-names. You write: 'There is no over-accurate'. However the country-articles are named Germany (instead of Federal Republic of Germany), France (instead of French Republic), etc. To use the common name of the countries is very common in encyclopaedias.

You wrote that 'there are people who do not want to see "Taiwan" as labeled "independent from China" and the use of "Taiwan government" can imply exactly that'. I'm going to assume that "people" means 'the current government of China'. Wikipedia has to date never bowed before the Chinese government, or censorship in general. That's why the Chinese government (among others) routinely blocks Wikipedia. Are you arguing that Wikipedia should bow down to Chinese censorship like Google and God-knows-how-many companies do? Flamarande (talk) 13:02, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

Flamarande, many of those arguments were discussed to the death in previous discussions that I linked to. There were refuted, and it is clear that there is no consensus to change the status quo regarding the PRC and the ROC. You also said: "Wikipedia has to date never bowed before the Chinese government, or censorship in general. That's why the Chinese government (among others) routinely blocks Wikipedia. Are you arguing that Wikipedia should bow down to Chinese censorship like Google and God-knows-how-many companies do?" - Actually using ROC and PRC does not bow down to PRC line - bowing down to the PRC line would be saying that the ROC has an illegitimate claim to China and that Taiwan Province, PRC is truly in effect, something like that. Saying that the aviation safety authorities are from the ROC does not skew Wikipedia towards the PRC line. Also, you said "Its writers aren't paid professionals, and most of them aren't experts of the relevant fields. Wikipedia isn't sold in stores." Flamarande, that is not an acceptable excuse to use unprofessional writing on Wikipedia. We try to be specific and proper in our writing, even though we are anywhere from high school students to retirees to rocket scientists. WhisperToMe (talk) 16:47, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

If the aviation authorities for Taiwan are part of Taiwan's national government, then use "Republic of China" for describing those authorities. On first use be sure to mention that the "Republic of China" is commonly known as "Taiwan". Continue to use "Republic of China" (or "ROC") to describe those authorities.

This has been our convention for a long time. Even though we've never had %100 buy-in this has been the common practice has been acceptable to most editors. Other solutions have been far more contentious. The best solution, simply referring to the country of Taiwan as "Taiwan", will get you into a long drawn out edit war. Readin (talk) 23:01, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

• So, here China Airlines Flight 140 The ROC is not mentioned in the lead (as we are only talking about the place Taiwan), but down in the bottom the aviation authorities are described as of the ROC, which is also known as Taiwan. This should satisfy the guideline, correct? WhisperToMe (talk) 16:36, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

Looks good. It wouldn't hurt to point out that China Airlines is an ROC airline, not a PRC airline. The name is very confusing. Readin (talk) 14:09, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Linguistics and related boxes: Please make distinctions

The linguistics box should include the romanizations appliable to the correspondent chinese characters... For instance, in the ROC, we can see IN THE LINGUISTICS BOX both the simplified and the traditional: In the country profile we only see the traditional variant, CAUSE THATS THE OFFICIAL ONE THERE... DPP has its own linguistics box and its own political box, the same applies to some newspapers, TV channels... and so on... Is this a policy or an established guideline? If not, Id like to propose it...Gumuhua (talk) 19:19, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

Hello there again: Id like to make a written mention in that 4th point of the naming conventiions to make reference to the Linguistics box, cause I've been looking for some guidelines about this kind of infobox, and found nothing.

My point is that the linguistics box should include the romanizations appliable to the correspondent chinese characters, both in simplified and traditional chinese... For instance, in the ROC, we can see IN THE LINGUISTICS BOX both the simplified and the traditional form, and the appliable transliterations: In the country infobox we only see the traditional variant, CAUSE THATS THE OFFICIAL ONE THERE... DPP has its own linguistics box and its own political party box, where we only see the traditional variant, the same applies to some newspapers, TV channels... and so on...

Im interested in such a move, cause there is no a clear standard.. just today another contributor suggested to undo my reform of the "KMT" page, cause i added a lingustics infobox, with wiktionary links, and erased the simplified fomr FROM THE POLITICAL INFOBOX, where it shouldn't be... If we add simplified to the political party infobox, we should add simplified too to the ROC country infobox, where its not the official script, and well, that makes no sense...

I dunno if I should ask for support, or just unilaterally declare it a new policy... If somebody created that infobox, well, y dont we use it? Gumuhua (talk) 17:18, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

Given Wikipedia general principles of using well-known common names when they exist and otherwise calling things what they prefer to be called, as well as the NPOV principle of providing both sides of a dispute, I would suggest the following which I believe is often followed in practice:

The first sentence of the article should provide both simplified and traditional characters (as there are only two character sets we can easily provide all of them) whenever they differ. The preferred characters of the item being referenced should go first (traditional for Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau, simplified in China (outside HK and Macau), and whatever Singapore uses for Singapore). For romanizations, the first sentence should use whatever romanization is currently preferred, followed by any other common romanizations for the item. In cases where a local government uses one system and the national government uses another, the order should be local first, then national.

The infobox (country profile, person profile, etc.), in the interest of brevity, should provide the character set and romanization listed first in the first sentence.

It is unclear to me what the intended purpose of the linguistic box is, except perhaps to save space in the first sentence when the list of characters and romanizations becomes very long. Or perhaps it provides a nice way to compare the different characters and romanizations by placing them vertically aligned. I suppose we should be clear on the purpose of the linguistics box before setting policy on it.

I do think we need at least some rework on this topic. I noticed (I have to admit I didn't spend a lot of time reading) that the rules for the character sets differ from the rules for the romanization in some ways that don't make sense. We should try to be consistent. Readin (talk) 16:07, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

Side note, Singapore uses simplified. Pandacomics (talk) 16:14, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

• Hello there, readin:

1) Agree with the 1st point, but I just prefer to place romanizations and simpl-trad in the linguistics box, cause its collapsable and it classifies the languages used.

2) Ur second point seems to agree with me too, also, using different wording: we dont use simplified in the ROC country infobox, because its no official there, neither in the DPP party infobox, for the same reason.

3) POV: again, I believe it is better to place romanizations and characters into that standarized box, for the amentioned reasons, so readers can know the differences between mandarin, kewen, minnan, and so on...

4) Yup, agree: we certainly need some standardization... thats why I asked for some clearer guidelines.

If a linguistics box is used, I favour putting it on top, not below any other appliable infobox. My reasons: It doesn't occupy much space and its collapsable. I dunno if some other contributors place the linguistics box below the related politics/media/country infobox (IE, the ROC article), because they consider that we r giving some kind of prevalence to simplified, which has no legal status ion the ROC. Just wanted to say that linguistics have nothing to do with politics, or, at least, they shouldn't.

Gumuhua (talk) 16:25, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

Hello all, good discussion so far. Might I suggest an alternative solution? Rather than adding a separate linguistics infobox with the various Romanizations, perhaps we can simply use the existing templates at Template:Zh-all, and perhaps modify them to link to Wiktionary. The political infobox can then be used with whichever character form is relevant (traditional in the case of Taiwan / ROC related articles) as you just discussed. -Loren (talk) 05:59, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

[edit] UTF8 not allowed?

The guideline states: "Chinese characters on the English Wikipedia should be encoded using HTML entities with Unicode numbers." Is this meant to imply — as it appears to be — that using UTF-8 for Chinese characters is discouraged, so that we shouldn't use "人" directly, but enter something like "人" or "人" in the edit box? 88.233.36.11 (talk) 17:42, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

I never noticed that. It's old and out-of-date advice. I removed it. SchmuckyTheCat (talk)

[edit] China or PRC?

On the PRC article, it's acknowledged that the state is popularly called "China". However, the article uses the acronym PRC rather than China quite a bit, and in at least a couple places it's slightly awkward. Is there any standard WP rule about when to use China vs. PRC when the context unambiguously indicates that they refer to the same thing (as opposed to Chinese civilization or China geographically)? --Cybercobra (talk) 02:28, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

It's probably a result of POV warriors replacing all instances of China with PRC blindly. There is no rule. SchmuckyTheCat (talk)

Here

The term "mainland China" is a term which can be used when a comparison is to be made with Taiwan for non-political purposes. Hong Kong and Macau are generally not considered part of Mainland China, though under the jurisdiction of the PRC. Thus, it is more appropriate to write "many tourists from Hong Kong and Taiwan are visiting mainland China" than "many tourists from Hong Kong and Taiwan are visiting China" as the latter could imply that Hong Kong and Taiwan are not part of China. "China proper" is a term used refer to parts of Mainland China except Tibet, Xinjiang, and other regions associated with non-Han ethnicities, but may be seen as controversial by the Chinese.

Also note that there are potential landmines when using the term "Chinese." In particular, some find a distinction between "Chinese" and "Tibetans" or between "Chinese" and "Taiwanese" to be objectionable and the terms "Han Chinese"/"Tibetans" and "Mainland Chinese"/"Taiwanese" are more politically neutral and use will depend on the context. For example, "Mainland Chinese businessmen look forward to meeting their Taiwanese counterparts" is more accurate and acceptable than with the word "Mainland" left out.

Summarily, it is not politically neutral to use "China" when the better term is "PRC". China is a politically disputed and ambiguous term, but the PRC isn't.--pyl (talk) 16:37, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

And what page were those 2 paragraphs gleaned from, just to verify? --Cybercobra (talk) 20:03, 3 February 2009 (UTC)

This article (where this talk page is attached to). Here is the shortcut--pyl (talk) 04:47, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

(1) That policy appears to be disputed (2) That policy relates strictly to ROC+Macau+HK articles. While the PRC article obviously mentions those entities and their relation to the PRC, I fail to see why unrelated (non-politico-geographic) sections would fall under that policy. And away to Talk:People's Republic of China I go so this can be resolved by the community concensus. --Cybercobra (talk) 05:32, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Guidelines for "China" vs. "PRC" usage

Please join the new discussion about Guidelines for "China" vs. "PRC" usage on the People's Republic of China article --Cybercobra (talk) 07:01, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Apostrophes!

There seems to be two schools about apostrophes in "Pinyinized" words. This document currently abides by the Library of Congress's guidlenes, which use an apostrophe "for disambiguation" only, i.e. only where an alternative reading could result without one. Thus, according to them, "Shi Naian" does not need an apostrophe (because Naian can only be divided Nai-an, and not Na-ian in Pinyin). This approach is also followed by some well-known writers (e.g. Timothy Brook in his book on Ming Dynasty, "The Confusions of Pleasure"). However, it seems that the official (or at least semi-official) Pinyin guidelines (as described e.g. here with a link to a Chinese published source), use a somewhat different - and simpler to explain - rule: When a syllable beginning with a, e, or o appears in the middle of a polysyllabic word, it is preceded by an apostrophe. Thus: .... hǎi'ōu (seagull) is two syllables, hǎi-ōu. So according to that rule, we'd have "Shi Nai'an". I personally am in favor of the second approach, and feel that even if we don't adopt it, we should at least mention it in this policy page. Vmenkov (talk) 13:47, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Naming convention for Chinese foods and usages of Wikitionary

I raise the issue to WT:WikiProject China#Naming convention for Chinese foods and usages of Wikitionary. Would you spare a moment to give your thought? Thanks.--Caspian blue 18:27, 11 May 2009 (UTC)