Wikipedia talk:WikiProject China/Archive/November 2006

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Archive This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.


Contents

Bad edits alert!

Certified.Gangsta (talk ·  contribs) (formerly Bonafide.hustla) has been removing the talk page header for this project from Taiwan-related articles. Please help put this to a stop. The reasons for doing so are ridiculous.--Jiang 06:05, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

This is strongly POV. This is implying Taiwan is part of China, which obviously is a highly controversial issue. Any addition of such should be view as POV pushing.--Certified.Gangsta 06:24, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

The addition of this tag only implies that Taiwan-related topics are also related to China. The addition of this tag at Talk:Chinese American does not mean America is part of China. Removal at places such as Min (linguistics) is just plain ridiculous. At least read the articles you edit!--Jiang 06:51, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

If you look at the project page, this WikiProject is defined to include China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Leave the template on Taiwan-related pages. enochlau (talk) 07:10, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

Wow then this is obviously a POV pushing project. The inclusion of Taiwan implies Taiwan is part of China which is debatable not to mention highly controverisial.--Certified.Gangsta 18:48, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

This is a project about China-related topics and articles. Inclusion of the tag does not assert ownership. Jiang has already explained that. Do you have any specific complaints rather than the rude accusation that this is a POV pushing project? -- Миборовский 19:30, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

WikiProject Taiwan

Wikipedia:WikiProject Taiwan

If anyone is interested, please help it out! =) AQu01rius (User | Talk | Websites)  05:15, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

Changing Hong Kong Categories to China

I left a note at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Hong Kong#Changing Hong Kong Categories to China about a wholesale move of Hong Kong Categories, replacing them with PRC categories. Perhaps this has been discussed previously, but if not, please have a look. Cheers.--Bookandcoffee 18:25, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Four Lords of the Warring States

The article entry is now created. I'll start working on the sub-articles for each of the Four. AQu01rius (User | Talk | Websites)  00:50, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Unimpressed with Chinese Articles

I have looked at a good half dozen articles about China, and I have to tell you, I am not impressed. These Chinese articles are almost uniformly unreadable. There are few if any sections. The sentences are very long and complicated. There are completely confused and overly long paragraphs with multiple topics in each paragraph. There are no introduction. There are many different names in different scripts, stated right at the start of the article that buries the reader under a load of minutae. This makes these articles completely inaccessible to almost 99% of the readers. I have tried to improve and rearrange a couple of these chinese articles. Hopefully people will agree that they look better now and are easier for nonspecialists to read. For an example, look at the article on the Forbidden City which I worked on a bit. Do you think I am heading in the right direction? If not, we can go back to the previous style, but I would suggest that style is not near as readable. --Filll 18:14, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Can you do me a favour and list down the articles you looked at? We're aware of this problem but haven't been able to find the energy or dedication to do a WP-wide cleanup... But a list of articles in critical need of cleanup would be helpful as a start. -- Миборовский 19:33, 6 November 2006 (UTC)
While I do plead guilty of having further burdened some articles with multiple language names, I do see the point. For instance, I don't see any point in giving Chinese place names in both simplifed and traditional characters, since anyone who knows Chinese can easily covert from one to the other. The use of one name form in favor of another can stir up strong feelings here, as you may have noticed, and this phenomenon is by no means exclusive to China-relate articles. Take a look at İzmir or Gdańsk, for instance.
On the other hand, I believe that multiple names do have an encyclopedic value and the beauty of a Wiki is that we can create more completeness than in an ordinary encyclopedia. I think the best way out is to create boxes for multiple names, like in Yalu River and Guangzhou.--Niohe 23:41, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Navigation

I just created a navigation side bar for WikiProject China, and organized related infomations to it. Still have a lot works to do... AQu01rius (User | Talk) 18:27, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

That's pretty cool. I'm sorry I can't do more for the project for the time being; college applications are more important. :( But after mid-Dec I should be back to normal activity... enemies of Centralia be warned!!! (j/k) :p -- Миборовский 04:19, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:China-related topics notice board

Should we redirect the discussion board there to the talk page in here? It's pretty inactive there =\

Anyways, I've organized the comments here to archive section according to the months. AQu01rius (User • Talk) 17:23, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

OK, thanks. The bot saves us the trouble of manual archiving. Maybe I should do that too. -- Миборовский 00:01, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
As for the noticeboard, that was here a lot earlier than this project so I didn't think it was appropriate to devour it. :) -- Миборовский 00:02, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

zh.wiki über alles, for those that care

zh.wiki recently hit the 100,000 article mark. Ten-Banzai! Or should I say, ten-ban-article? It has also been unblocked in mainland China, so jeder heil CCP!!! -- Миборовский 06:47, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

Oh, news link here. Also check out the rather crude 100,000th article celebratory upper left logo. -- Миборовский 06:57, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

忠義救國軍

Well, I just discovered that the father of one of my dad's colleagues was a veteran of 忠義救國軍... and I grilled him for an hour; a pity that his father had passed away. :( Anyway, I'm surprised to find there is no article either on zh.wiki or en.wiki on this very famous unit, can I interest someone to start this article? I would do it myself, but I have absolutely no idea what the English translation should be. Loyal and Righteous Army of National Salvation??? -- Миборовский 05:36, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

Use the transliterated name (Zhongyijiuguo Army), while specifying the meaning of it in the article. That's what I think.. AQu01rius (User • Talk) 05:43, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

Our portal

Argh, I'll be devoting sometime to improve Portal:China (should have enough things to put) and Portal:Taiwan (might be hard) into feature quality. Any help would be appreciated, as our portals are currently really basic. AQu01rius (User • Talk) 05:38, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

I spent some time on these portals as well as Portal:People's Republic of China, Portal:Republic of China, and Portal:Hong Kong. The only task remaining for Feature Portal status is to create automatically updating selected article/picture content (see Portal:Hong Kong for how to do this) and create archives of same. At one per month, a year's worth of articles and pictures is enough.
The main problem is finding enough high-quality articles and pictures to feature. If you have any other questions or requests feel free to ask here or on my talk page. --Ideogram 06:05, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

AQu01rius has been making many changes I disagree with and has not yet responded to my comments on Portal talk:China. I would appreciate it if others would weigh in with their opinions so we can try to reach a consensus on this. --Ideogram 19:02, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

Hai-Sha Ni

Hi China geeks, can you have a look at the page Hai-Sha Ni - there is a little debate as to whether Hai-Sha Ni meets our criteria for inclusion. --Dangherous 15:24, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

Geeks?
Google: 10,300 hits in Chinese. Baidu: 6,640 in Chinese. Seems controversial enough for inclusion. He's got quite an army of disciples, too. I guess he would also qualify as the grandmaster of a new martial arts... I mean TCM... sect... -- Миборовский 04:11, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

Anniversaries in Portals

I purposed a way to include all events related to China (PROC, ROC, Taiwan and Hong Kong) into one signle Portal Calender. It makes life easier, and increases the chances of having all China portals featured. See the calender here

AQu01rius (User • Talk) 16:43, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

Why have orange for Taiwan but nothing for mainland China in general? How about:
  • Blue for events in all China excluding Taiwan from its formation to the proclamation of the PRC and for Taiwan from the surrender of Japan to present (eg. anniversary of the start of the War of Resistance; Retrocession Day)
  • Red for events relating to the CPC, its historical events from its formation to proclamation of the PRC and from the proclamation of the PRC to present on mainland China (eg. Shenzhou 5 launch; Mao kicks the bucket)
  • Yellow/gold/orange for pre-ROC historical events and dates (eg. birth of Emperor so-and-so; signing of this-and-that unequal treaty)
Or we can forget all of this and specify somewhere that hey, we don't give a sh*t about politics, this thing's just to record everything that happened on a particular day. -- Миборовский 23:46, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
I really don't give a shit about politics. --Ideogram 21:42, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Right. Should we just record everything? AQu01rius (User • Talk) 01:27, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

Sure, if you can find a way to placate the mob of Taiduers and clueless crackas who will invariably pop up to protest your calendar. -- Миборовский 15:59, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
The anniversaries should include all dates until October 1, 1949. After which, the dates should be dealt with in the PRC and ROC portals seperately, otherwise it raises POV problem. I agree about not giving a shit about the politics but a lot of people will start harassing Wikipedia articles over the PRC vs. ROC issue. Other encyclopedias already just list ROC entry as Taiwan, and list PRC as China. Wikipedia is probably the only encyclopedia that avoids China = PRC, Taiwan = ROC definition. — Nrtm81 22:07, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

Chinese surnames

User:Yao Ziyuan has been putting some Chinese biography articles into Chinese surname categories. Normally I wouldn't have a problem with that, but he makes his categories with Chinese characters in them. (example: Category:Wéi (韋)) He also moved Ding (surname) to Dīng (丁). I'm under the impression that we shouldn't have non-Latin characters in article titles (and restrict using tone marks), but in this case, I'm not so sure. There are too many different Chinese surnames that sounds the same and we'd have nothing else to distinguish them if we don't use the Chinese character...

So, what can be done for this issue? _dk 07:44, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Wow, that's a good question. I'm leaning towards including the Chinese characters. --Ideogram 07:47, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
If we are going to have such categories, then the only way to disambiguate between different surnames is with Chinese characters. Which then brings us to the question of whether Simplified or Traditional should be used? --Sumple (Talk) 01:15, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
If that's the way we're going, then I prefer traditional Chinese since simplified Chinese merged too many things together. But then again, are such categories really necessary? Also, User:Yao Ziyuan also tried to split the Li (surname) article (which includes 李, 黎, 利, etc) but was reverted. I personally prefer a split there but I don't know...the Chinese page title issue again. _dk 02:34, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
Also see Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Lǐ (李) (surname) _dk 02:37, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
I think it's better not to have the Chinese word - some users (non-Chinese) may not have support for East Asian fonts on their computer, and then we get into the whole Simplified v. Traditional discussion again. –- kungming·2 (Talk) 22:08, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
I tend to agree, but what other ways are there to disambiguate between the same-sounding surnames? _dk 00:29, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

A disambiguation at the Li page, then arrange each Li articles by its sound, so it'll be something like Li (1), Li (2), Li (3), Li (4). That's my opinion. AQu01rius (User • Talk) 00:34, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

We'd still have multiple surnames in one page then. For example, 李 and 里 would both be Li (3). _dk 00:48, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
So what? This is not Chinese Wikipedia.--Niohe 00:51, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
It's fine to have multiple surnames in one article, I think - most non-Chinese will not be able to differentiate between the different forms. –- kungming·2 (Talk) 00:57, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
Of course this is not the Chinese wiki, I'm just concerned for the sizes of the articles if each surname gets to expand. _dk 01:01, 28 November 2006 (UTC)
I'm praying I'll live to see the day when article size becomes a problem on China-related articles. ;) -- 我♥中國 00:51, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

Vote for Portal:China theme color

Please visit the discussion page of Portal:China and vote for the theme color (red, yellow, etc). The vote was started to get a general concensus and an accepted color by the majority. Note that the portal is a geography portal, NOT a political portal. — Nrtm81 19:54, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Exactly. Using the exact same color as the PRC portal for the China portal is politically confusing for foreign viewers. But you supports that, hm. AQu01rius (User • Talk) 21:34, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
We could change the color of the PRC portal. --Ideogram 21:38, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

Han Chinese vs. Hua ren / Tang Chinese

OK, recently I was editing Demographics of Taiwan until an anonymous user User talk:71.106.149.53 came along and kept removing the ethnicity chart from the page. He says Han Chinese refers to a race and not cultural ethnicity. Is that true? (I thought it IS cultural meaning). He says it is propaganda by PRC and that 華人 or 唐人 is actually the term that is cultural and not refering to race. What does everyone think? I think it's important enough to warrant attention since Han Chinese is used almost everywhere when dealing with Chinese people of different ethnicities (Hakka and Hoklo people for example) --— Nrtm81 04:22, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

I seem to be posting everywhere. I'm not sure if people here also check the WikiProject Taiwan, but just to inform everyone, I uploaded a newer version of the image replacing "Han Chinese" with just "Chinese". I dunno what all the fuss is over the usage of Han Chinese, but it seems just "Chinese" is more neutral a term to use. — Nrtm81 23:00, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
According to the official PRC theory "汉族" is one of the 56 "民族" that populate China. I've never heard of Han being called a culture (汉族文化). My understanding has always been that there is no Chinese race due to millennia of population migration, there is only a Chinese culture that holds together disparate groups that may not have that much in common genetically. -- 我♥中國 07:52, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

Proposal for daughter projects

Shouldn't we have division of labour and divide the whole project (which has a lot of participants of different expertises) so there will be more focus? Such as Chinese politics/cultures/geography/languages, which can also be co-listed under the projects for politics/linguistics/cultures/geography as well as the China project? Shingrila 05:30, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

Personally I'm opposed to this. We do NOT have a lot of participants, and as a group, we're not very active. So it's important that all of us can have one place to meet, discuss and socialise, instead of several different places where initiatives can easily die of neglect and underpopulation. -- 我♥中國 07:44, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
71 is quite a lot, compared with many other projects. Maybe one of the reasons why the project isn't very active is people don't know where to start or they do not know what areas to focus on. This project lacks focus and does not allow for division of labour. And "to improve all China-related articles" says just as much as "to improve Wikipedia". Wouldn't "all China-related articles" seem to be too big? And I find your idea of socialising on Wikipedia very creative, apparently a lot of people came here to do that Shingrila 16:17, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
I'll start working on dividing this China project into sub-categories (Arts, Politics, Roads etc.). AQu01rius (User • Talk) 20:18, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
I don't feel subprojects are necessary. --Ideogram 20:25, 24 November 2006 (UTC)
Unless you're a bot, I don't think you can survive on Wikipedia without social interactions. 71 members is not a lot, considering the wide scope of this project. Given that most China-related articles and topics are pretty absymally written, it's not a wise choice to foster further division when we don't even have a decent crop of articles to start with. -- 我♥中國

Taiwan Discussion Board

Wikipedia:WikiProject Taiwan now has a new navigation template (based on WikiProject China). Please click on the Discussion board to discuss everything and any issue that is directly Taiwan-related. — Nrtm81 00:39, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

Workgroups & Departments

I've been working on developing workgroups and departments for WikiProject China. Check to see how it is!

I also upgraded our project banner to a more advanced system (See here). AQu01rius (User • Talk) 19:56, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

By the way, I redesigned the China-related topics notice board (Previous version) AQu01rius (User • Talk) 20:46, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
The redesigned noticeboard and banner look good. However, I'm not sure if the departments are a good idea. Many of the same departments for WP:MILHIST got mothballed after a while because they were not really that active and did not generate enough traffic/activity to occupy its own page. We should make sure a department is sustainable, before making any. -- 我♥中國 01:48, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

Well, let me break it down:

  • Assessment - This is what we've been doing the whole time. Shouldn't have problem.
  • Cartography - This one may have problems. However, shouldn't be a problem for having it, as it may encourage users to get started on drawing more maps for China-related articles.
  • Collaboration - It's an existing page. Once everything's set, we may setup a bot that will notify members of WPCHINA weekly to come participate in the COTW discussions. It's not a priority right now though.
  • Peer review - This was intergrated within the new project banner. I think it will encourage more discussions from users.
  • Translation - A lot tasks to do. Should be able to generate enough activity.

AQu01rius (User • Talk) 00:56, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

New article

Just created the stub China National Ethnic Song and Dance Ensemble. Any additions would be welcome, of course! --Fang Aili talk 17:06, 27 November 2006 (UTC)