User:Kowloonese
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An anonymous wikipedian using IP 63.192.137.xxx since first week of July 2001. Also appeared as many other IPs. Wish to stay anonymous, though the pseudonym may have already revealed too much.
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Wikipedia related opinions:
native text
I am a proponent of adding native text to article title terms of non-English origins, e.g. Yahweh (יהוה). Title terms shown in its original native spelling would help wikipedia users and researchers to eliminate ambiguity in transliteration and enable them to further their research using native sources. Native text is extremely instrumental in doing image search on Google even with no knowledge of the language. It is controversal to decide what is native to the article topic sometimes. In some situations, the decision is easy; in some, it is not. For example, Hanja is appropriate for the article on Kimchi while Kanji is appropriate for the article on Sushi. However, some wikipedians argue that Chữ nho & Chữ nôm are not appropriate for some Vietnamese articles despite the Vietnamese people used these Chinese text before their language was romanized. Multiple language text may be native to an article. For example, the board game GO is native to China, but the term GO is native to Japan. Though the game is also popular in Korea, in my opinion, Korean text is not native to the game of GO.
My philosophy is that native text should always be enclosed in parenthesis as a side note in the English wikipedia. Native text is necessary for the purpose of disambiguation of foreign-to-English transliteration. However, they interrupt the flow of reading in English. My rule of thumb is that any English reader should be able to read the text aloud as a valid English sentence. For example,
- Good: The Lord is also called Yahweh (יהוה). It is readable when anything within the parenthesis is omitted as just a side note.
- Bad: The Lord is also called יהוה. This sentence is unreadable by anyone who don't know Hebrew. This is an English encyclopedia, hence this is unacceptable.
Since native text is often disruptive to read even when enclosed in parenthesis, I usually remove them once the foreign term got an article on its own. Native text for "title term" is good. Native text for terms inside an article should be used as temporary place holders only.
Native text is okay in tables and lists because people don't usually read table or list entries as complete sentences.
one sentence per line
I prefer entering one sentence per line instead of merging the whole paragraph into one big blob. I argue that the web browser automatically joins these lines into paragraphs. It is not the author's business to worry about the paragraph layout. The time should be spent on the contents instead. The advantage of one line per sentence is better diff'ing when viewing the revision history of the article. This page is a living example of such practice. View the page history to see how good the diff is done compared to other pages. The revision history often fails to handle long paragraphs correctly. I have noticed some wikipedians took special efforts to revert what I did, but that is okay with me. In wikipedia, no one owns any article. If one has so much spare time to perform the browser's formatting task, it is his choice. (Wiki policy)
standardized Chinese name format
I had a debate with the wikipedia "policy makers" regarding the use of all capital letters in surnames which do not follow usual English convention, e.g. MAO Ze Dong or Martin LEE Chu Ming where MAO and LEE are family names. They are not placed at the end of the name according to English convention. It would be an overkill to standardize on the name format such as "BUSH, George W." which is unnatural in the English language. I gave up on the debate because it was hopeless to win on issue hinged on matter of preferences.
I proposed that individual names should be presented in a manner the person is called in their native country. Since each culture presents people's names in different order, it would be necessary to use capital letters to highlight a surname when it does not follow English convention. e.g. George W. Bush (standard English format), MAO Ze Dong (standard name format for English publication in China), Leslie CHEUNG Kwok Wing (standard name format in Hong Kong) etc. Even the CIA World Factbook uses the all capital letters convention to address the multicultural needs. I argued that Wikipedia is not international savvy to stick to a rule that is good only for English.
See more background information in family name. (Wiki policy)
Pinyin, not Wade-Giles
I am a strong proponent of using pinyin over Wade-Giles. See m:Use_pinyin_not_Wade-Giles.
use of Chinese and Japanese words in the English language and Wikipedia
I have noticed a biased use of Japanese words over Chinese words in the English language. The strong bias is also clearly reflected in the Wikipedia especially on what are chosen for the article titles. The Japanese successfully added countless Japanese terminologies into the English language. Relatively fewer Chinese words were accepted by the English speaking population. The only exception was probably martial arts terminologies. Ironically even the term wushu failed to take its place as Chinese martial arts. The word kung fu is kind of an exception.
When a Westerner asks "What is this drink?", the Japanese would answer "Sake". When a Westerner asks the same question about a similar drink, the Chinese would answer "Chinese rice wine". The word sake did not need to be in the English language because it could very well be Japanese rice wine, but somehow sake is more accepted than Japanese rice wine. Likewise, Judo could be called Japanese wrestling, Kendo could be called Japanese fencing etc.
There are many similar concepts in both Chinese and Japanese culture. However, the Chinese concepts always named "Chinese this" and "Chinese that", but the Japanese equivalent concepts often get their unique names into the English Language. For example:
| generic English names for Chinese concepts | specific Japanese names for similar concepts |
| Chinese characters instead of Hanzi | Kanji instead of Japanese characters |
| Chinese abacus | Soroban |
| Chopsticks | Hashi |
| Chinese poem | Haiku |
| Chinese wine | Sake |
| edible seaweed | Nori |
| Chinese chess | Shogi |
| Chinese drum | Taiko |
| various mythical creatures Chinese dragon, Chinese lion, Chinese phoenix, Fox spirit etc. | Kirin, kitsune, tanuki, tengu etc. |
| Chinese opera | kabuki |
| Chinese comic | Manga |
| Chinese cartoon | Anime |
| Chinese carp | Koi |
| Chinese American | Issei, Nisei, Sansei |
Some Japanese terms are totally unnecessary in the English language. For example, issei, nisei and sansei literally mean first generation, second generation and third generation respectively when referring to Japanese Americans. Shouldn't the terms 1st, 2nd, 3nd generation Japanese Americans be more descriptive than the unnecessarily arcane terms?
On the flip side of things, some English terms for Chinese concepts are totally inappropriate. For example, Chinese dragon and Western dragon have nothing in common; same problem with the Chinese lion and pheonix. These deserve their own unique names more than just Chinese this and Chinese that. Chinese words can barge their way into the English language like Japanese did if every Chinese person stops desperately finding a Western word to describe a Chinese concept. Those unnecessary mappings and erroneous translations were the main reasons why there were so much misunderstanding and confusions. A lung is not a dragon, then why call it Chinese dragon? A shi is not a lion, then stop calling it Chinese lion. The English language has so many loanwords from around the world. It probably can take in a lot more. The large number of Japanese loanwords is a proof that the Westerners are smart enough to learn new foreign concepts without matching with the old and familiar.
Though the root cause of these linguistic problem did not come from wikipedia, but the wikipedian article titles are promoting many unnecessary Japanese "contaminations" into the English language. Some examples of unnecessary esoteric wikipedian article titles include but not limited to issei, nisei, sansei, ie etc.
My objection is not against the use of loanwords nor the tying of foreign conceptions into Western terminologies. A balance is needed somewhere. My rant is mainly about two inconsistent approaches used in wikipedia where the bias is clearly, obsessively and unproportionally leaning towards Japanese loanwords to a point where some of these loanwords are just unnecessary. But on the other hand, Chinese terminologies didn't get their well deserved loanwords. It is like starving one to overfeed the other.
Contributions to Wikipedia:
I mostly contributed to Chinese related topics.
I have added native text to many Chinese and Japanese related articles.
starters
I have started many new articles. Due to page conversion from the old Wiki system to the new, and some page renaming and merging, some revision history was lost. As a result, I wasn't able to recall all my contributions. The list below is far from complete. It contains fully written articles and stubs that later filled by other wikipedians. e.g. American Chinese cuisine, Anglo-Chinese College, Beijing, Boba milk tea, Cantonese, Cantonese cuisine, Cantopop, Chiuchow cuisine, Chinese Buddhist cuisine, Chinese film history, Chinese five elements, Chinese medicine, Chopsticks, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Many stubs for Chinese Dynasties, Double steaming, Food therapy, Grand Teton National Park, G11n, Hang Seng, High tech baking, Hot salt frying, Hot sand frying, How to tell the origin of an accent which later became Non-native pronunciations of English, Hunan cuisine, Jet Li, Jiu, Li Po, Macau, Min Guo, Myriad, Nanjing, Nutella, Republic of China, Shi, Sir Run Run Shaw, Sleep apnea, Soul food, Steaming, Stir frying, Stock market index, Szechuan cuisine, Shanghai cuisine, Taiwan Capitalization Weighted Stock Index, Tung Chao Yung, Vacuum flask cooking, Vera Wang, Wu Xia film, Wing Chun, Zbig Rybczynski, Zhang Heng, Zhang Xue-liang, etc.
major edits
I have contributed major addition to many existing articles, e.g. Abacus, Chinese astrology, Chinese calendar, Chinese numerals, Floating point, Hot air balloon, I Ching, Shooting, Zhuyin, etc.
alternate identities
I didn't start using this identity until Nov 23, 2001. Besides, I don't always log in before typing, and also my log in session often expired during an edit, so most of my contributions are listed under various IP addresses. Since IP addresses were dynamically assigned by my ISP, it is possible that the same IP was used by another wikipedian though very unlikely. The IP addresses in the some contribution lists contain a wild card xxx, i.e. multiple contributors in the same subnet may have folded into the same list.
The contributions in the following lists were mostly mine as
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date range |
duration |
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63.192.137.xxx (http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=63.192.137.xxx&limit=500&offset=0) |
2001/07/11 - 2002/02/25 |
(7 months) |
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47.83.107.xxx (http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=47.83.107.xxx&limit=500&offset=0) |
2001/08/22 - 2001/11/12 |
(3 months) |
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24.4.254.xxx (http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=24.4.254.xxx&limit=500&offset=0) |
2001/09/01 - 2001/12/11 |
(3 months) |
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kowloonese (http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=kowloonese&limit=500&offset=0) |
2001/11/23 - present |
(on-going) |
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63.192.137.21 (http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=63.192.137.21&limit=500&offset=0) |
2002/02/11 - 2002/05/03 |
(3 months) |
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12.234.76.230 (http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=12.234.76.230&limit=500&offset=0) |
2002/09/27 - 2002/11/03 |
(2 months) |
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12.234.68.204 (http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=12.234.68.204&limit=500&offset=0) |
2002/12/06 - 2002/12/20 |
(1 month) |
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12.234.73.11 (http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=12.234.73.11&limit=500&offset=0) |
2003/01/04 - present |
(on-going) |
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67.117.82.5 (http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=67.117.82.5&limit=500&offset=0) |
2003/03/11 - present |
(on-going) |
I've just discovered today (July 10, 2004) that I made it to #445 in the Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by number of edits with 1298 edits. The list showed that my rank dropped by 7 position, which means I was once at #438. Due to the large number of IDs that I used over the years, my contribution is under-counted. I would have moved up the list if I could merge all my edits attributed to other IDs.
Resources
Wikipedia:Public domain image resources