Template talk:Nihongo/Archive 5

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extra parameter disabled?

Someone has disabled extra= (although extra2= still displays).

I noticed the case of

{{nihongo|'''Yamaguchi Hitomi'''|山口 瞳||extra=November 3, 1923 – August 30, 1995}}

rendering as

"Yamaguchi Hitomi (山口 瞳)

without the dates of birth/death. Was this due to Trappist the monk who made a recent change, or does it dater earlier?--Kiyoweap (talk) 10:18, 29 December 2019 (UTC)

Yeah, me. Fixed, I think:

{{nihongo|'''Yamaguchi Hitomi'''|山口 瞳||extra=November 3, 1923 – August 30, 1995}} → Yamaguchi Hitomi (山口 瞳, November 3, 1923 – August 30, 1995)

—Trappist the monk (talk) 11:55, 29 December 2019 (UTC)

Feature request: ruby text

It would be nice to have the kanji with a hiragana ruby text (furigana), or Chinese characters with a bopomofo ruby text, especially for obsolete/historical characters and other standard uses, many very applicable to an encyclopedia. HLHJ (talk) 06:21, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

Works:

{{nihongo|''subete''|{{Ruby-ja|全|すべ}}て||extra=translation: all, everything}} → subete (全（すべ）て, translation: all, everything)

I shall be using this. Thanks to User:Opencooper for the suggestion! HLHJ (talk) 01:27, 22 February 2020 (UTC)

I would note that the first positional parameter is for English (see the template's documentation) and that 'subete' is not English so perhaps the more correct for of your example template is:

{{nihongo||{{Ruby-ja|全|すべ}}て|subete|extra=translation: all, everything}} → subete (全（すべ）て, translation: all, everything)

Visually, the two appear to have the same rendering but under the hood, they are quite different; yours first:

• ''subete''<span style="font-weight: normal"> (<span title="Japanese-language text"><span lang="ja">'"`UNIQ--templatestyles-0000000B-QINU`"'<ruby lang="ja">全<rp>（</rp><rt>すべ</rt><rp>）</rp></ruby>て</span></span>, translation: all, everything)</span>
• <span title="Hepburn transliteration"><i lang="ja-Latn">subete</i></span><span style="font-weight: normal"> (<span title="Japanese-language text"><span lang="ja">'"`UNIQ--templatestyles-0000000D-QINU`"'<ruby lang="ja">全<rp>（</rp><rt>すべ</rt><rp>）</rp></ruby>て</span></span>, translation: all, everything)</span>

—Trappist the monk (talk) 01:38, 22 February 2020 (UTC)

Thanks, Trappist the monk! I've editing Shōji, so it may sometimes be a bit of a judgement call as to which to use, but it's a useful distinction. HLHJ (talk) 23:29, 22 February 2020 (UTC)

Comment: The use of Ruby has been discussed before (sorry, please look in the archives if interested), and the consensus was that it should be avoided except in very special cases. One fundamental reason is that it is incompatible with English typesetting. Japanese characters are already the 'wrong' shape; they need to be about 1.5 times the height of Roman letters to be on the right scale, and adding even more height is unwieldy. And anyway so-called "Ruby" text is simply not an orthographical convention of English, and therefore does not belong. Imaginatorium (talk) 06:59, 23 June 2020 (UTC)

Display of "Hepburn"

Notified: WP:JAPAN, WP:ANIME. — Goszei (talk) 22:53, 17 May 2020 (UTC)

... the real problem is wasting so much space and attention on the link to Hepburn in the first place. It's our only default romanization and should just be given after the characters in italics with no link at all: Bob (Japanese: 漢字, Bōbu). Another more elegant solution is used in Russian articles: use a small-text letter with a link for the curious: Bob (Japanese: 漢字, h Bōbu). — LlywelynII 04:22, 12 September 2019 (UTC)

I read this comment from @LlywelynII: above, and I wanted to start a discussion about it. I agree with him that the link to Hepburn in lead=yes is too prominent. I see a few potential options (I am showing off proposals for lead=no and lead=yes here):
① Status quo, no changes.

Bob (漢字, Bōbu) and Bob (Japanese: 漢字, Hepburn: Bōbu)

② Change lead=yes as proposed by Llywelyn.

Bob (漢字, Bōbu) and Bob (Japanese: 漢字, Bōbu)

③ Change lead=yes and add a third option, i.e. lead=hepburn.

Bob (漢字, Bōbu) and Bob (Japanese: 漢字, Bōbu) and Bob (Japanese: 漢字, Hepburn: Bōbu)

④ Maintain lead=yes and add a third option, i.e. lead=nohepburn.

Bob (漢字, Bōbu) and Bob (Japanese: 漢字, Hepburn: Bōbu) and Bob (Japanese: 漢字, Bōbu)

⑤ Adopt the alternate linking style proposed by Llywelyn, or add a third option for it like ③ or ④.

Bob (漢字, Bōbu) and Bob (Japanese: 漢字, h Bōbu)

Personally, I favor ③ for reasons of simplicity, consistency with other major language templates, and reducing existing lead clutter without having to make mass edits. Unlike Chinese-related articles that often need to display several romanization styles due to varying dialects pronouncing the same characters (see Template:Lang-zh: Cantonese Jyutping, Hokkien Pe̍h-ōe-jī, Bopomofo, etc.), we use Modified Hepburn in all cases, as prescribed by MOS:JAPAN. Opinions? — Goszei (talk) 02:52, 14 May 2020 (UTC)

Option 3 would be my favourite, though I'd also be fine with 2. bamse (talk) 08:33, 15 May 2020 (UTC)

I prefer Option 3, it's modular and decent. «ias!|,,.|^usbk» 11:52, 21 May 2020 (UTC)

Sorry, but I can make no sense of this at all. Who is "Bob"? What is the example supposed to show? Even in real examples, it is often not clear what the relationship between the bits is, since people insist on assuming that if we say "English", or "Kanji", or "Japanese" or "Romaji" it is just obvious what these are. I just came across a good example where the lean mean version (no "Hepburn" for example, which I generally favour) is somehow not very clear: Densha de GO! (電車でGO!, "Go By Train"). This surely needs a "lit." or similar. Imaginatorium (talk) 04:33, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

@Imaginatorium: "Bob" is simply an arbitrary example to show off my proposed changes to the template. In your example, there is no need for a Hepburn trasnscription because the common English title for the subject is the transcription. There are however some examples that require all four fields: English name (kanji, transcrption, lit. "translation"). My proposed changes above only concern the linking of "Hepburn", do you have an opinion on this topic? — Goszei (talk) 08:18, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

Firstly, I think it really helps to use plausible examples. This one is so artificial ("meaningless", "wrong", whatever) it hurts to look at it. And your comment on my (not particularly good) article is not strictly true: the hepburn romanisation would be densha de gō. But anyway, in general I think writing "Hepburn" does not help the general reader, particularly since there is only one system is general wide use, and WP always uses this. However, I also think that there may well be cases in which something else is applicable: looking at "Bob", I can't even say "Well, it's obviously OK in this case", because this isn't a case. Imaginatorium (talk) 15:02, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

I see nothing wrong with the current format. It's important to have some kind of link to Hepburn romanization, otherwise how is a reader supposed to figure out what the text represents? Linking only to Japanese language will not help them there.

In Russian, Wikipedia uses its own system which doesn't correspond exactly to any other standard system; while I think they should link to that page or a similar one explaining exactly how it's romanized, they simply link to Romanization of Russian, which is okay. However, for Japanese we use exactly modified Hepburn, with no further changes, thus calling it "Hepburn" and linking to that article is the most useful for readers, telling them exactly how it was romanized and providing them the information they need to understand it. --Bigpeteb (talk) 19:54, 29 May 2020 (UTC)

@Goszei: As someone who uses these templates a lot as of late, my preference is ③. Psiĥedelisto (talk • contribs) ^{please always ping!} 03:20, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

Discussion at WT:JAPAN#On the italicization of foreign-language song titles

 You are invited to join the discussion at WT:JAPAN#On the italicization of foreign-language song titles. Psiĥedelisto (talk • contribs) 01:07, 28 May 2020 (UTC)

Revising my "Hepburn" display proposal

Notified: WP:JAPAN, WP:ANIME, Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Japan-related articles — Goszei (talk) 05:55, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

This is a (hopefully more clear) restatement of my proposal above. Pinging for comment @Psiĥedelisto @LlywelynII, Bamse, I'm Aya Syameimaru!, Imaginatorium, and Bigpeteb:
Please post which new proposal that you support, as I want to build consensus around this new formulation (for those who commented on my old post: the old Proposal ③ is the same as new Proposal ①). Please scroll down and also consider Imaginatorium's proposal, for which I have made a second table. — Goszei (talk) 00:39, 24 June 2020 (UTC)

	default, with no parameters	with lead=yes parameter	with a new parameter (i.e. lead=hepburn/nohepburn)
Current	One Piece (ワンピース, Wan Pīsu)	One Piece (Japanese: ワンピース, Hepburn: Wan Pīsu)
Proposal ①	One Piece (ワンピース, Wan Pīsu)	One Piece (Japanese: ワンピース, Wan Pīsu)	One Piece (Japanese: ワンピース, Hepburn: Wan Pīsu)
Proposal ②	One Piece (ワンピース, Wan Pīsu)	One Piece (Japanese: ワンピース, Hepburn: Wan Pīsu)	One Piece (Japanese: ワンピース, Wan Pīsu)
Proposal ③	One Piece (ワンピース, Wan Pīsu)	One Piece (Japanese: ワンピース, h Wan Pīsu)

Justification: I think that there should be a way to hide the display of "Hepburn" when the lead=yes parameter is used. For a vast majority of readers, I think that it is evident that what is displayed after the Japanese text is a rendering of the text in Latin characters, and that the particular variety of romanization is not very relevant. Linking to the article for Hepburn romanization in every lead only serves as a distraction from the subject of the lead sentence. Even for readers who are interested in the method used, having a link to Hepburn re-appear in the lead of every article is not helpful. WP:ROMAJI states: People who care about other romanization systems are knowledgeable enough to look after themselves. I believe a similar principle applies here: those who are particularly interested in romanization can research the various systems for Japanese, but our goal in the lead sentences for articles about unrelated topics is to give a fair indication of pronunciation to the intended audience of English speakers.

I primarily edit WP:ANIME-related articles, where the lead=yes parameter is in widespread use. I support Proposal ① (shifting my support to Imaginatorium's proposal, see below), because it would immediately REMOVE the display of "Hepburn" from the articles that use it, while retaining the functionality if needed by adding a new parameter (I suggest lead=hepburn). Proposal ② is similar, except that it would KEEP the display of "Hepburn" for all the articles that currently use lead=yes, and add an "opt-out method" with a new parameter (I suggest lead=nohepburn). Proposal ③ is a sort of "compromise"; it keeps a link to Hepburn romanization, but minimized to limit distraction; the display specifics would be another matter of discussion (h Wan Pīsu or H Wan Pīsu or Wan Pīsu^?, etc.) I'm interested in hearing your opinions. — Goszei (talk) 03:05, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

Comments

@Goszei: As far as I can tell, new proposal ① is equal to old proposal ③. So I support ①. I didn't find your example difficult to understand, maybe because, as a programmer, foo, bar, and baz do not phase me. Psiĥedelisto (talk • contribs) ^{please always ping!} 03:57, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

Oh, and by the way Goszei, I don't get why you just don't wrap it in a {{transl}}, as in, {{transl|ja|Hepburn|Wan Pīsu}} (Wan Pīsu). This way, "Hepburn transliteration" is shown on hover. Psiĥedelisto (talk • contribs) ^{please always ping!} 04:03, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

@Psiĥedelisto: That's a good point: the Nihongo template currently uses the {{transl}} wrapper, and I've updated my proposals above to use it as well. — Goszei (talk) 04:26, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

This proposal looks clearer now. ias!@,,.yy 04:16, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

I'm supporting Proposal 1, a good compromise. ias!@,,.yy 04:44, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

@Goszei: I think you missed an important word when you quoted WP:ROMAJI, which I'll highlight: People who care about other romanization systems are knowledgeable enough to look after themselves. I would agree with that; someone who knows about Nihon-shiki or Kunrei-shiki and for some reason wants to know how to romanize the Japanese text in those can use the appropriate articles and figure it out on their own.

However, for the average reader, we have no idea how they got to any particular article, and we have no idea if they know anything about the Japanese language. We don't know if they speak English fluently. (Keep in mind, Hepburn is made to be intuitive to speakers of English, not necessarily other languages, however a lot of people on the Internet read English Wikipedia rather than one in a language they know better because it's more complete.) We don't know how they might try to pronounce foreign words; British speakers in particular are likely to read Fuji-san and pronounce it to rhyme with "hat" or "pan". The only way to teach them the correct way to pronounce it is to link to a page which provides that explanation. That's the whole point of having a lead=yes parameter. Removing the text and the link to Hepburn romanization is counterproductive.

You wrote two particular sentences that explain your reasoning, which I fundamentally disagree with:

"Linking to the article for Hepburn romanization in every lead only serves as a distraction from the subject of the lead sentence." No, it serves to inform the reader of how the text was romanized and provide them the information they need to utilize that romanization in order to pronounce the text correctly. What may be a distraction for you is essential for others. Your desire to hide or remove that information should not trump their need to see it.

"Even for readers who are interested in the method used, having a link to Hepburn re-appear in the lead of every article is not helpful." But you can't know if it's "re-appearing" for any particular reader! Someone reading the article may never have read anything about Japan, and may know nothing about Japanese language and romanization! It could be a kid learning about their favorite anime, or learning how to use an encyclopedia to do research for a report. The point is, you don't know, and you have no basis for asserting that someone who reads a given article on something related to Japanese will have any idea what the romanized text represents or how to pronounce it, yet you want to remove the link that would directly explain it to them.

To quote wholesale from WP:AUDIENCE:

Wikipedia is an international encyclopedia. People who read Wikipedia have different backgrounds, education and opinions. Make your article accessible and understandable for as many readers as possible. Assume readers are reading the article to learn. It is possible that the reader knows nothing about the subject, so the article needs to explain the subject fully.

Thus, I still oppose making this change. Your complaint seems to be based on some minor aesthetics ("It's so annoying that I read lots of articles on Japanese articles and keep seeing the same link that I don't need") rather than on what's appropriate for an encyclopedia and what's helpful or usable for the general reader. Yes, sometimes the lead sentence of an article does get cluttered with information in parentheses. However, there are a lot of considerations in writing a lead—look at how long MOS:LEAD is, not to mention all the related pages it links to—and omitting useful definitions to shorten the sentence or parenthetical by one word is not among them. --Bigpeteb (talk) 17:27, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

@Bigpeteb: In response to your quote from WP:AUDIENCE: I don't agree that omitting the display by default would significantly hurt understandability. Providing information in an accessible way is our #1 goal on Wikipedia, but "accessibility" includes controlling how and when that information is displayed. I think this particular inclusion does not serve this purpose well. A "kid learning about their favorite anime" does not need to know, and likely does not care, that Hepburn is the specific romanization that we use; all they really need is the fair indication of the pronunciation that it provides to the to the intended audience of English speakers. The purpose of romanization is to serve these narrow purposes, which are fulfilled by simply writing the transcription. Readers who care and "dig deeper" (which are a small minority) will be able to find out about Hepburn and pronunciation guides at Help:Japanese (which is very helpful!) or MOS:JAPAN, and don't need to be told a second time.

• I have checked some major non-English Wikipedias to see how they handle this issue, just for context. They use either my Proposal 1 (omit) or a variation on my Proposal 3 (small link using a question mark; and not to Hepburn romanization, but instead to their equivalent of Help:Japanese).

• French Wikipedia: One Piece (ワンピース, Wan Pīsu^?)
• German Wikipedia: One Piece (jap. ONE PIECE（ワンピース）, Wan Pīsu)
• Spanish Wikipedia: One Piece (ワンピース Wan Pīsu^?)
• Italian Wikipedia: One Piece (ONE PIECE - ワンピース Wan Pīsu^?)

As a side note, MOS:LEADLANG shows off this as an example of a foreign-language lead: Chernivtsi Oblast (Ukrainian: Чернівецька область, Chernivets’ka oblast’). This omits the information about the "Ukrainian National System" used on Wikipedia, which is instead placed at WP:UKR. As a reader, it would not be helpful to me to display something like Chernivtsi Oblast (Ukrainian: Чернівецька область, UNS: Chernivets’ka oblast’) in every lead. All that I really care about is a fair indication of the Ukraininan pronunciation, which it provides me. At most, (Ukrainian: Чернівецька область, Chernivets’ka oblast’ ^?) would give the information about the specific type of Ukrainian romanization its due weight, in my opinion. — Goszei (talk) 22:58, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

I continue to disagree with some of your points.

Linking to Help:Japanese would be helpful, except that this template doesn't do so, and you're not proposing that it should do so. You can't argue that readers can find the information they would need there when we do nothing do help them get there. How would they know to look there? How would they find that page if we don't tell them where it is? Really, if we expect readers will find it by searching, then why do we bother hyperlinking articles at all?

MOS:JAPAN is an article for editors. It's not appropriate to direct readers there.

Again, you cannot argue that readers "don't need to be told a second time". Every article could be somebody's first. That's why it's important to link to background information they might need and not already have. The only thing you can argue by saying they "don't need to be told a second time" is that lead=yes should not be used more than once per page, which has always been the rule and which I don't think any of us are suggesting changing.

You make an interesting comparison with the non-English WPs. But AFAIK, there's no rule or guideline that various language WPs should use similar formatting. English WP broadly abandoned the superscript question mark in most of its templates years ago. I think that was a good decision; it can be hard to spot, and it's too opaque as it doesn't tell you anything unless you hover over it or follow the link. I think it would be particularly bad to use when transliterating a foreign language, because to someone unfamiliar with the transliteration scheme being used, it could look like it's part of the transliteration to someone who isn't familiar with how the text is romanized.

Yes, I saw the MOS example using Ukrainian as well. However, I took it to be informative, not normative. Moreover, I have the same problem with that example as I did with the Russian one from the previous discussion: I think it should link to WP:UKR, and I think it's doing a disservice to the reader by not doing so. And again, you say that "as a reader, it would not be helpful to me to display something like "Chernivtsi Oblast (Ukrainian: Чернівецька область, UNS: Chernivets’ka oblast’)" in every lead", but—again!—I disagree. I think it would be helpful. If you keep repeating the same argument, I'm going to run out of ways to tell you I think you're wrong.

I'll throw you a bone and propose an alternative that hasn't been considered. Looking at pages like Japan or Mount Fuji, I noticed that the pronunciation in IPA directly links to Help:IPA/Japanese. (Again, a welcome change from the bad old days when there would have been an undecipherable question mark or a taunting "what's this?" floating after it.) Why not do the same with the romanization? That would look like:

One Piece (Japanese: ワンピース, Wan Pīsu)

although formatted like that, it would probably be better to link to Help:Japanese than Hepburn romanization. I think that would satisfy both of our desires, and I would tentatively support it, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were some pushback. Unlike IPA (which is put in brackets or slashes) or other foreign languages (which use non-English scripts), there isn't as much to set off the romanized text as special other than it being italicized. I think it would be harder for people to notice that it's also a hyperlink, and it wouldn't be very obvious why it's being linked. It also precludes having part or all of the romanized text link to anything else, although I don't know if any articles do that.

Lastly, after doing a lot of searching to see if this has been discussed before, I think this really ought to move to Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Japan-related articles, as far fewer editors are likely to watch a Template page than a MOS page. The archives of the talk page there are enormous, and there are lots of old discussions about how to format text using this template. --Bigpeteb (talk) 00:37, 23 June 2020 (UTC)

Comment: (indenting is all a bit unclear, I think) Anyway, I notice that the real issue is a proposal to increase the number of links in a pronunciation note from one to two, which I tend to oppose. But I understand the wish to let readers, and perhaps particularly to whom Hepburn is not particularly "natural", know about it. I suggest that the link to Japanese language is really superfluous, since readers only need to know that this is in the language of Japanese, not any information which is historical, orthographical, morpho- well any number of pseudogreek adjectives... Somehow the note showing the Japanese writing and Roman equivalent should link to somewhere that explains what the bits are. Perhaps that needs writing, and it would give "Hepburn" as the name of the transliteration, among many other useful and interesting tidbits. Imaginatorium (talk) 07:10, 23 June 2020 (UTC)

	default, with no parameters	with lead=yes parameter
the "Help:Japanese" proposal, per Imaginatorium	One Piece (ワンピース, Wan Pīsu)	One Piece (Japanese: ワンピース, Wan Pīsu)

@Imaginatorium: Is something like Help:Japanese what you have in mind? I agree with you that linking to that page with "Japanese:" would be more even useful for readers than just straight links to Japanese language and Hepburn romanization, as we have been discussing. The hatnote on that page would redirect people who click and are interested in the article about the language itself. I think this is a very elegant solution, and I now support it over all of as an alternative to my proposals. Thoughts, everyone? @Bigpeteb, Psiĥedelisto, and I'm Aya Syameimaru!: — Goszei (talk) 07:46, 23 June 2020 (UTC)

I think it can work. Support. Iias!:postb□xI 07:48, 23 June 2020 (UTC)

Support. A simple change that addresses everyone's problems, and seems to have little or no downside. --Bigpeteb (talk) 21:47, 23 June 2020 (UTC)

I support this as well, but  oppose Bigpeteb's idea of linking the Hepburn, unless a wider RfC is done that all transliterations need to change to do the same. In my view, the idea violates MOS:EASTEREGG/WP:PLA. No other transliterations are, to my knowledge, linked like that, so I would not know what to expect from such a link, or why only articles about Japan have them. And, I don't think new readers would either. Perhaps one would expect a Japanese-language version of the article? An article about rōmaji in general? Psiĥedelisto (talk • contribs) ^{please always ping!} 04:25, 24 June 2020 (UTC)

Error with the = sign

"=" is needed for List of We Never Learn chapters. Chapter 150 is literally called [x]=, and the sign is used in later chapter names, but the template shows error when I try to use it. Smeagol 17 (talk) 05:29, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

Smeagol 17, I think I found a work-around with these revisions. — Goszei (talk) 05:37, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

Thanks, it works, but maybe the tempate should accept those signs as-is. Smeagol 17 (talk) 06:03, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

Smeagol 17, the = sign is the separator between parameter names and parameter values of template parameters. You therefore need to either explicitly number, or use named parameters in order to use = inside a parameter value. Help:Templates#Numbered_parameters, or use something like {{=}} or {{equals}} —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 07:58, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

Thanks, I understand. Smeagol 17 (talk) 08:09, 22 July 2020 (UTC)