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Chinese Wikipedia https://zh.wikipedia.org https://zh.wikipedia.org automatically transliterates into Mainland Simplified, Hong Kong Traditional, Macau Traditio
by 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 agoI'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 agoI 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.