Biocrawler talk:Naming conventions (Chinese)

Politics/Parties/Elections

Under the non-disputed portions of the current NPOV section, it is preferable to use the actual name of the political entities, ie: PRC, ROC, Hong Kong, Macau. I found most of this stuff was organized under "mainland China", because 10 days ago (ahem) someone (ahem) moved everything there. This caused "Elections in mainland China" to appear in lists of countries, which is not OK.

I emptied the mainland and recreated all the PRC categories. Plus, I tried to remove any plain old "China" category that sat alone. Or, I disambiguated it with NPOV explanatory text on the category page itself that "China" was not a single entity... blah blah blah. See Category:Political_parties_in_China. PRC, ROC, HK, and Macau appear as equals in these lists. I accept this because of the disclaimer text.

There is a category, "Youth Wings of Chinese Political Parties" that has existed for quite awhile that was linked from a parent category Category:Youth wings of political parties this listing as "Chinese" is entirely POV as the only article there is in the PRC. Either it needs a lot of expansion and explanatory text or some other way of organizing this. I'm open to taking the only article there, renaming it to "... of the PRC" and putting it directly in the parent category, I am not sure the maintainers of that parent category find that amenable.

Who wrote this? Can you sign it?

PRC, ROC, HK, and Macau appear as equals in these lists. -- don't you see something wrong with this? Hong Kong and Macau are administrative divisions of the PRC. -- ran (talk) 20:32, Mar 30, 2005 (UTC)

Size of this article

It's 230k, which is getting impossible to edit. Can we move that huge discussion to /NPOV?

Chinese surnames on Biocrawler

If you're interested in working on how Chinese surnames should be presented on Biocrawler, please comment at Talk:Chinese surname#Chinese surnames on Biocrawler. Thanks. — Instantnood 13:55, Apr 5, 2005 (UTC)

Naming convention vs. Manual of Style

The "Political NPOV" section doesn't seem seem to be even largely about article naming conventions, but about style and usage, which is beyond the scope of of this namespace. It ought to confine itself to guidelines on which articles names should use the terms "China", "mainland China", or "PRC", etc. Alai 16:30, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Eras and Emperors

[I moved this post from the main project page since it was incorrectly posted there --Umofomia 23:19, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)]

I was thinking of including all events of an Emperor's reign into the Emperor's article itself, regardless of direct involvement from the Emperor. For example, during the reign of the Shunzhi Emperor, the Manchus took over Beijing, but it had little to do with the Emperor himself but was much the work of Dorgon and a couple Han Chinese Generals. This way a continuous line of articles could eventually compose the entire History of China series by Era Name. The problem I see, however, is the fact that other than Qing and Ming Dynasty Emperors, there can be several era names for one Emperor. Should we consider having separate articles for each era name? Furthermore, several era names can exist at the same time for various rulers. Any ideas?

Colipon+(T) 22:37, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Mmmm.... a very interesting idea! :D I'd suggest though that you use just one article for each Emperor with multiple era names, or else some of those Tang Dynasty emperors are really going to be chopped up into tiny bits...

This is truly a cool idea, and I think if combined with a few aids (e.g. the bar at the bottom providing a continuous chain of links; better designed timelines) we would get a very comprehensive description of Chinese history.

The era names can probably be put into the year articles (1, 2, etc.). We can put Chinese historical events there too. -- ran (talk) 00:30, Apr 18, 2005 (UTC)

Excellent Ran. If you can agree with this idea then I can begin with Qing Dynasty stuff, which is relatively simple compared to Tang Emperors with about 25 era names. But before I start, I'm open to suggestions on format. I do think Biocrawlerns could undertake a huge project on the history of the longest continuous civilization in the world. Colipon+(T) 04:48, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Mmmm... how about a WikiProject? :D Perhaps Biocrawler:WikiProject Chinese history. -- ran (talk) 05:32, Apr 18, 2005 (UTC)

Great idea. If one of you doesn't start it, I probably will in the near future. Colipon+(T) 01:38, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Cantonese naming conventions

One thing that occured to me while working on several Cantonese and Hong Kong related articles was that Biocrawler lacks a clear naming convention for Cantonese. Obviously for placenames we use the official spelling and for people we choose their official or most commonly used name. And we keep well established spellings like dim sum. But what about for less well-established terms like Chaan-teng or Poon choi? When naming an article, what system do we use? There's multiple Cantonese romanization systems in existence, Barnett-Chao, Jyutping (used by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong, Yale romanization (used more often by western academics), the official Guangdong_Romanization, among others, and none of them are dominant. We should have some kind of consistent and systematic naming convention to avoid confusion and as a guideline for starting new Cantonese-related articles. I've mostly been using Yale, but what the Standard Cantonese says really is true: most Cantonese speakers, including me, don't understand most of the Romanization system, and I'm disinclined to learn them until there's a system that's being consistently used.--Yuje 11:59, Jun 16, 2005 (UTC)