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Simple use

The basic use like {{zh|厚朴}} doesn't work. Could you fix this? --Apoc2400 (talk) 14:59, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Fixed. But it's better to specify what you want using {{zh|c=厚朴}}, {{zh|s=厚朴}}, etc. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 17:40, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Yes, you're right, but sometimes I don't know which it is. It still doesn't seem to work, {{zh|厚朴}}: Chinese: 厚朴. --Apoc2400 (talk) 18:40, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Oops! I had fixed the code in my sandbox, and forgot to move the fixed code to the real template. Should be working now. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 18:43, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. Can you make {{zh|厚朴|foo}} do something resonable too? Either default to pinyin or just output foo with no description before. --Apoc2400 (talk) 18:57, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Hm... I think after a point, it gets a bit dangerous to try to guess what users mean when they didn't input the parameter names, so for that reason just ouputting "foo" by itself would be better. But even in that case, I'm not sure if that's the best way to go...if you output "foo", the user might not realize that anything was wrong. If someone uses {{zh|厚朴|foo}} and the second parameter doesn't show up, then at least he'll notice there's a problem and go check the template documentation to see how to fix it, and therefore won't make the same result again. I think this is probably the best option. Besides, forms like {{zh|厚朴|foo}} are not really being used as far as I know; when you see them they're just a result of replacements that happened during the bot run, and they seem to be pretty rare (and I'm figuring that when they do happen, people watching the page will fix them manually). rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 19:20, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

I saw a case in Gua Sha, that you just fixed. For the trade off, it depends on how important is it to specify what kind of romanization is used. --Apoc2400 (talk) 19:56, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Also, is there a way to mark something as Chinese, without producing the 'Chinese:' text? Like {{nihongo}} does for Japanese? --Apoc2400 (talk) 18:44, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

For that it's better just to use the {{lang|zh}} template, which puts it in Chinese font and stuff. It would look like {{lang|zh|厚朴}}. For example, see Chinese classifier, which has this template all over the place. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 18:51, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Ok, that's kind of complex though. Didn't {{lang-zh}} use to do just that? --Apoc2400 (talk) 18:57, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Hm, as far as I can tell that template always did what this one does, which is make "Chinese: ___". I think {{lang}} is more versatile.

And actually, lang-zh should have been replaced with the others when ZhBot did his run... I didn't realize that template existed, so I'll go quickly run the bot again. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 19:00, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Ok, I guess I remember wrong. {{lang}} seems fine. I added an other question above. --Apoc2400 (talk) 19:11, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Template malfuction on Battle of Triangle Hill

I don't know how the vandals inserted stuffs into the template, but once I remove the template, the vandalism is gone. Jim101 (talk) 00:30, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

VANDALISM: Vampire sightings?

I cannot edit this page, but the current version appears to be vandalized. In addition to the usual text, it includes the following nonsense blurb, whose origin I cannot trace:

There has only ever been 12 reports of vampire siteings and the picturs and Bite's have been breath takingly scary Creepy. a long time ago in 1945 a woman called Mara valances was drained of her blood Throu to Pin sized hole's in her neck just below her Left cheek. The strange thing doctor's noticed is her hole body was dry, But she continued to breath slowly but strong asif she was in a deep sleep. Doctor's reported this to the police shortly after the attack in south Texas. Is was belived she had found maby proof of Existance of vampier's and she was silenced. Mara Valances story was kept secret so that tourisim didnt Get inturupted.

This is of course a really significant issue since it appears on all pages that use the template, which is pretty much all pages that have to do with anything Chinese. Miranche (talk) 00:32, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

Some idiot vandalized Template:;...fixed now. Jim101 (talk) 00:41, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

Tonyong Pinyin not displaying correctly

I don't know too much about templates, but for pages that use the "tp=" tag, the Tonyong Pinyin link doesn't show up properly.

Example: Fengshan, Taiwan

-Multivariable (talk) 01:00, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

Fixed. Thanks for pointing that out. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 01:09, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

Marking language for pinyin

For the pinyin and other latin scripts, should we mark the language as Chinese? I think this would help screen readers pronounce correctly. Perhaps most easily, wrap them as {{lang|zh-Latn|tiān yuán shù}}. --Apoc2400 (talk) 20:37, 27 December 2009 (UTC)

Line breaks

Something I just noticed at Macau is the first line is broken very unnaturally in between the characters of 澳门. This is browser, settings and window size dependent: I'm using Safari 4, with a relatively narrow window, e.g. 800 - 900 pixels. The whole of "门; Mandarin Pinyin:" is being treated as a unit as far as line breaks are concerned. I can also see it on the template page in the examples if I make the window narrow enough.

The problem seems to be the template is inserting non-breakable spaces, so it doesn't break on the spaces between English words or after the semicolons. The latter in particular is a natural place to break the line, and would deal with the problem above.

So can the non-breaking spaces after the semicolons be changed to normal spaces? If someone more familiar with this can look at it and see if my thinking's right I think this is a relatively straightforward fix.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 20:51, 9 April 2010 (UTC)

I changed the non-breaking spaces to regular ones. How does Macau look now? rʨanaɢ (talk) 21:20, 9 April 2010 (UTC)

That's much better, thanks. --JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 21:23, 9 April 2010 (UTC)

Default order

As User:Kwami had pointed out, it is indeed a problem to display simplified characters first by default. Traditional characters is still the official or common standard in many places. Preference shouldn't be given to any of the two by this template. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 119.237.153.52 (talk) 01:30, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

It's not a problem; as I have said numerous times, the default is very easily overridden and no one is forced to use any particular order. And your preposterous suggestion of "preference shouldn't be given to any of the two" is impossible—unless you can suggest a way to have neither one appear before the other. rʨanaɢ (talk) 01:32, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

Edit request from Paedia, 29 August 2010

{{editprotected}} Please change all instances of Wade-Giles to Wade–Giles. Cheers, Pædia 11:19, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

Done. Thanks for catching that. rʨanaɢ (talk) 12:39, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

Should capitalize

"Pinyin," "Simplified," and "Traditional" should be capitalized because they are not just a generic romanization system and character sets. Asoer (talk) 21:49, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

"Traditional" and "simplified" characters are not trademarked names or anything like that, and they are very often used as common nouns. "Pinyin", referring to Hanyu Pinyin, does refer more specifically to a proper name and from a purist's view it maybe should be capitalized (for example, it is at http://pinyin.info), but in actual usage it seems to be lowercase as often, or more often, as capital, so I could go either way. rʨanaɢ (talk) 22:48, 12 September 2010 (UTC)

I've seen "pinyin" both capitalised and not, which suggests it's not normally or by default, and it is when used as e.g. headings in tables. Notably Pinyin does not have it capitalised except as a heading or name, which is what I'd expect. The same except more so for "traditional" and "simplified" which are just terms, and are again often seen uncapitalised unless at the start of sentences or headings: one example is the article Debate on traditional and simplified Chinese characters.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 00:06, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

Actually, the Pinyin article seems to be inconsistent in capitalization. I didn't bother checking the whole article, but in the Usage section there are several instances where it's capitalized mid-sentence, and several where it's not. This is fairly common in articles that have "rotted" (i.e., the primary contributor[s] are no longer paying attention and small edits have been made here and there by inexperienced editors who don't have an eye for keeping the article consistent). rʨanaɢ (talk) 00:43, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

Traditional/simplified character order in Template:Zh: a new proposal

copying this spam message to here, just in case there is anyone watching this page who didn't get the message in their user talk page

As you probably know, currently if you want traditional characters to display before simplified characters when using this template, you have to write |first=t every time you use the template, which can be a pain in long articles, and which raises complaints about political and practical problems with making simplified characters the "default".

So I am trying to write up a version of the template in which you set a traditional/simplified choice setting just once (specifically, on a subpage of the article where you're using the template), and then every instance of the template on that article uses the ordering you set. Further details about the new setup are here; if you have a moment I would very much appreciate your input, specifically about any potential problems you can imagine or any ways this can be made better.

Thank you, rʨanaɢ (talk) 01:24, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

use of {zh} template

Notification of discussion about use of {{zh}} at WT:LEDE --Ohconfucius ^¡digame! 03:51, 26 October 2010 (UTC)

Bug for parameter "hp" when first=t

I found a bug for parameter "hp" when parameter "first" is "t".

{{zh|t=臺北市|s=台北市|hp=Táiběi Shì|first=t}}

would yield:

traditional Chinese: 臺北市; simplified Chinese: 台北市; pinyin: Táiběi Shì

You can see the "; " between "simplified Chinese: 台北市" and "pinyin" disappears. It is fine when using "p" instead of "hp":

{{zh|t=臺北市|s=台北市|p=Táiběi Shì|first=t}}

traditional Chinese: 臺北市; simplified Chinese: 台北市; pinyin: Táiběi Shì

or using no "first" parameter:

{{zh|t=臺北市|s=台北市|hp=Táiběi Shì}}

simplified Chinese: 台北市; traditional Chinese: 臺北市; pinyin: Táiběi Shì

It is not a serieus bug because it can be easily avoided by changing "hp" to "p", but it would be better to fix it. The article Taipei had suffered this bug for a long time, it's fixed just now by me.--Tomchen1989 (talk) 16:33, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, I'll look into it. rʨanaɢ (talk) 16:36, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

Got it. Thanks for pointing that out. rʨanaɢ (talk) 16:41, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

New paramater for Xiao'erjing, arabic script for chinese language

please create New paramater for Xiao'erjing, arabic script for chinese language, it will be usefull on Hui related articles, and for names of mosques in China and other islamic related stuff.Дунгане (talk) 21:22, 5 December 2010 (UTC)

Suggested enhancement

Hi, I wonder if it would be worth adding another parameter to suppress the word "Chinese"; i.e. to render as "simplified: XX; traditional: XX" rather than "simplified Chinese: XX; traditional Chinese: XX". I'm thinking about instances like Chinglish#Examples, "Spread to fuck the fruit" section, where, with repeated successive uses, we quickly get the idea that, yes, it's Chinese, and it become a bit tiresome to keep reading it. 86.176.211.169 (talk) 02:26, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

It's certainly possible, and it can be done without any real drawbacks (i.e., the current version would still be the default, so nothing would need to be changed elsewhere), but I'm not sure how much need there is for it. In the instance you point out, really, I think that section of the article should just be removed for editorial reasons. Also, it is usually not necessary to give both simplified and traditional characters (there are some instances where it is useful, but this is not one of them); it would be easier just to give |c= ("Chinese:"). rʨanaɢ (talk) 02:45, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

I think that section is worthwhile and should be kept. I have seen quite a few of these "fuck" translations, and it's very interesting to learn how such a bizarre thing could happen. 86.160.218.248 (talk)

It's a useful addition to the template. The idea is appropriate to every Chinese historical or biographical page where there is no question which language is under discussion.

The real improvement, though, would be to suppress unnecessary distinctions automatically on every display of the template. (I.e., (Chinese: 武陵山脈; pinyin: Wǔlíng Shānmài) should display as (Chinese: 武陵山脈, pinyin: Wǔlíng Shānmài) — unnecessary "traditional" suppressed but link goes to traditional Chinese script; see above for the discussion on correcting the current misuse of semicolons — while (simplified Chinese: 武陵山脉; traditional Chinese: 武陵山脈; pinyin: Wǔlíng Shānmài) should display as (simplified Chinese: 武陵山脉, traditional: 武陵山脈, pinyin: Wǔlíng Shānmài). — LlywelynII 03:25, 16 August 2011 (UTC)

In the case you're describing you can use {{zh|c=武陵山脈|p=Wǔlíng Shānmài}}, which displays as (Chinese: 武陵山脈; pinyin: Wǔlíng Shānmài). When the traditional/simplified distinction doesn't really matter (as it doesn't in most pages) you can just use the |c= parameter. rʨanaɢ (talk) 03:36, 16 August 2011 (UTC)

(Although I admit not everyone knows to do that, so the |t= and |s= parameters are overused. This addition will make it so "simplified" or "traditional" only display if both are present. rʨanaɢ (talk) 04:02, 16 August 2011 (UTC))

Suggested Enhancement #2 - Pinyin Auto-conversion

User:Rjanag and other coders - would it be possible to enhance the template's functionality to automatically convert something like "Dai4" into "Daì" (i.e. Syllable with a tone number into diacritic pinyin)? There seem to be a number of websites that do it. Entering Mandarin Pinyin is a royal pain in the ass if one doesn't have a 10-key numpad on the keyboard, and even then the caron is still a nightmare. Thanks.  White Whirlwind  咨  23:44, 31 August 2011 (UTC)

Not possible in this template. This requires the sort of string manipulation capability that the MediaWiki parser doesn't have.

There are plenty of alternatives for entering pinyin, such as downloading pinyinput, copying pinyin from WP:CHINESE, or using any of those other online tools to do the conversion and then copying the pinyin into here. rʨanaɢ (talk) 00:22, 1 September 2011 (UTC)

(By the way, in your example, "dai4" should be dài, not *daì. rʨanaɢ (talk) 00:25, 1 September 2011 (UTC))

Ok, that's all I wanted to know. I am aware of the variety of pinyin-input tools out there, but I have long disliked using pinyin and do not use it except when necessary. As you can see, I never properly learned the rules of applying diacritics, and it turns out it's a generally useless skill except in certain situations, like providing examples on talk pages. :)  White Whirlwind  咨  03:14, 1 September 2011 (UTC)

Glaring careless error

Take a look at, for example, [[Guangdong]], which currently reads "(Chinese: 广东 Chinese: 廣東)". I would sometimes accept "(Chinese: 广东)" alone, but never the form above. Tartanator (talk) 00:56, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

Probably has something to do with this recent update. I'll look into it. rʨanaɢ (talk) 01:01, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

Quite simple: this wasn't a problem with the template, it was a problem within the article. Someone had put two instance of the template in, rather than using one instance properly. I fixed it very easily, and if you had looked in the article's wikitext before posting here you probably could have found the problem on your own. The "carelessness" was in this edit to the article, not anything having to do with the template, and I can't take responsibility for people doing stuff like that. rʨanaɢ (talk) 01:05, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

EMC/LMC, et al.

User:Rjanag - has anyone ever suggested adding parameters for reconstructions on this template or, perhaps more appropriately, the {{chinese}} template? I'd hesitate a bit for Old Chinese, but Middle Chinese (split into Early/Late) might be nice to include in infoboxes on the relevant articles.  White Whirlwind  咨  08:25, 12 September 2011 (UTC)

That sounds like it's probably more relevant for {{Chinese}} than this. rʨanaɢ (talk) 12:48, 12 September 2011 (UTC)

Agreed. Functionality added to {{chinese}}, not here.  White Whirlwind  咨  22:49, 12 September 2011 (UTC)

Check for existence of zh/format/{FULLPAGENAME}

{{edit protected}} Please replace all occurences of

{{zh/format/{{FULLPAGENAME}}}}

with

{{#ifexist:Template:zh/format/{{FULLPAGENAME}}|{{zh/format/{{FULLPAGENAME}}}}}}

This will remove these subpages from Wikipedia:Database reports/Transclusions of deleted templates. Frietjes (talk) 20:13, 8 June 2011 (UTC)

Done. rʨanaɢ (talk) 22:41, 8 June 2011 (UTC)

Thank you, that will remove a few thousand pages from that list. Frietjes (talk) 23:23, 8 June 2011 (UTC)

OTOH, now you've added Xiguan, Mandarin Chinese profanity, and List of sites in Jinan to Category:Pages with too many expensive parser function calls. Anomie⚔ 23:47, 17 September 2011 (UTC)

Template badly constructed: Should use commas, not semicolons

Semicolons are first-order divisions, commas are secondary ones. In discussions of topics where names exist in more than one language, the semicolons should be used to differentiate the languages, not the various means of expressing Chinese. An example is the article on the Red River (Asia) where a Vietnamese and Chinese name (at least) are required. Currently, the template forces the division (Vietnamese: Sông Hồng, Chinese: 红河; pinyin: Hóng Hé) which makes the Chinese characters a variant of Vietnamese and pinyin its own (badly-capitalized) language. For similar reasons, (Vietnamese: Sông Hồng; Chinese: 红河; pinyin: Hóng Hé) is hardly an improvement. We should be aiming for (Vietnamese: Sông Hồng; Chinese: 红河, pinyin: Hóng Hé).

The template should use commas throughout its occurrences or we should go back to breaking up the templates into its original divisions. -— LlywelynII 05:39, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

I'm not sure I agree. As you pointed out yourself, the template does not force Vietnamese and Chinese to be separated by a comma; they are each added by separate templates, and anyone can change the comma to a semicolon for consistency; I don't understand why you think adding a colon is not an improvement, since as far as I can tell it solves the problem you were concerned about. Personally, I think the third option you specify (Vietnamese: Sông Hồng; Chinese: 红河, pinyin: Hóng Hé) looks awkward to me—my intuition is that colons are a more salient "divider" than commas, and thus 'Chinese: 红河, pinyin: Hóng Hé' looks awkward to me.

As a side note, what do you mean by "badly-capitalized"? Are you suggesting that the template should use "Pinyin" rather than "pinyin"? Personally I feel ambivalent about those options, I wouldn't mind changing to "Pinyin" if there is a desire for that. rʨanaɢ (talk) 15:00, 30 April 2011 (UTC)

Semicolons are a more salient divider than commas. That's why they're used to divide languages, not separate displays of the same language. Pinyin is not a separate language from Chinese: it is another method of writing it, hence the need for a comma.

(Unless using the formal name Hanyu Pinyin, pinyin should be lower-case. My point was the semi-colon division puts it in a state of equality with the (capitalized) languages and the current template fails aesthetically as well as grammatically and syntactically.) — LlywelynII 03:00, 16 August 2011 (UTC)

Colons aren't used to "divide languages" in this template. I assume you're talking about semicolons?

Anyway, it is common in prose lists to use semicolons instead of commas when the items of the lists are long or complex or include other puncuation. That is the reason I used semicolons here; I thought that the colons in the list items warranted semicolons rather than commas in the list, as those are more salient dividers.

Also, please consider the context in which this template is meant to be used. In the majority of cases where this template is used, it's for Chinese-only terms and topics, and thus there aren't other languages. The cases you're worried about are a minority. rʨanaɢ (talk) 03:33, 16 August 2011 (UTC)

The MOS includes examples of what I'm talking about both at WP:lede and WP:place but so far didn't spell out the punctuation. Since it's non-controversial and apparently needed, I included that, but let me give you examples from around Wikipedia, since you don't apparently grok it.

Byzantine Empire: Roman Empire (Greek: Βασιλεία Ῥωμαίων, Basileia Rhōmaiōn)

Amazon River: The Amazon (Portuguese: Amazonas; Spanish: Amazonas)

Rome: Rome (Italian: Roma; Latin: Rōma)

Navajo people: The Navajo (also spelled Navaho; in Navajo: Diné, meaning "the people," or Naabeehó)

Brussels: Brussels (French: Bruxelles, pronounced [bʁysɛl]; Dutch: Brussel, pronounced [ˈbrʏsəl])

Königsberg: Königsberg (Lithuanian: Karaliaučius; Low German: Königsbarg; Polish: Królewiec; the Latinised name of the city is Regimontium Prussorum; see also other names)

So Lü Buwei & al. shouldn't treat simplified and traditional Chinese like they're separate languages but use commas like Athens does with the different kinds of Greek. And multiple languages are hardly a small minority. Consider the many many articles involving Chinese ethnicities, historic figures, Sinosphere notes on Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese related pages, etc. — LlywelynII 13:07, 16 August 2011 (UTC)

Notice: The same user is trying to push similar changes for the Tibetan-language template at Template talk:Bo#Wylie, Semicolons without consensus as well. For those knowledgable on Tibetan-language topics, you might want to join in the discussion here as well. -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 04:56, 1 October 2011 (UTC)

I think that using semicolons to separate distinct languages (i.e. language families) and commas to separate varieties within those languages is reasonable enough.  White Whirlwind  咨  06:20, 1 October 2011 (UTC)

Hell, I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt to separate languages even within a family: it's perfectly arguable whether there should be a comma (variant pronunciation) or a semicolon (variant language) between the Mandarin and Shanghainese names of Shanghai, for example.

...jie seems to be defering to Rja...'s usage, but it remains hard for me to understand how he justifies having a template that produces entries that look like this

The Khitan people (Chinese: 契丹; pinyin: Qìdān; Persian: ختن)...

or this

The Kara-Khitan Khanate (Mongolian: Хар Хятан; simplified Chinese: 西辽; traditional Chinese: 西遼; pinyin: Xī Liáo)...

or this

The Liao Dynasty (simplified Chinese: 辽朝; traditional Chinese: 遼朝; pinyin: Liáo Cháo; Khitan language: Mos Jælut)...

I think the idea is that he doesn't feel like fixing the original mistake, but it still is one, even if more people don't come to template talk pages to moot it over. — LlywelynII 09:47, 12 October 2011 (UTC)

Subsidiary thoughts

Names transliterated atonally are generally unitalicized, that's true, but the Wade-Giles should probably default to italics as long as there's a way to disable it. Postal Map Romanizations essentially were English names and should not be italicized, but where they're worth mentioning, they're probably worth bolding. (I know the current default is to move the PM down to the history section or to write "Atonalpinyin (Chinese: 中文; pinyin: tònē), also known as Postalname", but I'd offer that's because of the template's default.) — LlywelynII 14:28, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

Reformat proposal

In addition to the semicolon issue raised above, the current template is pretty unsightly and long. There's a great need to distinguish traditional from simplified clearly, but the glut of space taken up by things like

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisici elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud (simplified Chinese: 成语; traditional Chinese: 成語; pinyin: chéngyǔ; Wade–Giles: ch'ung-yu; lit. 'set phrases') exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum

leads to editors avoiding the template in favor of things like (成語/成语, chéngyǔ). (Side issue: The current template also doesn't treat Wade-Giles as foreign text.) My proposal would be to replace the cumbersome "simplified Chinese" &c. with small markers and links on the model of the Russian transliteration link.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisici elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud (Chinese: t 成語, s 成语, p chéngyǔ, w ch'ung-yu, lit. "set phrases") exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum

Semantic content is actually gained by a clear Chinese marker, the variants are still available with links to more information, and it's much less unsightly.

Of course, if Chinese had already been mentioned above, that field could still be hidden along with the others

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisici elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud (t 成語, s 成语, p chéngyǔ) exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia (成語, 成语, chéngyǔ) deserunt mollit anim id est laborum

without having to omit the template or its metadata. — LlywelynII 10:20, 12 October 2011 (UTC)

I don't think it's a good idea to replace traditional, simplified and pinyin with 't', 's' and 'p'. None of them are especially obvious and it also makes the links much harder to spot. 'simp.', 'trad.' and 'pinyin' would be better from both points of view. I agree that repeating 'Chinese' should be unnecessary, though it's not obvious how to achieve this. Using smaller text seems fine too.

I question how much of a problem all of this is though. The template is not used much but that's as it's often unnecessary. E.g. apart from the main topic of an article it's usually unnecessary to include so much detail. Other appearances of Chinese are usually much simpler, e.g. "Zhongguo (中国)". Or if there is a lot of Chinese text in a table or list it might be presented some other way, such as in a separate column. Traditional and simplified are often not both shown, either as they are the same or as the topic is one where one usage predominates. Wade-Giles is rarely needed.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 11:31, 12 October 2011 (UTC)

JohnBlackburne has said pretty much everything I was going to say. It seems to me that there is usually not a need to use a long version of the template over and over again; once in the lede should suffice (and even then, if there are a ton of things to include, it might be better to just put that information in a {{Chinese}} box rather than prose). In cases where someone is overusing the template within an article, a simple solution is to clean up the article rather than to rewrite the template. Also, much of what you are asking for (smaller text, "t" instead of "traditional Chinese", etc.), can be accomplished using the {{zh-full}} template. rʨanaɢ (talk) 13:20, 12 October 2011 (UTC)

The proposal is to make it the default. Further, the zh template is far more prevalent and user-friendly, and the {{zh-full}} template continues various other errors mentioned above. Finally, as you are the template creator, I don't question that you are correct on your points, but the template directions certainly give no indication at all about its ability to do what you claim it does. — LlywelynII 13:54, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

With respect I think your objections are very poorly taken.

1) It would be a very special kind of Wikipedia reader who would need to be reminded every single time he visits any Chinese page that the language can be represented by separate kinds of characters or that there are multiple romanization systems. (Off the top of my head, the only candidates are those suffering from anterograde amnesia.) After the very first visit, the very first click-through, he understands and at that point the only thing needed to do is differentiate them. We keep the links but limit the descriptors to the bare minimum, because it is absolutely unnecessary clutter to say simplified Chinese or even so much as simp.. We only need the markers.

2) You're quite right that some of my examples used many fields and W-G is fairly uncommon: I was illustrating the effect. The fact that it doesn't show up on every page doesn't mean it doesn't show up on many in aggregate. Fwiw, the template's used by 19715 wiki pages at present and theoretically should be used for every single appearance of Chinese text. (The use of {{lang}} is prescribed, but {{zh}} is preferred for Chinese because of lang's issues.) Small text links seem generally superior to stand-alone Chinese because pages use simplified and traditional on either side of their slashes (榜样/榜樣) without clarification. There's a fantastic argument to be made that mentioning pinyin is completely superfluous (it has tonal marks and is the official standard in both Chinas now), but it remains political enough and the other romanizations show up often enough that I didn't mind including the marker.

3) I would suggest that you're mistaken if you think that over time Wikipedia won't accumulate both Chinese versions if they exist. — LlywelynII 13:54, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

Regarding the use of "pinyin:", these labels aren't just there to indicate to the reader which is which; they're also guides for readers who don't know about Chinese to find the relevant pages explaining what they're seeing. Thus, I don't think it would be appropriate to remove the marker entirely.

Regarding reducing "simplified Chinese" to "simp." after the first instance, it is probably possible to create a "short form" version of the template that can be specified in later instances of the template (something like this is already done with |links=no, suppressing links if the template is used over and over again). I still think in most cases it's best to just avoid using the template over and over again (see, for instance, Chinese classifier, which has tons of Chinese and doesn't use the template) because it's usually not necessary. I can look into making the template allow a "short form" version for the rare cases when it's needed. (I can't guarantee that people will actually use it, because most people just do stuff without checking the instructions.) rʨanaɢ (talk) 18:04, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

On (1) the problem is we don't know what other pages users have visited before they visit any single page. Nor do we know their experience with Chinese. We don't even know if they can see the characters (anyone still using Windows XP, unless they have a Chinese version or make special effort, just sees rectangles). For all these reasons we can't assume that users will recognise the text as Chinese from having seen it before, and so not need it pointing out to them. Really for many if not most Europeans and Americans Chinese might just as well be Thai or Korean: even if they have the software installed they can't tell them apart. So at least once per article labelling the funny squiggles as "Chinese", and clarifying why they appear twice not once, makes sense to me.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 20:45, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

I would be against changing, for example, the "Simplified" to "Simp." or "s" across the board, but it might be nice to do so, say, in the second and subsequent uses of the template in an article or section of an article. Calling the template does clutter up an article quite quickly: I looked at rʨanaɢ's example of Chinese classifier, and it's an absolute mess. It also reads like a section from a beginning Chinese textbook, not an encyclopedia, but that's another issue.  White Whirlwind  咨  01:19, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you mean. That article only uses {{zh}} twice, so if you think it's cluttered I don't see why you're using that as an example of how this template causes clutter. Regarding your other concern, I would be happy to discuss this issue (about which I don't agree with you) about that article elsewhere, but it's not really relevant in this discussion. rʨanaɢ (talk) 04:03, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

I simply meant that it contains a significant amount of Chinese characters (far too many, in my opinion) - I mistakenly assumed the template was used for most of them. Regarding the Chinese classifier page, I didn't realize until after looking at the Talk and hist pages that you (rʨanaɢ) are the de facto steward over there - I hope you didn't take my calling the page "an absolute mess" personally. It was simply an opinion: I meant no offense by it.  White Whirlwind  咨  04:43, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

I'm not taking it personally--anyone is welcome to give constructive criticism about any article. What I meant was, if you really think there are serious problems with the article, we can discuss it in a more relevant place. rʨanaɢ (talk) 05:15, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

Traditional & Simplified

I think the template should show the Traditional & Simplified, even entering one type only, because it is confusing for some people.hoising (talk) 04:21, 2 October 2011 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you mean. Can you give an example of what you're asking for? rʨanaɢ (talk) 07:28, 2 October 2011 (UTC)

If a man named 叶干 in Simplified Chinese, his probable Traditional Chinese name is 叶干, 葉干, 叶乾 or 葉乾.

For the template: Chinese: 叶干 <- it shows Chinese only, not Simplified Chinese. Some people might wrongly think 叶干 also is his Traditional Chinese name when he read the template.

We had better comfirm 叶干 is Simplified Chinese name in the template. (Simplified Chinese: 叶干). hoising (talk) 11:51, 2 October 2011 (UTC)

For most cases, it's not necessary to give both traditional and simplified; for instance, if a person is from the PRC we usually only give his/her simplified name, and if a person is from Taiwan or Hong Kong we usually only give traditional. In such cases, I don't see why it's necessary to know what the other version is. Even though the template only displays "Chinese", the link points to Simplified, as you will notice if you hold your mouse over the link for a moment. rʨanaɢ (talk) 18:16, 2 October 2011 (UTC)

Xié 叶 is pretty unusual in modern Chinese, so I don't think that's a particularly good example, but gān/gàn certainly could be a problem (rʨanaɢ: the difference would be crucial when looking it up in a serious dictionary). However, having the template list both Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese would make every instance look something like Lü Buwei's first line, which is unsightly and clumsy. — Preceding unsigned comment added by White whirlwind (talk • contribs) 18:36, 2 October 2011 (UTC)

叶 is yè and it's a common family name (and a common word). 干 is, to the best of my knowledge, not a common name.

Obviously the difference matters in a dictionary, but Wikipedia is not a dictionary, and for the reasons I explained above I don't think it's relevant in the lede of an article to know whether a name given is in traditional or simplified characters. In the vast majority of cases it isn't; besides, most of this detail belongs in a box like {{Chinese}}, not in prose. rʨanaɢ (talk) 19:09, 2 October 2011 (UTC)

rʨanaɢ, you seem to have missed the point here. The Simplified character 叶 is used to write two distinct Traditional characters: yè 葉 and xié 叶, while the Simplified character 干 is used to write the three distinct Traditional characters: gān 干, gān/qián 乾, and gàn 幹. I think User:hoising is concerned about the ambiguity of leaving the term "Chinese" out there in such cases. "Don't try to correct my Chinese, child."  White Whirlwind  咨  02:39, 4 October 2011 (UTC)

I see. I thought that may have been what you may have meant, but then I didn't find 叶 xié in either of the two traditional character dictionaries I checked, so it must be uncommon indeed like you said.

As for whether this ambiguity is a problem, I still don't see how it is; also, someone above specifically asked for the "traditional" and "simplified" to be removed to save space and reduce redundancy. rʨanaɢ (talk) 11:45, 4 October 2011 (UTC)

Well, ambiguity is, by definition, ambiguous, so there is an inherent "problem" there, but as User:rjanag said, it's very small. Isn't there a way to manually force the template to display the full "Simp/Trad Chinese" when using it in an article? If User:hoising could do so, it might ease his mind.  White Whirlwind  咨  16:00, 4 October 2011 (UTC)

It's possible, but the solution would be messy. A better alternative would just be to have another version of this template (either an actual different template, or just a different set of behavior that could be called by setting some parameter in this like |usefullnames=yes). This alternative is in fact already implemented; I'm pretty sure {{zh-full}} has the sort of display you are looking for, and it also allows flexibility in how names are displayed (i.e., you can manually change "Simplified Chinese:" to whatever you want, in any given instance of the template). rʨanaɢ (talk) 18:35, 4 October 2011 (UTC)

• It is so common to generate mistakes in Hong Kong, a region accept both traditional Chinese and simplified Chinese. I think there are no any reason that wikipedia change other people's names and we should fix the wrong template. We have t=, s= and c=, and someone can use c= if it is not clear enough. That all. hoising (talk) 14:44, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

Chinese is not alphabetic. Generally, all words can be use for name; just think 2 million Chinese in the world have Chinese name and you can find every combinations since BC 3,000 easily. Example for take 干 as name hoising (talk) 15:01, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

Pinyin italicization

Is there a particular reason for Pinyin to be the only romanization that's italicized? I feel like all of them should either be italicized or not italicized, not a mix of the two. Arsonal (talk) 07:48, 28 September 2009 (UTC)

I did think about that after I added the pinyin italics, but I'm not totally sure about standards. I agree that it's best to italicize all, but I'm not sure if there are some that aren't usually italicized; I'll leave a quick query at WT:CHINESE and then see. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 12:05, 28 September 2009 (UTC)

Please de-italicize the pinyin in this template. It renders the diacritics difficult to read, and we generally don't italicize pinyin at WP. Badagnani (talk) 02:27, 21 October 2009 (UTC)

I added this to make italicization optional. (The default is now set to no italics; this can be changed if there is a consensus to do so). Italics can now be forced by either adding a |ital=yes parameter to the template call, or by just putting '' '' around the pinyin text in the template. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 02:51, 21 October 2009 (UTC)

Thank you. Badagnani (talk) 02:43, 3 November 2009 (UTC)

Pinyin should be de-italicized. It is not easily readable when italicized, and WP practice for years has been to not italicize it. Badagnani (talk) 03:39, 19 December 2009 (UTC)

Yes, you said that before, but recently I checked WP:CHINESE and that page says the opposite. If you wish to contest the guideline please do it there first, and once that guideline is changed this template will be updated to conform to it. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 04:04, 19 December 2009 (UTC)

Pinyin is always italicized in academic writing and tone marks are not used unless the character or word is obscure. Additionally, there should not be spaces after each syllable, but after each word. For example, we write pinyin, not pin yin. For my part, I think the double-bracket "zh" template needs to lose simplified/full character options and the pinyin option - it makes it feel like a poorly designed dictionary. Just my two cents. White whirlwind (talk) 06:17, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

You are saying the template should show neither romanizations nor simplified and traditional (not "full") variants? Why? This would be alienating to non-Chinese-speaking readers. Also, if all it shows is one form of characters and nothing else, there is no point anymore for a template at all. rʨanaɢ (talk) 00:20, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

I agree that all the romanizations should be italicized, per MOS:FOREIGN. Regarding the tone marks, my experience is that they're omitted when the word is integrated into the English text (indicated by roman font), e.g. "Beijing" and other proper names, but included when it is treated as foreign (indicated by italics). Kanguole 10:12, 21 February 2011 (UTC)

This. For that reason Pinyin and Wade-Giles should be italicized by default and Postal Map shouldn't be (it was for de facto English placenames from their Chinese characters. In fact, if anything, the spellings were so generally common during the last two centuries it might be bolded by default.) — LlywelynII 10:01, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

Can we have curly quotes around the literal meaning?

Can we have curly quotes “ ” instead of straight quotes " " around the "literally" part? I believe they are supported by all browsers that support Chinese and pinyin. (I would put them in myself, but it seems this template can be edited only by administrators.) Silas S. Brown (talk) 16:40, 4 March 2012 (UTC)

I agree they look better but the Manual of Style strongly recommends against curly quotes, not just for reason of browser support. See WP:MOS#Quotation marks.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 16:47, 4 March 2012 (UTC)

Does not work in description lists

{{Zh}} does not work in a description list. For example,

;Some text ({{Zh|p=some text}})

produces

Some text (pinyin: some text)

instead of the desired

Some text (pinyin: some text)

The transcluded colon is interpreted as the separator in the description list syntax. All such occurrences in the template should be escaped. Kxx (talk | contribs) 22:00, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

I think I got all of them [1]. rʨanaɢ (talk) 22:44, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

Disabling as this appears to be fixed? Please let me know if there are still problems. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 11:45, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

Zhuyin fuhao -> Bopomofo

Zhuyin fuhao, in the template when zhu= is used, is a redirect. Could it be bypassed to Bopomofo? I noticed it on that page where the link is not showing up in bold as it should when a template's included in a page. It's the only one with this problem, based on the examples in the documentation (I'm using User:Anomie/linkclassifier.js which colours links to show what they are so shows which are redirects).--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 03:03, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

I think it's fixed now [2] (using a piped link, so it still displays as "Zhuyin Fuhao"); thanks for the suggestion. rʨanaɢ (talk) 12:16, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

Minor formatting bug when s=t

On this page Norman Bethune#Bethune in film and literature, we have:

''Dr Bethune'' ({{zh|t=白求恩大夫|s=白求恩大夫}}),

which outputs as:

Dr Bethune (Chinese: 白求恩大夫),

with a gratuitous ';' separator after the hanzi. Varlaam (talk) 18:46, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

Sorry about the delay, I didn't notice your comment.

I fixed it here in the article. I don't really consider this a bug in the template; for the sake of non-Chinese speaking Wikipedia readers the template ought to always have some form of romanization in it, and in this example the reason the extra semicolon was there was because only the Chinese was included. So rather than changing the template I just added Pinyin (which for MOS reasons I think ought to have been there anyway). rʨanaɢ (talk) 12:21, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

Non-minor display bug

When using |links=no in conjunction with s and t, where s ≠ t, the template only shows "Chinese: ", and not the two+ written forms. GotR ^Talk 05:35, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

Can you give me an example of where this is happening? I just tried {{zh|s=学生|t=學生|links=no}} in my sandbox and was unable to replicate this problem. rʨanaɢ (talk) 10:09, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

Never mind, I found the problem and repaired it [3]. The problem was that you were using a Chinese ＝ instead of a regular =. Best, rʨanaɢ (talk) 10:17, 26 July 2012 (UTC)