6 ms·

Taiwan's language is traditional mandarin, which in the context of a text site like Wikipedia, matters a lot. Using China's site would mean being forced to read

Taiwan's language is traditional mandarin, which in the context of a text site like Wikipedia, matters a lot. Using China's site would mean being forced to read simplified Chinese. There's other language differences as well that would make a Taiwanese person very confused if they had to read a China-based Wikipedia. Really the only sensible solution is for Taiwan to have its own chapter.

im3w1l 6y ago
Simplified and traditional characters are in perfect correspondence right? Could maybe translate on the fly?
- hker 6y ago
  > Simplified and traditional characters are in perfect correspondence right? No, there is no perfect correspondence between simplified and traditional Chinese. The simplified Chinese collapses important characters such as “after” and “back”, often causing confusion (you can read more here [1]). [1]: http://pages.ucsd.edu/~dkjordan/chin/SimplifiedCharacters.html http://pages.ucsd.edu/~dkjordan/chin/SimplifiedCharacters.ht...
  - dheera 6y ago
    Not only that, but there are a couple of characters that are collapsed in traditional but split out in simplified: "乾" in Simplified refers to only one of the 8 trigrams, as is used in the word "乾坤" "乾" in Traditional can mean either the above OR the Simplified "干" (dry) "干" also exists in Traditional but only means "stem" not "dry" However, GP's point about translating on the fly is possible. You don't need a very advanced algorithm to translate simplified<->traditional almost perfectly. Unless you're translating poetry they can almost always be disambiguated by the nearby characters very well. Note though that there are lots of actual word differences in mainland Mandarin and Taiwanese Mandarin. It's not difficult for one to read the other and maybe occasionally asking a question or two but it's nice for every human to have materials available in their native dialect and vocabulary. Much like you probably appreciate that your system offers both UK English and US English and doesn't force you to use the "other" one from what you're used to.
    - im3w1l 6y ago
      As a non-native English speaker, I actually hate that there is a split.
      - dheera 6y ago
        You should check out Singaporean English or "Singlish", which uses a lot of Chinese grammar and Hokkien and Malay vocabulary in English sentences. It's a wonderfully efficient dialect taking the best from all of these languages.
        im3w1l 6y ago
        I heard it spoken when I was in Singapore. It was pretty fun, but I'm glad it isn't given equal status, and that we didn't have to learn any in school.
- gene91 6y ago
  No. They are not in perfect correspondence. The mapping is one-to-multiple or multiple-to-one in quite a few characters, some of them commonly used. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambiguities_in_Chinese_character_simplification https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambiguities_in_Chinese_chara...
- yorwba 6y ago
  Chinese Wikipedia https://zh.wikipedia.org https://zh.wikipedia.org automatically transliterates into Mainland Simplified, Hong Kong Traditional, Macau Traditional, Malaysia Simplified, Singapore Simplified and Taiwan Traditional. The article text can be in any variant (and is usually a mixture after getting edited by people using different standards) and if you visit an untransliterated page, you'll be prompted for your preference. There's no simple one-to-one correspondence for all characters, but Wikipedia has multiple layers of special cases and exceptions that can cover most situations (including vocabulary differences). That doesn't mean the text always makes sense after transliteration: The article about the Taiwanese township of Shuili mentions that it was originally named 水裡, but then renamed to 水里 in 1966. At least in the Taiwanese Traditional version https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/%E6%B0%B4%E9%87%8C%E9%84%89 https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/%E6%B0%B4%E9%87%8C%E9%84%89 . If you read the Mainland Simplified one ( https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/%E6%B0%B4%E9%87%8C%E9%84%89 https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/%E6%B0%B4%E9%87%8C%E9%84%89 ) both of these names get simplified to 水里.
  - dwohnitmok 6y ago
    I've never really bought the multiple layers of special cases and exceptions. For example, British English and American English also have many of the same differences between simplified and traditional Chinese characters; e.g. British English and American English both agree on the verb form of "to curb" but disagree on "kerb" vs "curb." Yet AFAIK Wikipedia doesn't have a similar system that tries to convert from British English to American English or vice versa that also handles all these special cases apart from just the normal spelling differences. Taiwanese Mandarin is really not that different from PRC Mandarin. In fact most college-educated mainland speakers can read works written in traditional characters just fine although I'm not sure on the Taiwanese side for simplified characters. In fact I think a substantial proportion (most?) of Chinese Wikipedia readers just don't bother with changing the character set either way and are fine with traditional/simplified character switches throughout the article (that's certainly the way I read it).
    - yorwba 6y ago
      I wanted to find out whether there are any statistics on how this feature is used, but only found this Phabricator ticket: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T227904 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T227904 Looks like they put doing research on user needs into the backlog for now.
eloisius 6y ago
The most popular language in Taiwan is Mandarin, and they use the Traditional characters, but it’s the same Mandarin, albeit with small, regional differences like pronouncing 和 as hàn instead of Northern Chinese hé. Additionally, there are other official Taiwanese languages like Taiwan Min Nan and various Formosan languages. Pedantry out of the way, You could make a case that the Wikipedia is the same language and you can change the character set pretty much interchangeably by machine, but I wouldn’t want to see China have its claws on the only ZH-language Wikipedia either.
- jimworm 6y ago
  My view is rather different. Written Chinese does not "belong" to Mandarin or any other spoken Chinese language, but is its own entity. While the mainland-China version of simplified Chinese is based around Mandarin, written Chinese is most definitely not Mandarin. 裏 is not 里. 只 is not 隻. 后 is not 後. They might sound the same in modern Mandarin but that is where the similarity ends. Those are characters with entirely different meanings and often different pronunciations in various forms of Chinese. I believe that alone makes the assertion that traditional Chinese is "just another character set" as controversial as calling English "just another Newspeak".
  - eloisius 6y ago
    You're absolutely right. Written Chinese is called Standard Chinese on the mainland and it is "Chinese" whether you speak Cantonese, Mandarin, or Shangaianese. That fact blew my mind when I learned it. Written Chinese can be understand by people that speak mutually unintelligible spoken languages. And not just that it _can be_ understood. They share the same written language. There are informal written version of regional languages, but that's a rabbit hole. My point was really not to get too deep into the pedantry of it, but simply that Taiwan and China do share the same written language with a different character set because you can generally replace the characters without substantial grammatical or vocabulary changes. It's not in the same ballpark as equivocating Spanish, Catalan, Languedoc, and French. There are different vocabulary variations like saying 哪兒 Nǎ'er and 哪裡 Nǎlǐ (both mean "where?"), but you can also find variations between Brit and American English vocabulary. IMO, the Trad/Simplified difference is closer akin to American English deciding to drop a lot of U's in words like "colour." My point was that you could say they share the same written language so it makes very much sense to have one ZH-language Wikipedia, and use machine conversion to present it in the character set preferred by the reader (as it does currently). And, that there is plenty of good reasons for Taiwan to have its own Wikimedia organization because there are non-ZH languages like Min Nan that deserve to be represented. Edit for sake of illustration. Take the sentence "I like this cat." It's read "Wǒ xǐhuān zhè zhī māo" no matter if you're reading it in Traditional or Simplified characters. There may be some pronunciation differences North v South that is above my level so far, but the characters (notably 只 that you mentioned) are the same meaning and sound. 我喜歡這隻貓我喜欢这只猫
bawolff 6y ago
Chapters are separate from which languages have a site. (E.g. thee exists Wikimedia Canada, Wikimedia NYC, wikimedia cascadia etc. That is unrelated to there being an english language wikipedia) Http://zh.wikipedia.org uses some weird auto conversion to try and be both lsnguages.

im3w1l 6y ago

Simplified and traditional characters are in perfect correspondence right? Could maybe translate on the fly?

hker 6y ago
> Simplified and traditional characters are in perfect correspondence right? No, there is no perfect correspondence between simplified and traditional Chinese. The simplified Chinese collapses important characters such as “after” and “back”, often causing confusion (you can read more here [1]). [1]: http://pages.ucsd.edu/~dkjordan/chin/SimplifiedCharacters.html http://pages.ucsd.edu/~dkjordan/chin/SimplifiedCharacters.ht...
- dheera 6y ago
  Not only that, but there are a couple of characters that are collapsed in traditional but split out in simplified: "乾" in Simplified refers to only one of the 8 trigrams, as is used in the word "乾坤" "乾" in Traditional can mean either the above OR the Simplified "干" (dry) "干" also exists in Traditional but only means "stem" not "dry" However, GP's point about translating on the fly is possible. You don't need a very advanced algorithm to translate simplified<->traditional almost perfectly. Unless you're translating poetry they can almost always be disambiguated by the nearby characters very well. Note though that there are lots of actual word differences in mainland Mandarin and Taiwanese Mandarin. It's not difficult for one to read the other and maybe occasionally asking a question or two but it's nice for every human to have materials available in their native dialect and vocabulary. Much like you probably appreciate that your system offers both UK English and US English and doesn't force you to use the "other" one from what you're used to.
  - im3w1l 6y ago
    As a non-native English speaker, I actually hate that there is a split.
    - dheera 6y ago
      You should check out Singaporean English or "Singlish", which uses a lot of Chinese grammar and Hokkien and Malay vocabulary in English sentences. It's a wonderfully efficient dialect taking the best from all of these languages.
      - im3w1l 6y ago
        I heard it spoken when I was in Singapore. It was pretty fun, but I'm glad it isn't given equal status, and that we didn't have to learn any in school.
gene91 6y ago
No. They are not in perfect correspondence. The mapping is one-to-multiple or multiple-to-one in quite a few characters, some of them commonly used. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambiguities_in_Chinese_character_simplification https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambiguities_in_Chinese_chara...
yorwba 6y ago
Chinese Wikipedia https://zh.wikipedia.org https://zh.wikipedia.org automatically transliterates into Mainland Simplified, Hong Kong Traditional, Macau Traditional, Malaysia Simplified, Singapore Simplified and Taiwan Traditional. The article text can be in any variant (and is usually a mixture after getting edited by people using different standards) and if you visit an untransliterated page, you'll be prompted for your preference. There's no simple one-to-one correspondence for all characters, but Wikipedia has multiple layers of special cases and exceptions that can cover most situations (including vocabulary differences). That doesn't mean the text always makes sense after transliteration: The article about the Taiwanese township of Shuili mentions that it was originally named 水裡, but then renamed to 水里 in 1966. At least in the Taiwanese Traditional version https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/%E6%B0%B4%E9%87%8C%E9%84%89 https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/%E6%B0%B4%E9%87%8C%E9%84%89 . If you read the Mainland Simplified one ( https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/%E6%B0%B4%E9%87%8C%E9%84%89 https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/%E6%B0%B4%E9%87%8C%E9%84%89 ) both of these names get simplified to 水里.
- dwohnitmok 6y ago
  I've never really bought the multiple layers of special cases and exceptions. For example, British English and American English also have many of the same differences between simplified and traditional Chinese characters; e.g. British English and American English both agree on the verb form of "to curb" but disagree on "kerb" vs "curb." Yet AFAIK Wikipedia doesn't have a similar system that tries to convert from British English to American English or vice versa that also handles all these special cases apart from just the normal spelling differences. Taiwanese Mandarin is really not that different from PRC Mandarin. In fact most college-educated mainland speakers can read works written in traditional characters just fine although I'm not sure on the Taiwanese side for simplified characters. In fact I think a substantial proportion (most?) of Chinese Wikipedia readers just don't bother with changing the character set either way and are fine with traditional/simplified character switches throughout the article (that's certainly the way I read it).
  - yorwba 6y ago
    I wanted to find out whether there are any statistics on how this feature is used, but only found this Phabricator ticket: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T227904 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T227904 Looks like they put doing research on user needs into the backlog for now.

eloisius 6y ago

The most popular language in Taiwan is Mandarin, and they use the Traditional characters, but it’s the same Mandarin, albeit with small, regional differences like pronouncing 和 as hàn instead of Northern Chinese hé. Additionally, there are other official Taiwanese languages like Taiwan Min Nan and various Formosan languages. Pedantry out of the way, You could make a case that the Wikipedia is the same language and you can change the character set pretty much interchangeably by machine, but I wouldn’t want to see China have its claws on the only ZH-language Wikipedia either.

jimworm 6y ago
My view is rather different. Written Chinese does not "belong" to Mandarin or any other spoken Chinese language, but is its own entity. While the mainland-China version of simplified Chinese is based around Mandarin, written Chinese is most definitely not Mandarin. 裏 is not 里. 只 is not 隻. 后 is not 後. They might sound the same in modern Mandarin but that is where the similarity ends. Those are characters with entirely different meanings and often different pronunciations in various forms of Chinese. I believe that alone makes the assertion that traditional Chinese is "just another character set" as controversial as calling English "just another Newspeak".
- eloisius 6y ago
  You're absolutely right. Written Chinese is called Standard Chinese on the mainland and it is "Chinese" whether you speak Cantonese, Mandarin, or Shangaianese. That fact blew my mind when I learned it. Written Chinese can be understand by people that speak mutually unintelligible spoken languages. And not just that it _can be_ understood. They share the same written language. There are informal written version of regional languages, but that's a rabbit hole. My point was really not to get too deep into the pedantry of it, but simply that Taiwan and China do share the same written language with a different character set because you can generally replace the characters without substantial grammatical or vocabulary changes. It's not in the same ballpark as equivocating Spanish, Catalan, Languedoc, and French. There are different vocabulary variations like saying 哪兒 Nǎ'er and 哪裡 Nǎlǐ (both mean "where?"), but you can also find variations between Brit and American English vocabulary. IMO, the Trad/Simplified difference is closer akin to American English deciding to drop a lot of U's in words like "colour." My point was that you could say they share the same written language so it makes very much sense to have one ZH-language Wikipedia, and use machine conversion to present it in the character set preferred by the reader (as it does currently). And, that there is plenty of good reasons for Taiwan to have its own Wikimedia organization because there are non-ZH languages like Min Nan that deserve to be represented. Edit for sake of illustration. Take the sentence "I like this cat." It's read "Wǒ xǐhuān zhè zhī māo" no matter if you're reading it in Traditional or Simplified characters. There may be some pronunciation differences North v South that is above my level so far, but the characters (notably 只 that you mentioned) are the same meaning and sound. 我喜歡這隻貓我喜欢这只猫

bawolff 6y ago

Chapters are separate from which languages have a site. (E.g. thee exists Wikimedia Canada, Wikimedia NYC, wikimedia cascadia etc. That is unrelated to there being an english language wikipedia) Http://zh.wikipedia.org uses some weird auto conversion to try and be both lsnguages.