Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/China- and Chinese-related articles

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Shibbolethink (talk | contribs) at 15:18, 19 February 2023 (→‎Capitalization of romanized titles: close in favor of sentence case when inconsistent in the sources.). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.


Historical and alternative transliterations (restored unresolved discussion from archive)

(I have restored this discussion that was previously archived, because of valid concerns that were left unaddressed. See my response at bottom of thread for details. -Firejuggler)

Historical and alternative transliterations of Mandarin Chinese are importanːt to display on Wikipedia. This is because those transliterations were/are used in written materials related to China before/outside of Hanyu Pinyin derived forms. If you delete those forms ("sp per WP:PINYIN") or if you delete local language transliterations ("Foochow Romanized is not the PRC standard"), you erase history in a very Orwellian way. I say, if you can find a good source or sources for an alternative or historical form, then add it in a note somewhere on the page. Hanyu Pinyin is great, but Hanyu Pinyin is a Johnny-come-lately in terms of the understanding of the Mandarin Chinese speaking world in the English language. One of the reasons our Mandarin Chinese language related geography pages are weak is because everything written about those areas in English before Wikipedia was written with forms that some users reflexively scrub from those pages. Ignoring history leads to...nothing on the page. Come on people. History happened. Geographyinitiative (talk) 04:51, 1 October 2019 (UTC) (modified)[reply]

I agree that I may not be the best at wording, so if my wording is poor, yeah let's work on that. But we need something in here about not erasing historical or alternative forms because people are misinterpreting 'default pinyin' as 'delete non-pinyin'. Yikes. Geographyinitiative (talk) 05:03, 1 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
'The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition,' he said. 'We're getting the language into its final shape -- the shape it's going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When we've finished with it, people like you will have to learn it all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying words -- scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We're cutting the language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edition won't contain a single word that will become obsolete before the year 2050.' Geographyinitiative (talk) 10:20, 1 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
The vast majority of my work on Wikipedia is in doing foundational work for Chinese language related geography topics that are seriously neglected- usually stubs etc. If you have any tips or suggestions, let me know. I think one of the critical reasons that these articles are weak is that Wikipedia has approaching zero respect for historically-used transcriptions from Mandarin etc (as demonstrated by above). This leads to the inability of people who read Chinese-related English language works from the 18th/19th/20th century to search for and successfully find locations they read about. I am slogging through this work to attempt to make it possible for Wikipedia to actually cover Chinese-related geography. Geographyinitiative (talk) 23:28, 1 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Geographyinitiative: While I sympathize with your position, I'd like to remind you that any substantial changes to MOS or Wikipedia guidelines require consensus, which you clearly have not obtained. Instead, you've been edit warring against multiple respected editors to unilaterally insert your preferred language. If I'm not mistaken, you were blocked for similar behaviour not long ago, and I'd hate to see a productive editor like you being blocked again. So please stop edit warring (and I suggest you to self-revert your latest revert before someone else does). -Zanhe (talk) 23:52, 1 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
@Zanhe: I've pointed out a disastrous consequence of the current wording of the Chinese MoS, which is that some users interpret it to mean that you can outright delete historical and alternative geographical name forms in favor of Hanyu Pinyin derived forms. I can take a block, but what I can't take is a Wikipedia which does not inform the readers. However, in order to avoid charges of edit war or disruption and let everyone get back to making an encylopedia, I am going to have to stop editing this Chinese MoS page for the time being. I can't discuss stuff if I feel my account is under threat during the discussion. But I am glad you can see where I'm coming from. I hope some change like what I proposed will be made at some point. Geographyinitiative (talk) 00:05, 2 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
GI, you raise a valid concern with edits such as these, but you had best not take a block over another MoS matter, lest we all lose. CaradhrasAiguo (leave language) 20:28, 2 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Geographyinitiative raised legitimate and persuasive concerns above. From what I gather from Zanhe's response, other editors reverted all BOLD changes he attempted to make; yet, apparently, when GI opened a discussion, and made a thorough case for his proposed changes, they all refused to discuss. (except for CaradhrasAiguo who acknowledged the validity of GI's points; Zanhe responded, though he did not discuss, but merely warned GI that if he continued to edit war he risked being blocked). I do not agree, though, that the status quo of any guideline may be de facto unchangeable by means of editors wishing to retain the status quo refusing to discuss! The "onus", yea, is on the editor seeking change - but if that editor makes efforts to engage in discussion, editors opposing the change can't just refuse to engage! That goes against every principle this project is based on. Please address. Ty Firejuggler86 (talk) 18:58, 12 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
1st, do provide the alternative names at the Wikidata and Wiktionary entries on the places if you have the time. It's more their focus and here you do need to be sensitive to WP:UNDUE. It's probably more time efficient to have a table and script something or look through projects here to work with script kiddies to add your information. Certainly we should have Wade-Giles, Postal Map, Legge, and EB versions of all names at those projects.
2nd, we have |w= and |psp= fields in {{Infobox Chinese}} precisely because those forms are already known to be encyclopedic and necessary to historical understanding of these places. Use that template and those fields as needed.
3rd, be understanding about legitimate WP:UNDUE concerns. We're honestly past the point where "Kwongchow" really belongs in the lead sentence of an article about Guangzhou. We may be past the point where "Canton" even belongs there. This isn't a one-size-fits-all situation. Most English speakers visiting Yingkou probably are actually looking for the treaty port of "Newchwang" under one of its names because that was the era when that city was most important internationally. Most English speakers going to Guangzhou these days would only ever refer to it as that, even if the language is Cantonese. I think the sensible path forward isn't to flood lead sentences (which is objectionable) or even the history section. It's better to have a {{anchor}} template with Etymology and Toponymy above a #Name or #Names section after the lead paragraph going through the Chinese name(s), the different traditional and simplified characters, and the tones and then the various English transcriptions and alt names it may have. See Xi'an for an example. It may be past time to insist that such Name sections be a part of every Chinese location article so there's always a place to include clear links to the articles on characters, romanization, and tones and we can finally clean up the way {{lang-zh}} ridiculously formats traditional and simplified characters as separate languages.
4th, use {{rfd}} to request broader discussion by interested editors across the entire project, possibly as well as adding neutrally phrased requests for more feedback on relevant projects like {{WPCHINA}}. No one supports making things shittier and less useful for our WP:READERs. If some people have gotten misguided on what others need to know, just reach out to the larger community to remind them. — LlywelynII 02:39, 3 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Chinese placenames

Based on a discussion at Talk:An Giang Province about Vietnamese provincial placenames, I am interested in whether Chinese placenames should change as well.

  • All the provinces of China are the primary topic for their name - though Neimenggu and Xizang are translated.
  • Prefecture-level cities (地级市) generally have the city as the primary title, and there is no distinction between the city and the eponymous prefecture-level city. Xi'an is mostly about the historic city of Xi'an, but also includes information about Xi'an (sub-provincial city)
    • Over the past 40 years, almost the entire territory of China has been re-organized into prefecture-level cities, and they are approximately equivalents of Departments of France.
  • For counties/districts, there often is minimal if no reference to the area in the English language. These are titled such as Tiexi District, Anshan or Heishan County.
    • There are enough overlaps that I think we should avoid titles like Zhenxing District even if they are unique. We should (similar to WP:USPLACE) always include a region.
    • Should the disambiguating region be a province or a 地级市? We can't always use just a province, Tiexi District, Shenyang and Tiexi District, Anshan are both in Liaoning (and both are Tiexi 铁西).
  • Most of China's 30,000 townships do not have articles. When they do, they are titled as Hedong Township, Dayu County which seems fine to me.

The possible options I see for third-level subdivisions (区):

Thoughts? User:力 (powera, π, ν) 21:27, 21 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I kind of lean towards WP:AINTBROKE here i.e. any change is probably more trouble than it's worth. However if pressed to select one I prefer the style of Tiexi, Liaoning per WP:CONCISE, periodically longer disambiguation will be needed, but that can be handled on a case by case basis. Equal choice with doing nothing. 202.53.171.50 (talk) 01:14, 22 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think there is any need for long, clunky titles with disambiguators like "Anshan 地级市" or "Anshan prefecture-level city". It seems to me "Anshan" is enough.
I prefer "Tiexi District" over "Tiexiqu", to follow common usage (English-speakers and English-speaking sources usually translate 区 as "district" rather than saying "qu").
If we have to pick, I'd say that for sub-prefecture-level divisions the default disambiguator should be the prefecture-level city rather than the province. It would seem silly to have Futian District at "Futian District, Guangdong" instead of "Futian District, Shenzhen". But this may be something to decide on a case-by-case basis. Using the province as a disambiguator may be more sensible for towns and county-level cities than for districts. —Mx. Granger (talk · contribs) 17:27, 22 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Came here from notification at Talk:An Giang Province. My impression is to agree with a leaning toward WP:AINTBROKE. WP:AT deals with disambiguators and if they are required. The disambiguators themselves are not particularly useful for a Western/English reader, since the terminology to describe the geopolitical hierarchy does not correlate with "conventional" meanings (more simply, the words used don't mean what I usually expect them to mean). This is not a matter resolved by the article title but internally. Cinderella157 (talk) 04:07, 25 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Not much need for a change of convention here, but when district or province or such are used, and are not mostly capped in sources, we should lowercase them. In the case of Tiexi District, lowercase is common enough (in book and news sources) that I'd lowercase them. We're about done with "province" in the Vietnam case, but ran into a lot of neighbor Laos and Cambodia ones that are still capped, so need to bring that up for fixing. Dicklyon (talk) 23:17, 27 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

How should articles refer to China's ruling party?

The names "Chinese Communist Party" and "Communist Party of China" are both widely used in reliable sources. Should we exclusively use one form of the name across Wikipedia, or should this be an "optional style" where different articles can use different forms of the name?

My view is that, reflecting reliable sources, it's reasonable for different Wikipedia articles to use different forms of the name. Generally, I don't think editors should mass-edit hundreds of articles to change one form of the name to the other. (See User talk:Amigao#Mass changes and WP:ANI#More mass edits without consensus for context.)

What do others think? —Mx. Granger (talk · contribs) 20:24, 6 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  • The purpose of a discussion on an MoS talk page should be regarding proposed changes to the Manual of Style. Along those lines, it seems like it might be worthwhile to develop an RfC regarding the ways in which we might refer to the party. There's precedent for MoS providing guidance to exclude full abbreviations of official names (see MOS:USA). But that sort of guidance also appears to make exception for technical uses as well as contexts in which the fuller abbreviation (USA) is used as a part of a common name for a particular entity (Team USA). Based off of the above and other discussions (see: Talk:Chinese_Communist_Party/Archive_4#Requested_move_16_July_2020 and Talk:Chinese_Communist_Party/Archive_5#Requested_move_21_January_2021), users appear to be split into three camps on this:
    1. Camp 1: The term "Chinese Communist Party" is unacceptable to use when referring to the ruling party of China in almost all cases, since it is not the official name of the party. When writing the text of articles, users should avoid using this name and instead should only refer to the Party as the "Communist Party of China" when writing in wikivoice.
    2. Camp 2: Both "Chinese Communist Party" and "Communist Party of China" are both equally preferred names by which to refer to the ruling party of China. Editors are free to use either in an article, so long as the use is consistent throughout.
    3. Camp 3: The term "Chinese Communist Party" is ordinarily preferred to "Communist Party of China" when describing China's ruling party, as it is the dominantly common name that is used to refer to the entity.
I personally find appeals to the official name to be somewhat spurious, while there's good evidence that the "Chinese Communist Party" has been the dominant English-language name given to China's ruling party since its inception. I don't think either Camp 2 or Camp 3 are quite right, either. Camp 2 seems to be wholly neutral on which name is appropriate in an article, but WP:POVNAMING notes that [t]he best name to use for a topic may depend on the context in which it is mentioned. It seems quite reasonable to me that there are contexts in which the common name ("Chinese Communist Party") so completely overwhelms the use of the official name ("Communist Party of China") that it would be out-of-line with our sources to use the common name. Camp 3, on the other hand, needs to be clarified a bit—I don't think anyone has argued that "Chinese Communist Party" is superior to "Communist Party of China" in all contexts. As such, I propose that something along the lines of the following be added to MOS:CHINESE#NAMING under a new subsection:

There is a community consensus that the use of the name "Chinese Communist Party" dominates the use of the term "Communist Party of China" among reliable sources. While "Chinese Communist Party" should ordinarily be used to refer to the ruling party of the People's Republic of China, the best name to use may depend on the context in which the name is being used. In particular, in topic areas where reliable sources use the common and official names with similar frequency, either name may be chosen so long as the particular name is used consistently throughout the article.

— Ⓜ️hawk10 (talk) 04:46, 7 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • I roughly agree with "Camp 2", though I might say "equally acceptable" rather than "equally preferred". Both terms are widely used by reliable sources, and both are fine to use in wikivoice. I disagree with "Camp 1" and "Camp 3". When multiple terms are common in reliable sources, there's typically no need to pick one term to enforce across the wiki. Rather, the choice of term can vary by article. I'm not sure anything needs to be added to the MOS about this, but if something is to be added, I might suggest something like this (modeled after WP:SHIPPRONOUNS):

The ruling party of China may be referred to as the "Chinese Communist Party" or the "Communist Party of China". As with all optional styles, articles should not be changed from one style to another without clear and substantial reason.

As for the issue of different contexts – for the question of CCP vs CPC, I don't see the value of trying to determine which term is more common in which contexts. Are there any specific contexts that you have in mind? —Mx. Granger (talk · contribs) 09:38, 7 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
My suspicion is that Hong Kong English and/or Singapore English might be different than other varieties of English in how they refer to the ruling party, but I don't really know how one would back this up with data. It's fairly clear to me that English, broadly, has always referred to the party as the "Chinese Communist Party" much more than it has referred to it as the "Communist Party of China". WP:SHIPPRONOUNS is a bit of a different situation, where there are arguments regarding whether the use of "she" is archaic (such as the use of "she" to refer to countries) and how to handle differences in the choice that different sorts of sources (i.e. technical v.s. popular press) use when referring to ships. — Ⓜ️hawk10 (talk) 17:11, 7 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I agree that WP:SHIPPRONOUNS is a different situation – I only borrowed the phrasing and don't endorse the same reasoning in that case. —Mx. Granger (talk · contribs) 19:46, 7 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I did a little searching in Hong Kong and Singaporean media and found both forms used (which has also been my experience in US and UK media). For instance, this SCMP opinion piece uses one form in the text and the other form in a video caption. For whatever it's worth, a search of recent (since 2018) Google Scholar hits finds close to the same number for each (slightly more for CPC) [1][2] – but again, I don't see the value of trying to count number of usages in different types of sources, and would prefer to keep this an optional style. —Mx. Granger (talk · contribs) 20:46, 7 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Both are equally valid, and there is precisely zero difference between them; no political connotations one way or the other, and to say or imply same is simply bull, pardon my French. Swings and roundabouts is what it is, What bugs me is that once a local discussion has decided on one variant, someone goes around and changes all other related articles on the basis of that consensus. Then a few months later comes another discussion citing more recent n-gram, and the name swings back to what it was before. The most recent name change flurry caused a number of these to appear on my watchlist, and I just wish do-gooders would just get a life and leave them the fuck alone. -- Ohc revolution of our times 22:33, 7 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • The difference between "Communist Party of China" and "Chinese Communist Party" is similar to the difference between "Democratic Party" and "Democrat Party". While the two names appear completely interchangeable, for whatever reason, one is viewed as pejorative, while the other isn't. CPC is the official name of the party, and has no pejorative connotation. CCP is somewhat pejorative, probably because of who uses it, and because (like with "Democrat Party") consciously refusing to use the official name of the party itself sends a statement. These connotations exist, and the question is whether the Wikipedia community wants to use the somewhat pejorative (but still relatively common) term, as opposed to the neutral, official name.
One more thing to note is that a while back, there was an effort to go through Wikipedia and replace all instances of "Communist Party of China" with "Chinese Communist Party". As part of this blanket replacement, all sorts of official titles and organizations that include "Communist Party of China" in their official name were relabeled. For example, we now have an article on the "General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party", instead of the actual name of the position, "General Secretary of the Communist Party of China". Of course, according to Wikipedia, the General Secretary is nominated by the "Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party", rather than the "Central Committee of the Communist Party of China" (the actual official name of the organization). If you look at these articles, a lot of them are plagued by edit-warring over the name.
If I can give my view on why this mass replacement of the official name with the more pejorative term happened, I would guess that it has something to do with the rapidly deteriorating view of China in the West over the last few years (specifically, since Trump's election, but also tied to the pandemic), which comes across quite dramatically in opinion polling. -Thucydides411 (talk) 23:24, 7 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'm slightly more concerned about the use of CCP instead of CPC even though I use the former when the rest of the article already adopts it, because CCCP and CCP are too similar and because there seems to be some sort of a word-play going on to tap into Cold War sentiments. As for the full name, I don't think it should be changed in situations where the official title, name, or the terminology used by the source of an edit would become altered, for the same reason you wouldn't change USAFA to AAFA just because "American" stands in for "United States" sometimes. CurryCity (talk) 06:51, 8 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
The fact that "there's evidence that the "Chinese Communist Party" has been the dominant English-language name given to China's ruling party since its inception" is sufficient to nullify the "pejorative" cold war political narrative, IMHO. It fails to demonstrate that there has been any significant shift relative in usage over time, Trump notwithstanding. The preference of one form over the other can, I think, be ascribed more to how the English language works, and people's preference for the simpler form – it's like the majority of people would tend to say "Jesse's cat" instead of "the cat of Jesse". The "of" in the middle of the formal title just makes it seem more stuffy and cumbersome. This is however totally unlike the case of the "Publicity Department" versus the "Propaganda Department": in English, the term "propaganda" definitely has a negative connotation, whereas there is only one word for both terms (宣傳) in Chinese so that I believe some official documents in English have used the term "Propaganda Department" in the past. Some editors with political axes to grind go for the low-hanging fruit, as this one seems to be, ascribing negative connotations where none existed before. Maybe it's the same ones edit-warring over some content I don't know about, but this one over CCP vs CPC is just so lame. -- Ohc revolution of our times 08:05, 8 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Thucydides411: I also believe official titles should stay official in style. "General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party" and "Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party" both seem sooo wrong. Applying that logic, they should perhaps advocate "Chinese Communist Party General Secretary " and "Chinese Communist Party Central Committee, yet nobody does. Funny, that. -- Ohc revolution of our times 08:37, 8 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
"Democrat Party" didn't originally have any pejorative connotations either, but it does now. "CCP" just happens to have become a somewhat pejorative term over time. The official term, "CPC", was used across Wikipedia until fairly recently, until it was pretty aggressively edit-warred out of most articles. I don't think this was done simply because of WP:COMMONNAME. I would be similarly concerned if "Democrat Party" were aggressively pushed across Wikipedia, and articles like "Democratic National Committee" were renamed to "Democrat National Committee", or even worse, "Democrat Party National Committee". -Thucydides411 (talk) 08:45, 8 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not sure that it can ever work the same way. Sure that words can take on positive or negative connotations through time and usage, as "discrimination" did. There's clearly a morphological change with your example which led to a semantic change, whereas there is none in the CPC vs CCP debate. If Trump had invented the term "Chinese Communistic Party", that would have been another matter. -- Ohc revolution of our times 09:02, 8 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
BTW, I'm not a big fan of the ruling party in China. -- Ohc revolution of our times 09:07, 8 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not sure what being a "fan" has to do with anything. We're all supposed to edit neutrally here, without regard to personal beliefs.
With CPC vs. CCP, I can only speculate why the latter is pejorative, while the former isn't. The two obvious explanations that come to mind are that intentionally avoiding the official name sends a statement, and that critics of China in American politics tend to repeatedly use the term "CCP" when discussing anything related to China. Nevertheless, "CCP" has clearly acquired a somewhat pejorative sense.
You say that there's no real difference between CPC and CCP, so the latter can't really be pejorative. There's a very similar issue in transliterations of Mandarin Chinese, which shows how something seemingly innocuous can become a political statement. During the Cold War, usage of the Yale Romanization or Wade-Giles romanization in place of pinyin became a political statement. This is seemingly just a boring technical question of how to render Mandarin Chinese in the Latin alphabet, but it became a political statement. If there were suddenly a big push by a few hyperactive editors to replace all occurrences of pinyin with the Yale romanization throughout Wikipedia, I would be similarly skeptical.
If you want an even sillier example of this linguistic politics, take this article in the influential conservative American publication, the National Review. The article argues that we should all start calling Beijing "Peking" again, in order to take a jab at the communist Chinese. The last line of the article gives some insight into the thinking that goes behind using terms like "Peking" and "CCP":

If “Beijing” is the name the Chinese Communist Party prefers, well . . . the last thing we should do is agree to it.

Wikipedia hasn't gotten quite this silly yet, but this type of linguistic politics is spilling over into the encyclopedia, and the mass replacement of "CPC" with "CCP" across virtually all China-related articles is a sign of that. -Thucydides411 (talk) 12:12, 8 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Thucydides411: I said that I'm not a fan of the Regime because I actually prefer the formal title "Communist Party of China", and that's not me being doctrinaire. I'm just a bit of a purist.

I can understand the argument you stated, and how people can deliberately politicise names by mispronouncing or otherwise distorting its form. Of course they do, but this particular example doesn't work for the reason I already explained above. Warring over CPC vs CCP is lame.

It's true that the govt of the PRC made a huge effort to use pinyin to supplant other romanisation, I think mainly because of claimed precision, the benefit of which is real. But other attempts by westerners to phoneticise the Chinese languages were [perhaps correctly] regarded by Beijing as "colonial" relics (devised by westerners and imposed on the Chinese language). The fact that Wade–Giles is widely used to phoneticise in Taiwan would of course be an additional reason for the Regime to want to erase it from existence, so the political motive is obvious.

On top of that, all phoneticisation methods have their imperfections. Although "Peking" was pushed into "Beijing", its usage is still not universal. The capital of the country is still referred to largely as "Pékin" to this day in France, for example. I don't think it's due to a colonial mindset – some people clearly can't get to grips with how the Roman alphabet has been usurped by pinyin conventions. But pinyin only represents the Mandarin dialect and none or the other SInitic languages, such as Cantonese of Hokkien, which the PRC government doesn't even recognise as languages in their own right (against the views of many scolars of language), and is trying to eradicate or at least marginalise. -- Ohc revolution of our times 13:34, 8 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not saying that Hanyu pinyin is the end-all and be-all of romanizations, and I know that it is based on Mandarin, not Cantonese (just like the most recent German spelling reform was modeled off of the phonology of Standard German, not of Allemannic German, which is also called a "dialect", but which is not really mutually intelligible). I'm just pointing out that seemingly boring linguistic choices like the use of Yale romanization over pinyin can be a political statement. The same goes for Beijing/Peking. I know that French and German use Pékin/Peking, but in English, "Peking" is rare nowadays, and its use can be political (as the National Review article makes clear).
I agree that edit-warring over CPC vs. CCP is lame. However, I think the fact that there has been a push to replace every instance of CPC with CCP is a sign of non-neutral editing in China-related topics. I don't really care about "Democratic Party" vs. "Democrat Party" - that's also silly. However, if a group of editors were to go around Wikipedia systematically replacing every instance of "Democratic Party" with "Democrat Party", that would be a red flag to me. It would just be a sign of non-neutral, probably highly polemical editing in the relevant subject area. -Thucydides411 (talk) 15:01, 8 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
FYI Beijing as rendered in Wade–Giles would be Peiching. Peking is the pronunciation in one of the southern Chinese languages, I assume Cantonese (as well as not pinyin). Folly Mox (talk) 04:08, 9 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • I don't belong to any camp, but I would agree that the official name should be used for pages about CCP officials and offices. The rapidly deteriorating view of China in the West - brought on by the Chinese Communist Party over its response to the COVID-19 outbreak - should not be in the scope of this discussion. CutePeach (talk) 15:08, 8 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • This is one of those semantic issues which may engage a minority, but which most readers are likely completely unaware of. Either way readers will gain exactly the same information and meaning and impression, and in that sense the question doesn't really matter at all. (Others have noted lameness above, which is a similar point.) Given that, the general principle of preferring using whatever the article title is holds here (and I have not checked which one it is). Either way I don't see the need for a blanket rule; one name is clearly more descriptive and one name is official and there may be situations in which one or the other of these is preferable. Acronyms should follow whatever long-form is used in the article. CMD (talk) 15:25, 8 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • Thanks to all above who joined in. I'm certainly glad that disputes are at the "lame" level. Just wait until the Regime unleashes its trolls on us, as we have already seen on zh.wp. God help us then. -- Ohc revolution of our times 16:00, 8 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • It doesn't matter I am unhappy that this discussion is happening due to the result of disruption. This discussion should not be interpreted as an official reason to go around mass changing pages!! It doesn't matter. Its so unimportant I can't believe that editor time is being wasted on it. This should qualify for WP:LAME. Whether an editor wants to use one term or the other shouldn't be this big issue. But if folks really can't just get along and not go around making useless changes, I'd support Camp 2 or 3. Camp 3 is the standard usage in media, evidenced by its abbreviation CCP. Camp 2 is also workable, and I see no reason to force the hand of users. I have no idea why we'd choose camp 1, that feels like we'd be toeing the party line, which is so against our ideals. CaptainEek Edits Ho Cap'n!⚓ 19:04, 8 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Prefer Chinese government, unless specifically talking about political parties. I've noticed a trend among right-wing media to always refer to the Chinese government as the CCP or Chinese Communist Party. I suspect this is because they like to emphasize how "communist" China is, because they have weaponized that word and call a variety of their enemies and various evil-doers socialists and communists. As a result, I consider CCP to be a weaponized term, and I prefer to use the more neutral "Chinese government" where possible. When referring to the United States government or the Trump administration, we don't go around calling those two things the "Republican party". We should try to avoid this misnomer when referring to China, unless we are specifically talking about political parties. I have no opinion on CCP vs CPC, I merely want to point out how the term communist seems to have been recently weaponized and is, in my opinion, being over-used in some Chinese articles. –Novem Linguae (talk) 19:09, 8 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Novem Linguae:The reason why we don't go around calling the United States government or the Trump administration, the "Republican party" is because of a different context compared with the PRC – it would probably be acceptable to conflate them to a certain degree because the Communist Party sits above the government of the People's Republic of China and the Chinese constitution. It's the modern day l'état, c'est moi. (BTW, do you agree with the redirects? I don't). -- Ohc revolution of our times 21:03, 8 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment - just a quick comment, I know people have actually provided evidence above but 中国共产党 literally translates to Chinese (中国) Communist (共产) Party (党), however the accepted translation would be Communist Party of China, this is due to the structure differences between the two languages, and as another user mentioned it just falls into semantics. I personally don't think it matters too much. As long as the article sticks with one the whole way through, then that's fine by me. 万岁中华人民共和国. X-750 I've made a mistake, haven't I? 01:17, 9 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I can't accept 中国 as an adjective. It means "China" (these days), and can mean "Chinese" or "of China" contextually in colloquial translation, but when translated as a standalone word it's for sure a noun. "Communist Party of China" is indeed the more accepted translation, but I usually see 万岁 following the noun it's talking about. Folly Mox (talk) 04:31, 9 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Yes, which is why I gave an example, posters will have the 万岁 proceeding the 中华人民共和国，not preceding. Another example would be “去哪儿呢？”, which is "where are we going", literally it is "going where?" Not to mention Western pronunciations of Chinese names such as Zhou Guanyu (whose name is normally pronounced Guanyu Zhou by commentators). X-750 I've made a mistake, haven't I? 07:55, 9 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Yeah, fwiw, none of these comments are correct, pretty much at any level.
    X-750 seems to misunderstand Chinese grammar (which is almost completely positional regardless of the 名 next to the word in a dictionary), misunderstand English grammar (which is easily but not completely positional—East China Sea and China Eastern Airlines are both fine but China Communist Party doesn't parse), misunderstand English words (the only difference between proceeding and preceding in this context is that one is just a misspelling of the other), misunderstand Chinese grammar again (the 万岁 goes at the end like Molly was saying), and misunderstand how names work (if Zhou Guanyu prefers to go by G.Y. Zhou in English more power to him but his actual Chinese name is Zhou Guanyu and commentators screwing that up because of how their forms are set up or because they assume their listeners aren't familiar with Xi Jinping, Mao Zedong, &c. yet has no bearing on anything).
    Similarly, FM links to an article which repeats a guy interested in astronomical history mistranslating 國 as region but that's not terribly authoritative. 中國 has always been the period understanding of the Chinese state, which context fits the bronze vessel being discussed just fine pending an actual discovery where it gets used to only mean a certain region within or outside of the realm. Likewise, it's not "colloquial" to translate it as "Chinese" or "of China": it's a simple requirement of turning Chinese thoughts into English thoughts. They are the literal meaning of the word in various contexts, including this one.
    Of course the completely literal translation of 中国共产党 is the Chinese Communist Party. It's [attributive] + [attributive] + [noun]. China Daily is still using it, Global Times is still using it, the MFA is still using it, &c. The Chinese equivalent of an actual CPC construction with a clearly noun-being-noun format would've been 中国的共产党, which they very obviously and sensibly preferred not to use.
    If for whatever reason (is it anything but consistency with the PRC and superstitious avoidance of USSR parallels?), they prefer to more generally use Communist Party of China as an official English name, we can absolutely respect that designation. It has nothing to do with the grammar.  — LlywelynII 02:06, 3 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • I prefer Communist Party of China in general, though Chinese Communist Party is also acceptable, and which is preferable probably depends on context. We should in general use the official names for organisations, and shy away from colloquial names, particularly when those colloquial names are typically understood to be derogatory in nature (even when the colloquial name is more common). So for example, it's more acceptable to use the GOP for the Republican Party (colloquial, but non-derogatory) than Democrat party for the Democratic Party (colloquial, and derogatory), but "Republican Party" and "Democratic Party" are the official terms and should normally be used. Going around changing CPC->CCP or CCP->CPC en-masse in a semi-automated fashion, which is what this spawned off, is inappropriate regardless of which direction you're changing it in. Endwise (talk) 11:08, 9 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Needless timesink which needs a prompt close I'm just going to point everyone to MOS:RETAIN, and the recent discussion on she/it for ships, and say that the exact same kind of consideration should apply here. Unless there's a good reason to use a specific form in a specific article, then so long any individual article is internally consistent and clear (consistency might be less of a factor here, though, as varying the word order can make for a less monotonous read...), then there's really no need to waste editor time changing anything. And on the same grounds, somebody going off on a mass editing spree to change from one form to the other, in whichever direction, is equally a needless timesink. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 16:56, 11 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Reading the above, I am slightly surprised that no one has objected to the use of the word "communist" on the ground that communism as implemented in various 'communist' states including PRC does not conform to the Marxist ideal. They might suggest that "communist" be replaced by some other more descriptive formulation such as "Stalinist", "social fascist", or "state capitalist". JRSpriggs (talk) 21:12, 27 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • That's because we're tryna do a translate, for a general readership encyclopaedia, not be social theorists downfallen yea again by nomenclature. We describe, not prescribe. Blessings, Folly Mox (talk) 08:25, 29 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • Adjusted indention. --魔琴 (Zauber Violino) (talk) 07:18, 29 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Came from zhwiki. I suggest you use the "Communist Party of China" in formal contexts and the "Chinese Communist Party" in general ones, similar to what you do to the Republic of China (Taiwan) where you can see the "Government of the Republic of China" and "Elections in Taiwan." --魔琴 (Zauber Violino) (talk) 07:18, 29 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • WP:AINTBROKE -- plus, I see no evidence that "Chinese Communist Party" is peggiorative. I've followed China professionally for more than fifty years and Maoists and Cold Warriors alike have used it. The official "Communist Party of China" is fine for officials, of course.ch (talk) 16:58, 29 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Who cares and early close per RandomCanadian and others. They're both acceptable phrasings, there's no need to specify a preferred style. Ban anyone who runs around edit warring one phrasing to the other. Problem solved. SnowFire (talk) 10:26, 1 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Capitalization of romanized titles

WHERE INCONSISTENT IN SOURCES, DEFAULT TO SENTENCE CASE
Per the narrow consensus in this discussion and our current policies, default to sentence case when the romanized title capitalization is inconsistent among our reliable sources. Quality arguments were made on all sides of this discussion, and as often happens in wikipedia disagreements, there is more agreement among participants here than would appear at first glance. Many participants ended up talking past each other rather than directly addressing issues raised. Examples were provided of style guides which state a preference for title case, but as was pointed out, Wikipedia does not necessarily follow any one style guide other than its own. When sources (and guides) disagree, wikipedia defaults to lowercase and sentence case in titles of works originally rendered in non-English languages, per MOS:CAPS, MOS:FOREIGNTITLE, and MOS:TITLECAPS. This should not be read to apply to titles of works for which capitalization is uniform or overwhelming in sources. In such cases, the work title should be rendered in title case on Wikipedia. Summary: At this point, consensus is not in favor of defaulting Pinyin to title case when inconsistently capitalized in the sources. — Shibbolethink (♔ ♕) 15:18, 19 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Continuing from last time, this has come up again based on increasing prevalence of sentence case in scholarship. As far as I can tell, they're just mistakenly copying each other or giving preference to their local European capitalization rules and ignoring the PRC's published standards and those used on Taiwan (here's a copiously footnoted legal citation guide overseen by a Taiwan district court judge presumably annoyed by everyone's continuing confusion on the point).

If the PRC has published other guidelines or house style guides at the major Chinese journals has changed, though, that's fine. Just present that. Otherwise, we should just link from the mistaken format to articles that consistently use the correct one. — LlywelynII 01:19, 3 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Chinese title capitalisation
This is something that has weighed on my mind for quite some time and I'm glad that you raised it with your good faith edits to Xinxiu bencao. If you actually looked at the sources cited in the article, it is clear that Chinese titles are capitalised sentence-style, rather than headline-style for English-language works. That is to say only the first letter of the first word should be capitalised... This is the academic convention and WP:PINYIN absolutely does not contradict what I've just said. This should be clarified elsewhere and as you pointed out Category:Chinese medical texts (and many others!) is flush with bad titling (but I haven't the inclination to edit them right now). Cheers, KINGofLETTUCE 👑 🥬 13:52, 2 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
​The reason that so many of those works have title caps is that each word of the title should be capitalised per WP:PINYIN ("English Wikipedia uses pinyin as the default Romanisation method for Chinese characters") because, as Section 4.9.2 in this source points out, pinyin title cap rules are the same as English (i.e. "If a proper noun consists of two or more words, capitalize the first letter of each word."). User:LlywelynII noted this in the MOSCHINA talk page a while back with no objection and the relevant Wikipedia article calls for this practice as well. Others sources may have their own house styles, but those typically do not override Wikipedia's own (e.g. The Economist does not capitalise "second world war"). —  AjaxSmack  19:01, 2 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Appreciate the elaboration, but I'm not buying it. I hardly find that a lone editor's spiel should be taken as gospel truth, and neither should the status quo be seen as unchangeable. It's very simple to me: it's simply incongruous to insist on using our own "house style" when the very sources cited don't render the titles that way! (Ironically, Llywelyn's random example of "Honglou Meng/meng" backfires, as a quick Google search shows that scholars worth their ilk refer to it as "Honglou meng". Same goes for virtually any other major Chinese work, with exceptions like the I Ching. There is some admission of simply wanting to avoid the hassle and confusion of changing the status quo, in that they recognise that they don't actually better than some hypothetical "powerful citation" but somehow titling Chinese works sentence-style "appears" to be "wrong".) I will also note that Wikipedia:Naming conventions (capitalization)#Works and compositions explicitly gives us this latitude: "Capitalization in foreign-language titles varies, even over time within the same language. Retain the style of the original for modern works. For historical works, follow the dominant usage in modern, English-language, reliable sources." KINGofLETTUCE 👑 🥬 20:56, 2 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Kingoflettuce: Nah. You don't have to buy it. You do need to buy one of the authoritative sources on pinyin (or find a free copy online) and share your findings if you want other people to buy what you're selling. You can't default to a "dominant usage" that doesn't actually exist, since transcriptions of titles is all over the place among the Chinese themselves (who consider romanized titles a learning aid to the actual character titles) and the scholars who write about Chinese from within the traditions of their own languages' capitalization rules. You also can't just talk about it in random people's talk pages. You need to take it MOSCHINA.
Otherwise you end up with exactly what I was talking about: You thinking you're right and creating needless makework as people edit war all over the place and you eventually ending up with administrative sanctions since you're the one not following the MOSCHINA style guide. You may be perfectly right that there's an established convention now to create ugly and confusing European-style sentence case forms of Chinese titles within English. Go prove it and get it added to the style guide. — LlywelynII 00:58, 3 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
This obviously isn't binding but these guys—including a Taiwan district court judge—were trying to improve legal citations from Chinese sources with copious reference to the available style guides and use standard title case (with correct PRC pinyin treatment of e.g. de) consistently. It really is worth looking for actual sourcing like that since for each "I hit Google", I can give you, "yeah, well, I went to Google Scholar and, well, they're just inconsistent." — LlywelynII 01:12, 3 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion was copied and pasted from UT:AjaxSmack to elicit wider input. —  AjaxSmack  01:23, 3 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • The basics to me: 1. Capitals don't exist in Chinese so "retain the style of the original" doesn't work. 2. English capitalises titles. 3. Pinyin rules call for capitalising titles. 4. Sources are mixed.
It's hard to understand adopting Slavic/Romance caps rules in this case. —  AjaxSmack  01:40, 3 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'm confused. Is this about work titles? Or about proper names? Can we see some examples of where there's disagreement on the right capitalization? Dicklyon (talk) 02:09, 3 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Dicklyon: We're talking about the correct capitalization of literary works who were originally titled in Chinese characters. For an example, if you don't just use Xiyouji, should 《西游记》 be transcribed as Xiyou Ji or Xiyou ji in English discussions? Here, obviously the solution would be to use Xiyouji or Journey to the West most of the time, but (a) how should you correctly write the pinyin transcription of the title's characters when you do that? and (b) many other Chinese works are as/more famous under their transcribed names than any English equivalent or have names so long that writing them as a single word isn't an acceptable option.
Right now, Dream of the Red Chamber starts
Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou Meng) or The Story of the Stone (Shitou Ji) is a novel composed by Cao Xueqin in...
KOL would prefer that it read
Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng) or The Story of the Stone (Shitou ji) is a novel composed by Cao Xueqin in...
 — LlywelynII 02:52, 3 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Well, work titles are proper names, so I'd say discuss either/both. Xinxiu bencao is the example that prompted this discussion. —  AjaxSmack  02:54, 3 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the clarification that the bit above about "proper noun" was a red herring. I have no particular knowledge or opinion on the pinyin rules, so I'll stay out of that. Dicklyon (talk) 02:56, 3 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
It isn't a red herring. Like AS said, titles are proper nouns and that's what the current pinyin rules call for. You're right that capitalizing languages that don't have letters is a hornest's nest. We want to be descriptive instead of prescriptive but it's just a complete mess descriptively and you'd need to include everything. We just need a consistent house style that's as authoritative as possible. — LlywelynII 03:00, 3 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry my reply above might be out of sync or out of place. But I disagree on titles being proper nouns. We have style guidelines for work titles precisely because they are not the same as proper nouns. The "Section 4.9.2" guideline on proper nouns is not necessarily the right answer for work titles. Dicklyon (talk) 03:05, 3 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
​Here's a list of titles from the same source (previous edition) as "Section 4.9.2" treating work titles just like other proper names. —  AjaxSmack  03:41, 3 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I listed this discussion at WT:MOSCAPS#Current to see if there are more knowledgeable inputs on this. Dicklyon (talk) 03:11, 3 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Let me just rehash my point in case it got swamped by the other editors' output: if all or all but one of the sources cited write Xinxiu bencao, it seems schizophrenic to insist on Xinxiu Bencao just because a general pinyin guide suggested so. I do believe that I can default to a dominant usage as far as each individual work is concerned (e.g. all leading scholars referring to the work as Xinxiu bencao for some strange reason...) but obviously we might be here for much longer if we're trying to grope at some general principle. LlywelynII even in the paper that you linked, there is in fact a section on "Titles of Japanese and Chinese works" (pg. 32) that contradicts the earlier guidance (and the writer admits that the Chicago Manual of Style is one of the most important sources on citing Chinese material, a.k.a the sort of "best" authority that you're looking for). KINGofLETTUCE 👑 🥬 10:00, 3 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
It's not schizophrenic in the least. The fact that the first page of results from Google Scholar provides only use of "Xinxiu Bencao" and absolutely none for "Xinxiu bencao" is pretty representative of what a mess this subject is, which is the whole point of a style guide. Even if our page did list use every single authoritative reference on the subject (which is obviously highly dubious given the Google Scholar results), that would still be a WP:LOCALCONSENSUS that isn't particularly helpful.
I'm glad you read through the cites, but you would've seen it doesn't "contradict" the "earlier" guidance in any meaningful way. The authors provide their view (English title case), they quote the relevant parts of the Chicago Style Guide (French-style sentence case), and they quote the relevant parts of the Bluebook (English title case). Yeah, the sources are inconsistent. Afaik, this is the most recent English copy of the authoritative rules for official pinyin usage. The rules on titles start on page 43ish, although you can see examples of the use of Title Case throughout the work. That might've been updated and the update might've just been in Chinese so far or only available offline. Dunno. — LlywelynII 13:18, 3 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I'd take the GScholar results with a pinch of salt. We should be more discerning than that. The most authoritative references, not least of all the Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine, do without a doubt write the name properly, and this isn't something that can be simply confirmed thru a quick glance at what an algorithm spews out. Not all sources are created equal. Still, I take your point on local consensus and I'll wait with bated breath for a wider community consensus to emerge. In the meantime, I hope to be able to continue deferring to what the sources that I'm citing (and not including the likely non-authoritative sources "out there") say. KINGofLETTUCE 👑 🥬 13:36, 3 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
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