Wikipedia talk:Chinese interlanguage links

Naming of 'cn' and 'tw'

On an unrelated note, why call the different links 'cn' and 'tw'? Reminds me of politics... --Jiang, Talk 03:32, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Well, it is not a Wikipedian developer's invention. The chronology:

• ISO 639 states that Chinese language = zh
• ISO 3166-1 specifies that Mainland = cn; Republic of China = tw; HK = hk; Singapore = sg; Macau = mo
• RFC 1766 ("Tags for the Identification of Languages") combines 639 with 3166-1, resulting in five tags:
  • zh-cn
  • zh-tw
  • zh-sg
  • zh-hk
  • zh-mo

These were originally not used to mark trad/simpl, but to differentiate between localism of the same language. Their English parallels are easier to see. For example, en-ca, en-gb and en-nz mean that "color" is spelled as "colour"; but en-us spells it like "color". This is how they are still used in "Language Preferences" in most broswers (IE, Netscape, Mozilla...).

But somewhere down the way, somebody chose to make zh-cn the abbrev of simpli and zh-tw trad. And now, the use is stuck, and quite popular, if not very widespread in computer science. --Menchi 04:43, 7 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Since Wikipedia is still young, one should really try to use zh-trad/zh-simp, the -cn,-tw,-hk should be used to refer to variant on language, not on script. Is this "chinese inter language link" a kind of ad hoc hack?--pektiong 03:35, 16 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I agree, but simp means "stupid" -- which may not be very attractive to "simp" users. --Menchi (Talk)â 05:55, 16 Dec 2003 (UTC)

'Simp' does not mean "supid", IMO. Can anybody tell me when/who/how this "new" function is added to the wikipedia software? Is there any discussion "before" this new function is born? --pektiong 00:23, 17 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Somebody asked for it and I added it, maybe six months ago. If you don't like them, just use "zh". It all goes to the same place. --Brion 00:33, 17 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I think this is a good function. I am just want to know the history of thie change. --pektiong 17:40, 18 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I believe it was User:Formulax who asked. It just suddenly appeared. Even I, at the time very active in Chinese WP, and other Chinese admins had no idea how or who or what this occurred. (We got the why, and we agreed with it.) No, there was no discussion. --Menchi (Talk)â 00:46, 17 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I love this article! Really funny to read. Personally speaking, using "zh-cn" and "zh-tw" really reminds me of something political... Another problem is, I think the tags now "中文(简体)(Simplified Chinese)" are really ugly (with two brackets). Why not merge them together like "简体中文(Simplified Chinese)" and "繁體中文(Tranditional Chinese)" instead? --Samuel 02:59, 7 Jan 2004 (UTC)~

None of the other languages have english translations. The English labels take up too much space. "简体中文" and "繁體中文" (no English, maybe keep pinyin Zhongwen-S/T) should be enough.

Articles with the same cn/tw title will still have separate simplified/traditional texts. Clicking on them leads a reader to a disambiguation page. Why not do away with the zh entirely and skip linking to the disambiguation? --Jiang 02:13, 15 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Many years later, an off topic pedantic note on terminology: ISO 3166-1 states that China = cn; Taiwan, Province of China = tw; Hong Kong = hk; Singapore = sg; Macao = mo. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 10:16, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

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In general, is there a consensus that (zh-tw or zh-cn) preferable, or is (zh)? That is, if there is only a simplified version available, for instance, should I use zh-cn or zh?

PS - I agree with Jiang about ditching the English. - Nat Krause 12:31, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

It's always better to specify the version whenever possible. So if there's only a zh-cn, use zh-cn, not zn. --Jiang 21:11, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Page combination and auto-converstion in MediaWiki 1.4

In the past few months there has been an effort to combine the different versions of the same page on Chinese wikipedia, in preparation for the auto-converstion feature that is currently being tested in the MediaWiki 1.4 beta.

What this means is that for pages that already have two versions, contents are manually merged into one version (generally the one that has a longer history), and the other title became a redirect to the merged versions. For those that only has one version now, redirects are created as found. This will greatly reduce the amount of maintainence needed to keep two versions in sync, since almost all editors can only edit article in one version, though some can read both.

The standard interwiki bot is also changed (~Oct 2004) to handle the case where if the simplified and traditional is the same, it will remove the zh-cn and zh-tw link, and put in the unified zh link as well. Also, when I ran the bot on the Chinese wiki specifing the home language to be zh, it will make an entry into warning file to replace zh-cn or zh-tw with zh if there is only one version present.

So, the recommandation for linking should be changed, that if you are not sure which version it is, or if there is only one Chinese version (as in you can't find an link to the other version on Chinese wiki), the link to Chinese should be zh. --Vina 21:43, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)