Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2014-12/Making simplified Chinese soft-redirect to traditional Chinese

Making simplified Chinese soft-redirect to traditional Chinese

• Voting on: Making simplified Chinese soft-redirect to traditional Chinese. Thus, hosting definitions and other content in traditional Chinese entries, and no longer in simplified Chinese entries.
• Vote starts: 00:00, 26 December 2014 (UTC)
• Vote ends: 23:59, 25 January 2015 (UTC)
  • Vote extended to 23:59, 28 February 2015 (UTC) --Dan Polansky (talk) 18:21, 25 January 2015 (UTC)
• Vote created: Dan Polansky (talk) 16:31, 20 December 2014 (UTC)
• Discussion:

  Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2014/December#New changes to Chinese entries

  Wiktionary talk:Votes/pl-2014-12/Making simplified Chinese soft-redirect to traditional Chinese

Support

1. Support. Altthough simplified is the standard in PRC and Singapore, I vote for centralization of Chinese entries. It can be one or the other, not both. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 04:27, 26 December 2014 (UTC)
2. Support Wyang (talk) 22:11, 27 December 2014 (UTC)
3. Support Centralisation of data will greatly facilitate the work of editors and the parsing of chinese entries for reuse of wiktionary data.
   For the problem of readers only interested in simplified being invaded by traditionnal in examples, traditionnal will be dispalyed anyway in entries which are both simplified and traditionnal. Keeping Simplified and traditionnal separated don't solve this problem and will create inconsistency in the display of chinese entries.Meihouwang (talk) 09:17, 28 December 2014 (UTC)

   There is a lot of opposition on this vote. Maybe we should instead do a vote on centralising data in traditional page and displaying definitions in simplified page with a template. This way we will get most of the opposing people on our side. I read some people said that it is not technicaly possible but I have already parsed wiktionary data to use in a chinese dictionnary that I am programming. I was able to store definitions in my database sorted by Simplified/Traditionnal/Pinyin using {{zh-hanzi-box}} to know in which Simp/Trad pair the definitions should be stored. Character with several Simp/Trad pair have several {{zh-hanzi-box}} (At least in the entries I edited). I think displaying definitions from traditionnal page on simplified page should be less complicated than this. But I have no experience with Wiktionary scripting so I might be wrong. Meihouwang (talk) 16:09, 9 January 2015 (UTC)

4. Support Avoids duplication of content, which is a scourge of this dictionary (especially for non-English languages). Ideally what we would do is automagically replicate the contents of the traditional entry at the simplified page, with all traditional forms converted to simplified. But that is not technically feasible right now. This, that and the other (talk) 11:32, 7 January 2015 (UTC)
5. Support DTLHS (talk) 17:21, 8 January 2015 (UTC)
6. Support Reducing duplication is good, and makes Wiktionary easier to manage. I call upon the opposers to be more constructive, and propose an alternative idea that would reduce the workload of managing Chinese entries in another way. Voting oppose to solutions doesn't make the problem go away. —CodeCat 17:24, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

   An alternative idea that would reduce the workload has been put forward and its is to make traditional Chinese make soft-redirect to simplified. Why are people to fast to dismiss that? It has been claimed that the other way is easier to maintain for contributors but how much more work is it really to make it the other way? Simplified is used far more than traditional so if we can make the simplified form the lemma that must be the right thing to do. Kinamand (talk) 18:40, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

7. Support --Vahag (talk) 00:24, 12 January 2015 (UTC)
8. Support --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 01:42, 12 January 2015 (UTC)
9. Support I do not agree that a soft direct makes it look like an implicit claim that one of the two is more correct. Everyone knows that the traditional form came first. It is true that there is no one-to-one correspondence between simplified and traditional, but it is reasonably close. Simplified 后 = Traditional 後 (hòu, "after") and 后 (hòu, "queen"). The Chinese and Japanese characters (and their categorization) are extremely complex, and it actually requires more knowledge to make use of the Wiktionary offerings of these languages. Splitting 后 into 後 and 后 will be a relative minor hurdle for users. If we do not use redirects, simplified 后 becomes doubly complex, since it has to define both meanings (and sometimes different pronunciations), as well as different etymologies. —Stephen ^(Talk) 03:48, 13 January 2015 (UTC)

   Good example, Stephen! I have just made a split of two etymologies for 後／后 (hòu) and 后 (hòu). Maintaining in sync complicated entries like 惡／恶 (è) is quite complicated. Editors have been focussing on one or the other form. The unified approach allows to treat both forms equally, without making one form or the other better, literally. That's the approach taken by the majority of electronic or book dictionaries. It's impossible to centralise the contents while having duplicate entries. Entries get out of sync momentarily. Eventually, it may be possible to include the contents of the traditional entry in the simplified one. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 04:40, 13 January 2015 (UTC)

   • In 后#Chinese, I see structure no more complex than in sound#English: multiple etymologies, no rocket science. --Dan Polansky (talk) 19:13, 13 January 2015 (UTC)

   Stephen mentioned 後／后 (hòu) and 后 (hòu) because of their non-trivial simplified/traditional conversions. They needed attention, so I fixed them. For relative complexity I meant 惡／恶 (è), which now has a list of derivations in both trad. and simpl. forms, previously only in simplified form in 恶 only. The traditional entry didn't have derivations. Now it has. Note that the entry has usage examples and derived forms IN BOTH TRADITIONAL AND SIMPLIFIED. This is how the Chinese entries are meant to look with the new structure. No discrimination, the only disadvantage is having to click through from to traditional to simplified. There is no problem with sound or many other English or Chinese entries with multiple etymologies. However, there are problems with various revisions of color and colour. One thing that commonly quickly makes them out of sync is translation tables or lack thereof. Template {{trans-see}} is used for that to avoid duplication of contents. Yes, one can copy/paste from one another but how long will it be before they get out of sync? {{zh-see}} is meant to link to the Chinese entry, which contains info in both character sets (unlike Serbo-Croatian, for example, which only display the other form in the header). We didn't create the rationale for this vote but the change is not meant to make one character set better than the other, no. It's all about centralising the contents. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 21:48, 13 January 2015 (UTC)

   As the reader can see in this revision of 恶, section Mandarin, there were derived terms in simplied script before Atitarev removed them (diff); his solution is to have a mixed table of compounds as in 惡#Chinese, where the list now mixes both simplified and traditional. The first four items look like this:

   • 惡心／恶心 (èxīn)
   • 惡霸／恶霸 (èbà)
   • 惡報／恶报 (èbào)
   • 惡變／恶变 (èbiàn)

   The reader who wants to only deal with simplified script will no longer have the option, and the same is true of the traditional script; both scripts will be presented at the same time in example sentences and derived term lists.

   The reason I do not undo those non-consensual changes by Atitarev and others is above all that I do not want to get into a revert war, and that I prefer the civilized methods of government exemplified by this vote. --Dan Polansky (talk) 22:12, 13 January 2015 (UTC)

   Support. Traditional characteristics contain more meaningful information for the words or terms of the culture. This is what our dictionary really needs.--Wildcursive (talk) 15:05, 18 January 2015 (UTC)

   Vote struck as invalid per policy. — Keφr 21:07, 18 January 2015 (UTC)

10. Support Whether it's a preference of one script over another is simply one's value judgment at work. To me, if it help improve editing, that's all that matters. Jamesjiao → ^{T ◊ C} 22:47, 19 January 2015 (UTC)
11. Weak support This is not a hard redirect and can reduce a lot of duplicate entries which can not be synchronized. However:
    1. Only redirect words which is not used by Japanese;
    2. Do not redirect character. They contains non-translingual data.

    This problem will ultimately be resolved by Wiktionary support of Wikidata (phab:T986).--GZWDer (talk) 15:10, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

Oppose

Oppose. Bad idea! 173.89.236.187 04:09, 26 December 2014 (UTC)

Anonymous accounts can comment but they can't vote. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 04:27, 26 December 2014 (UTC)

1. Oppose --Dan Polansky (talk) 10:01, 26 December 2014 (UTC) Making simplified Chinese entries mere soft redirects (featuring no definitions) would create a significant inconvenience for those readers who are interested in simplified Chinese writing and not in traditional Chinese writing. Simplified Chinese is currently the prevalent form in the mainland China as per W:Simplified Chinese characters. Having definitions in both simplified and traditional Chinese entries, as has been English Wiktionary practice for many years, creates duplication of definitions, which I admit to be a disadvantage for maintenance; it is a cost of making the dictionary easy to use for the readers. Those editors who want to focus e.g. only on traditional Chinese entries should be allowed to do so, without being chastised for not creating simplified Chinese entries at the same time. As an example of similar practice, we now have definitions in both Latin and Cyrillic Serbo-Croatian entries, which is a duplication (mačka, мачка). As a further inconvenience of soft-redirects as envisioned at Wiktionary:Beer_parlour/2014/December#New_changes_to_Chinese_entries in paragraph "The problem is not about having or not wanting to create ...", usage examples would newly feature both simplified and traditional Chinese (probably along with Pinyin), becoming even more busy with information that the reader is not interested in: the reader with the interest in simplified Chinese does not necessarily want to see traditional Chinese. --Dan Polansky (talk) 10:12, 26 December 2014 (UTC)

   Don't forget Malay entry versions in both Jawi and Rumi. (I'm not voting, though; but if I were forced to do so, I could abstain, right?) --Lo Ximiendo (talk) 10:26, 26 December 2014 (UTC)

   On the other hand, all those simplified Chinese edits are clogging up the Short pages. --Lo Ximiendo (talk) 17:20, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

   (Oppose vote retracted due to not having enough contributions here for it to be valid. I use Wiktionary very often, but apparently I don’t contribute enough…) A redirect, whether soft or hard, from simplified to traditional or vice versa, looks like an implicit claim that one of the two is more correct than the other. This happens regardless of whether making that claim is intentional or not. Since it is not the case that either of the two types of character is more correct than the other, it seems clear to me that redirecting from one to the other is a bad idea. In addition, as stated above, a soft redirect like this (as opposed to a hard redirect) causes significant inconvenience to anyone who commonly looks up words in simplified Chinese. The analogy to Latin vs. Cyrillic Serbo‐Croatian entries is an excellent point too. With regard to the point about maintaining separate entries being too much work, I have an alternative suggestion which, if properly thought through and implemented, could have the same effect of reducing the workload without the major disadvantages of a redirect: For the information that would otherwise be duplicated (which in some cases is an entire entry, in other cases only part of an entry), move that information to a template that is transcluded onto the pages that would otherwise duplicate that information. That way the relevant information is visible everywhere it should be, and only needs maintaining from one location. MTC (talk) 09:06, 2 January 2015 (UTC)

   I am afraid your vote is invalid per policy: not enough edits in content namespaces. — Keφr 18:43, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

   Ah, that’s a shame. In that case, I have re‐indented it so that the comment is still there while the votes are counted correctly. MTC (talk) 13:40, 13 January 2015 (UTC)

2. Oppose as far as I know there is no one-to-one correspondence between simplified and traditional Chinese, i. e. one simplified term may map to multiple traditional terms. This makes the proposal infeasible because readers won't be able to guess the correct form if they're unfamiliar with traditional Chinese, as residents of the PRC and Singapore tend to be. -- Liliana • 12:36, 4 January 2015 (UTC)
3. Oppose Since simplified is use far more often than traditional I believe that people using Wiktionary will find it odd and backward with redirects to traditional Chinese. The argument is that it is easier for people writing templates to use the traditional form as lemma but how much extra work is it really to do it with simplified as lemma? Kinamand (talk) 09:22, 8 January 2015 (UTC)
4. Oppose, though not strongly. Each should have its own entry explaining the characteristics unique to it. bd2412 T 16:54, 8 January 2015 (UTC)
5. Oppose (strongly) When a page is correct and helpful to readers, its contents should never be removed, even to avoid replication. This should be a strong principle of the project. One of the reasons is that most readers want to find what they look for immediately (statistics show that each additional click needed makes the probability of a donation to the Foundation 30% less). Another reason is neutrality: as both writing styles are used, they must be addressed the same way. A third reason is that it would tend to discourage editors preferring simplified characters, and fewer editors is something bad for the project. Soft redirects might be used as a first step, but it must be allowed to convert these soft redirects to full pages. @CodeCat: an alternative idea that would reduce the workload of managing Chinese entries: allow editors to contribute to the pages they wish. This way, there will be more editors, making it easier to make the project more complete. Anyway, strictly speaking, there is no workload, everybody contributes as much as they wish, not more, and we are not in a hurry. Lmaltier (talk) 22:40, 10 January 2015 (UTC) I see Splitting 后 into 後 and 后 will be a relative minor hurdle for users.. But priority must be given to users, not to editors. Slowly but surely, this dictionary could become the perfect dictionary for users. Lmaltier (talk) 19:20, 13 January 2015 (UTC)

   We could compare this issue to two other ones: 1. the typographic issue of s/long s, ct grouped as a single character in ols books, or capitalized words (where/Where), where we create a single entry, and this is quite normal. 2. the existence of several scripts for the same language (e.g. Serbian), where we create one entry by script, and this is quite normal. I feel that the simplied Chinese is felt as a different ideographic script, just like Cyrillic is a different alphabetic script, and this is confirmed by the absence of a general one-to-one correspondence with the traditional Chinese script. This should be sufficient for creating both complete entries. I'm afraid that some editors want to promote one of the scripts. Lmaltier (talk) 06:56, 9 February 2015 (UTC)

   Oppose Although simplified Chinese is widely used, I don't think traditional Chinese should be redirected to it unconditionally, and the opposite direction of redirection is a little confusing. "Who-redirect-to-who" problem is always a controversial issue, and I think that it can be determined by who create the entry first. If it is created with the title in traditional Chinese, the later simplified Chinese version should redirect to the former entry (if the meaning of the word is same), and vice versa.--Snowkylin (talk) 14:34, 16 January 2015 (UTC)

   Unfortunately, your vote is invalid per the first two points of our voting policy. See at the top of WT:VOTE. --Vahag (talk) 14:52, 16 January 2015 (UTC)

   Oh, I just find that minutes ago, my fault. Edit count is not universal, what a pity :-( --Snowkylin (talk) 14:58, 16 January 2015 (UTC)

   You can't vote in China, you can't vote in Wiktionary. Poor disenfranchised fellow :-( --Vahag (talk) 15:10, 16 January 2015 (UTC)

   The opinion that citizen in China can't vote is quite incorrect, just like the opinion that users in English Wiktionary can vote. I do not know much about English Wiktionary, and maybe you do not know much about China either, seems that it's a tie game. :-)--Snowkylin (talk) 08:53, 17 January 2015 (UTC)

   I hear you, man. I too was born in a communist country. Western liberal media misrepresents our vibrant democracies. --Vahag (talk) 09:29, 17 January 2015 (UTC)

   Oppose, the same as above. --LNDDYL (talk) 06:44, 17 January 2015 (UTC)

   I'm afraid your vote doesn't count per voting policy #2 (you need at least 50 edits by the start time of the vote). --Vahag (talk) 09:29, 17 January 2015 (UTC)

6. Oppose. — Keφr 10:41, 18 January 2015 (UTC)

   @Kephir Could you explain your reasons, please? As a programmer, how would make (a rather trivial - single etymology, no variant pronunciations) entry 笔#Chinese to have the same information as 筆#Chinese without duplicating the contents? --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 03:56, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

   I would duplicate the contents. I simply find this preferable to the alternative. Despite all reassurances to the contrary, this obviously will create a preference for one orthography over the other. In itself, it might not necessarily be a problem. But given that (as I am told) there is no one-to-one correspondence between the two, this will necessitate creating some kind of disambiguation cluttering up entries, which are cluttered enough already. Chinese entries are already very confusing to read with all their nonstandard L3s and content splits between Translingual, Chinese and topolect L2, and I believe this proposal will only add more to the confusion for little benefit. And never call me a programmer. — Keφr 12:00, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

   I'm sorry if "programmer" was an offence to you. It wasn't meant to be. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 13:19, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

   Oppose Amphineko (talk) 12:10, 31 January 2015 (UTC)

   Your vote is invalid per the first two points of our voting policy. See at the top of WT:VOTE. --Vahag (talk) 12:50, 31 January 2015 (UTC)

Abstain

1. Abstain Byfserag (talk) 22:18, 18 January 2015 (UTC)

   You are not eligible to vote anyway. You might as well not bothered. — Keφr 12:01, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

   Your vote has been struck out as invalid as you have not yet made a single contribution to this wiki. Jamesjiao → ^{T ◊ C} 22:49, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

2. Abstain until there is solution for some problems of this action. Firstly, characters who are both simplified and traditional need to have another format. Secondly, characters who are neither simplified nor traditional, but a varients of another character instead, would have to be considered also. Thirdly, some Japanese kanji actually use the simplified form of a character, making the derived terms section troubling. Fourthly, one simplified character may correspond to two traiditional character, and a short definitional would be required for them to be distinguishable. Including definition would make the entry almost same as before. --kc_kennylau (talk) 07:35, 21 January 2015 (UTC)

Decision

Passes: 11:6:02 (support:oppose:abstain). --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 19:23, 7 February 2015 (UTC)