Talk:Written Chinese/GA1

GA review

OK this is the first time I've ever reviewed a GA. Having substantial knowledge of the article's subject myself, I think I can carry out the review without problems.

Comments added as subitems. BrianTung 18:20, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

• The first problem is that the lead section of this article does not have any inline citations. May sure every statements, claims and findings in the article are cited, and by using inline citations, it is easier for the reader to check the source. See WP:CITE, WP:RS and WP:V.

Interesting! I've seen a reviewer say (in regards to another article) that he did not want to see citations in the lead. I'll put them back in there for now, but someone might contest them.

• "Many characters have been definitively traced back to the 商 Shāng Dynasty about 1500 BCE, though the process of creating characters likely began some centuries earlier. Recent archaeological discoveries suggest to some researchers that prototypes of certain characters may date back as far as about 6000 BCE, but this conclusion is disputed." - this entire statement needs source(s).

Done as two separate citations. (But see above comment regarding citations in the lead.)

• "When Chinese characters were standardized under the 秦 Qín dynasty (221–206 BCE)." - cite with a source!

Done. (Ditto.)

• "Educated Chinese know roughly 4,000 characters." - this is statistics and needs a source.

Done with two citations. (Ditto.)

• The entire lead section needs improvement. Currently it is mostly about "the history of chinese characters". See WP:LEAD for more information. The lead section should be a concise overview of the article, establishing context, summarizing the most important points, explaining why the subject is interesting or notable, and briefly describing its notable controversies, if there are any. So it needs a bit of work.

Done.

• this article will use the somewhat contentious but more familiar term "dialect." - Using the term "this article" is not ideal, please improve it with a better phrase.

Please suggest an alternative that does not require an awkward circumlocution.

• A Mandarin speaker might say yī, a Cantonese yat, and a Hokkienese tsit, but all three will understand the character 一 "one." - Is this cited by ref No.9? If not then this is original research and it needs to be cited with a source.

In my opinion, this seems pretty much common knowledge. However, done anyway.

• "The Role of Chinese Characters" should be "The role of Chinese characters" per WP:MSH. And "Chinese Characters in Other Languages" needs to be changed too. As well as all the other headings in the article.

Done. In my defense, I was raised on an upstyle newspaper.

• "At the time, Japanese had no native written system, and the characters were used for the most part to represent Japanese words with the corresponding meanings, rather than similar pronunciations." - cite!

Done.

• There are 2 sentences here that sounded awkward, please re-word them:
  • "Chinese characters were first introduced into Japanese sometime in the first half of the first millennium CE, probably from Chinese products imported into Japan, possibly by way of Korea."
  • "Altogether, the Jōyō Kanji, a list of kanji for common use standardized by the Japanese government, lists 1,945 characters, roughly half the number of characters commanded by typical educated Chinese."

Removed "possibly by way of Korea" as not central to sentence. Not sure what you find awkward about the second sentence, but slightly reworded.

• "In contrast to the popular conception of Chinese as a primarily pictographic or ideographic language, by far the vast majority of Chinese characters (about 95 percent of the characters in the Shuōwén Jiězì [17]) are constructed as either logical aggregates or, more often, phonetic complexes." - ref No.17 should be placed at the end of this sentence.

Done.

• "sun," "blue/green," "candle," "host." - the commas and full stops should be placed outside the speech marks. Unless it is a dialogue or a quote from a statement, then the commas and full stops go inside the speech marks.

Damn, I knew that. (Obviously, I'm a USian.) Done, I think, but there are so many of them I suspect I'll be catching them for a while.

• "These five categories are not sharply delineated, so that one may write Chinese that is, say, halfway between two styles" - the "say" in this sentences makes it sound colloquial.

Replaced by "for example".

• "In addition, regular script imposes a stroke order, which must be followed in order for the characters to be written correctly. (Strictly speaking, this stroke order applies to the clerical, running, and grass scripts as well, but especially in the running and grass scripts, this order is occasionally deviated from.) Thus, for instance, the character 木 mù "wood" cannot be written in just any fashion. Instead, the horizontal stroke must be written first, from left to right; next, the vertical stroke, from top to bottom, with a small hook toward the upper left at the end; next, the left diagonal stroke, from top to bottom; and lastly the right diagonal stroke, from top to bottom." This entire statement seems more fitted to the "Structure of Chinese characters" section. But this is just my suggestion.

The "structure" in that section title refers to how the canonical form is assembled, rather than orthography like stroke order. I think I'll leave it where it is.

• "Throughout this article, Chinese text is given in both simplified and traditional forms when they differ, with the traditional forms being given first." - once again, statements like these tend to diminish the article's quality.

Not sure what you're referring to. "This article"? It is standard procedure in academic papers to identify conventions (such as notation) used throughout the paper, and the usual term for referring to itself is "this article" (or "this paper"). Can you suggest an alternative?

• Don't wikilink Jerry Norman because there is no article for it.

Removed.

• In the "Chinese Dictionaries" section, the explanation for radicals and stroke counts seem to go into excessive detail. Try summarise it further.

Done. (Removed most of the examples.)

• When citing websites, like ref No.12, No.22 and No.28. It should be given a title and retrival date.

Umm, they already had titles. Retrieval dates now added.

• Finally, the inline citations should follow directly after the full stop, comma or the last letter in a sentence. Currently all of the article's inline citations have a gap in front of them. This needs to be fixed.

Done, although like the US periods and commas, I may catch a few later.

Because there is still several areas of this article that need to be improved, I have failed this article for GA. Please renominate this article when the suggested improvements have been made.

OK, basically done, I think (pending my finding all of the pre-reference spaces and US punctuation). I've left the references to "this article," which is standard operating procedure in English-language scientific papers. If an appropriate and non-awkward alternative is suggested, I'll go with that. Incidentally, I think some of these were FA fails rather than GA fails, but we might as well smooth the way to FA as much as possible. BrianTung 19:14, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

It's been a week or so, and I've seen no suggestion for an alternative to "this article", which I think is perfectly acceptable terminology. I am therefore resubmitting for GA--if this usage is still deemed objectionable, please suggest an alternative or "be bold". BrianTung 16:23, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

p.s. The coverage of facts in this article are very well done. And the prose are quite well-written too. I think once the improvements are made, the article can possibly go into FA.

Oidia (talk) 05:50, 5 September 2007 (UTC)