Mapping Gaps in Wikipedia with Wikidata

 

How to create Wikidata items in different languages (including Chinese).

If you want to give it a try and contribute to Wikidata and add items to Chinese historical figures, artists, literary works or places, and you might encounter some difficulties in the beginning.

First, you should create a user account. If you created your account in English or another European language, then by default you will not be able to input a name in Chinese when creating a new Wikidata item.

As you can see above, when you create a new item in Wikidata, you might select from a pre-determined number of languages. In my case, my default setting listed English, German, and, strangely enough, Bavarian. Even though I am more qualified to contribute something in Chinese than Bavarian, Wikidata simply assumed this might be a language I speak because of my local IP address in Bavaria.

I had to add Chinese as a language option manually by adding a language information box on my user profile page.

This box containing information on your level of fluency in foreign languages is called “Babel user information” and you can add it by going to the “edit” header. In my case the line I inserted reads

{{#babel:de-N|zh-3|en-4|zh-hans-3|zh-hant-3}}

I set German (“de”) as “N” (native), you can add other languages with a number ranging from 0 (don’t understand the language at all) to 5 (professional proficiency). The exact definition can be found here.

After you inserted this line, the babel box appears on your user page, and as soon as you create your next Wikidata item, you will see that the program now lists the languages you set in your user account.

Apart from the codes for Chinese (zh) and English (en), simplified (zh-hans) and traditional Chinese (zh-hant) sinologists might also need the following codes:

  • zh-classical (for Classical Chinese)
  • zh-yue (for Cantonese)
  • zh-min-nan (for Minnan)
  • hak (for Hakka)
  • mn (for Mongolian)
  • ug (for Uyghur)
  • mnc (for Manchu)
  • ja (for Japanese)

However, there is no such thing as a “Wade-Giles” code, for example. If you create an item for a person, save differing transliterations for the name into the “also known as”  sections. See for example the Wikidata item for Chiang Kai-shek below:

As you can see, in this case, the main label is set to be “Chiang Kai-shek” and the Pinyin-transliteration is added in the “also known as” section because he is most commonly known as Chiang to English speakers. If you look again at the Xue Mili item (picture above), you will see that in this case, I put the pinyin first, and then added the differing transliteration.

As these examples demonstrate, it is difficult to find a coherent system of creating items. “蒋介石” is obviously not the simplified version of “蔣中正”, so we can assume that different users added information seperately.

 



Cite this blog post
Rudolph Henrike (2018, December 30). Mapping Gaps in Wikipedia with Wikidata. Political and Academic Networks in the PRC. Retrieved March 29, 2024, from https://panprc.hypotheses.org/938

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