Template talk:Ethnic groups in China

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[edit] Which spelling to use?

User:Caiqian insists on using official government spellings for the ethnic groups on this list. It seems to me that what we want is for people who see the list to know what we're talking about when we see it. Therefore, it's a good idea for us to use common English names and spellings. Almost everyone knows what "Korean" means, but almost no one who doesn't speak Chinese knows what "Chaoxian" means. As an additional point, I disagree with Caiqian's argument that "The naming has been changed and standardanized, just like Peking to Beijing, Nanking to Nanjing in wikipedia". This is actually irrelevant: we use "Nanjing" and "Beijing" because these are now more common outside of Wikipedia; if Peking and Nanking were more common, we would use those instead. Moreover, those cities are things which exist entirely inside of the PRC, whereas the ethnic groups in question live in several countries, so there's no reason why one government should be able to change their name. - Nat Krause^(Talk!) 18:00, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

Why don't we just use the English names as listed here: http://english.people.com.cn/data/minorities/ethnic_minorities.html Hong Qi Gong 17:02, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

I don't quite understand why we would use them.—Nat Krause^(Talk!) 22:27, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Because it's a standardised list that the Chinese government has, and this is a list of the officially recognised ethnic groups in China. Hong Qi Gong 22:38, 7 July 2006 (UTC)