Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Gwoyeu Romatzyh

The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was promoted 01:09, 3 April 2007.

[edit] Gwoyeu Romatzyh

This is a self-nomination. I starting to edit this article (on a Chinese romanization system due to the linguist Yuen Ren Chao) in January, & since then have largely rewritten it. Several editors, particularly User:Ikiroid, have helped by putting in a great deal of work suggesting & implementing improvements.

The article was passed as GA on 19 March. We have followed User:Peripitus' suggestion to reduce the length of the article by moving the detailed description of the system's spelling and tonal rules to a new article, Spelling in Gwoyeu Romatzyh. The essentials of this new article are now summarized in the Description section of the main article.

The article has had a peer review. We've followed the reviewer's useful suggestion about the structure of the article. --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 10:06, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

• Support As one of the editors who helped Ndsg, I can say that the article is ready to be featured. The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 14:22, 26 March 2007 (UTC)
• Comment Support I'm one of those "Several editors", though I really haven't done much editing to the article. After a last look over, I found a couple places that need a citation, and a paragraph that needs one as well. Aim for one citation per paragraph. If those are taken care of, I think it has my support.--Clyde (talk) 23:52, 26 March 2007 (UTC)
  • I've cited one of the two phrases you tagged with "citation needed." You also placed a hidden message regarding OR—specifically, what fact to do you believe is original research? The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 00:26, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

Well a good rule of thumb is one citation per paragraph, which the paragraph in question lacks. As to each sentence...

• "Lin Yutang's Chinese-English dictionary (1972) incorporated a number of innovative features, one of which was a simplified version of GR." Needs a citation about the features, and that one of them was simplified GR.
• "Lin eliminated most of the spelling rules requiring substitution of vowels, as can be seen from his spelling Guoryuu Romatzyh, in which the regular -r is used for T2 and a doubled vowel for T3." How do I know this is how he spelled it? Also, using an uncitied "example" seems to bring OR to mind.--Clyde (talk) 00:41, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

Y Done --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 10:18, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

I also found that in Description , under Basic forms (Tone 1), the first paragraph is void of a single citation. It is introducing the forms of the language, and there's a lot that could be citied in there.--Clyde (talk) 13:17, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

[outdent] Is it really necessary to duplicate the citations given in the main article, Spelling in Gwoyeu Romatzyh? A clear reference to that article is given at the beginning of the Description section. If you think it's essential to duplicate the refs, I can of course do so! --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 17:49, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

I would do it just to be safe. I did it somewhat when I cited IPA...pretend the reader is only looking at the article Gwoyeu Romatzyh, not the spelling page. The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 18:36, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

Update: I checked out both pages and neither appears to have inline citations in the sections describing tone spelling changes. It shouldn't be too hard to cite, since it's from the books by Chao inter alia that you've already referenced. However, I don't have any of those books, so you'll have to do that (unless I can utilize something from the article's internet resources). The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 18:51, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

But it's no more difficult to follow a link to the spelling page than it would be to look up a reference to Chao et al! Having gone to the trouble of preparing detailed colour-coded tables (now in the new article) making everything perfectly clear, what purpose would be served by sending the reader back to Chao? The new Gwoyeu Romatzyh#Description is supposed to be a summary, isn't it? If we start duplicating all the citations in the summary, eventually we'll end up with a carbon copy of the details we wanted to get rid of in the first place.

Or so it seems to me. It's getting late, & I may be getting a bit tired ...

BTW It's simply not true that Spelling in Gwoyeu Romatzyh#Tonal rules has no inline citations. It has one, referring to 2 books by Chao & 1 by Simon. Given the subject-matter, that's more than enough! Gwoyeu Romatzyh#Tonal modifications refers to the other article: if you prefer, we could replace this with a copy of the footnote from the other article.

Actually, this whole discussion raises an interesting point of principle. By presenting a summary of the Description we're in effect making the main GR article self-contained. The next question is: Where does the interested reader who wants to learn more about spelling & tones etc go to get further information? If we only give direct references to Chao, Simon et al., the reader may never get to see all our useful work in Spelling in Gwoyeu Romatzyh at all! To prevent that, we say "Main article: Spelling in Gwoyeu Romatzyh" at the top of the section. If, having read our attempt to explain everything there, he or she wants to check our sources, all the citations are given in that second article. That to me seems sufficient. --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 21:19, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

Whoa! The description section was great as it was. I don't want you to go about expanding it or cutting it apart. Keep the description page as a summary of Spelling in Gwoyeu Romatzyh. Just simply add a few citations from the books. We can keep the citations that refer the reader to the spelling article too, it's just that we want these facts individually sourced. It is a bit redundant to cite both articles on the same fact with the same source, but that is the preferred method. Look! I've already added a citation, which was in Spelling in Gwoyeu Romatzyh. You simply need to just put a few more of these in the section. The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 14:36, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

Y Done I think I've now achieved a judicious balance of external citations & links to the GR Spelling article. --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 16:50, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

I agree. See above.--Clyde (talk) 00:23, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

• Oppose. That colored text is the most jarring thing I've seen in an FAC since the weird formatting problem at the bottom of Hippocrates. If we don't have something in the MOS about colored text, we should. Also, references/footnotes aren't fully formatted; we need to know publisher (and publication date and author if available) on all sources. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 02:32, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

In all fairness, it's exceedingly difficult to explain the material in simple bold and italics. The colored letters work quite well in describing the four different tones. What would you suggest we should do instead for marking spelling differences? The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 02:56, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

It would be a simple matter to remove all the colours if necessary; but I think we should wait to hear objections to the existing colouring scheme from more reviewers before doing so. The MOS says:

Using color alone to convey information (color coding) should not be done ... It is certainly desirable to use color as an aid for those who can see it, but the information should still be accessible without it.

Well, in this case the colour is not being used alone (there is plenty of text explaining how the tones are encoded): it's being used as an additional aid to convey a complex point. In the Example text, in particular, the colours merely highlight what the reader can derive from the Tonal spelling rules given elsewhere in the article.

As for the references and footnotes, I'm a bit puzzled by your comment. What exactly is wrong with the formatting? The only omission I could detect was the publisher of Karlgren's The Romanization of Chinese. For some reason the publisher is given in almost none of the references I consulted; but I did finally trace it in a HK library catologue. The paper was printed by The China Society, London—a fact now duly incorporated in the References. Please let me know of any other omissions you spotted.

Thank you for taking the time to review this article. --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 11:03, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

I completed two refs as a sample of info that still needs to be filled in. Perhaps the color-coding issue could be reviewed with Wikipedia:WikiProject Languages ? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:04, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

I went there to post a request, but saw that you'd already done so! Thank you. I've also posted a request on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Writing systems.

As for the refs, I'll go through the article more thoroughly now that I understand what you were getting at. Thanks for making a start on the work. --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 17:12, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

Y Done Web citations are now properly formatted. --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 18:57, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

• Support. But what about filling in the wider political/cultural issues. Was it a force for centralising language during the 20th century (and thus power)? Has the same thing been attempted for other Chinese languages, such as Cantonese? Why not explain to non-experts what the tones are, in phonological and semantic terms. In English, tones are grammatical; perhaps you could point out this distinction to engage a wider audience. Tony 23:37, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

Post nomination (edit conflicted) comment: Your points are well-taken. As you can gather from the latter half of the history section and the thrid paragraph of the introduction, the GR movement unfortunately died out before it could play its intended role as the main romanization system of Mandarin. However, Y.R. Chao, the linguist who conceived the system, played a major role in pushing for a Latin alphabet in Chinese and also supported the movement to make vernacular Mandarin the official dialect of Chinese. Insofar as mainstream romanization systems, the GR style of spelling has not been replicated in any form Chinese. Your note about tones is duly noted and I have added a note about tones in Chinese per your suggestion. The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 02:09, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.