Last modified: 2014-08-28 00:16:24 UTC
Created attachment 14033 [details] Example of unreadable italicized Chinese characters in Wikipedia This regards the English version of Wikipedia. When Chinese characters are used as part of a title or similar text section that is enclosed inside a pair of doubled quotes (''), the Chinese characters are italicized. This is not in line with the best practice of writing Chinese. Also it makes the characters unreadable in some typefaces. ''Fusion of Music and Calendar 乐律融通'' Example taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_temperament#Early_history_2 This could be seen as a problem that the browser (in my case Firefox) should take care of. However there's no reason that Wikipedia would tell the browser that Chinese characters be italicized -- instead it should add emphasis mark to the character. When Chinese characters are used in the English Wikipedia I think that this would be done automatically if the characters occur inside '':s http://www.w3.org/TR/css-text-decor-3/#text-emphasis-style-property
It is italicized because that's exactly what the wikitext says: ''Fusion of Music and Calendar 乐律融通'' > This is not in line with the best practice of writing Chinese. I'd agree with this on a Chinese Wikipedia, however not sure if that would help readers on an English Wikipedia which might not be used to best practices of writing Chinese. I'm tempted to close this as WONTFIX as coming up with some code might be more work (and introduce more problems) than ignoring the current problem...
> I'd agree with this on a Chinese Wikipedia, however not sure if that would help readers on an English Wikipedia which might not be used to best practices of writing Chinese. Yes, I understand your arguments, also I don't have an overview of how complicated it would be to implement a solution. However, there's still no reason for the Chinese text to be italicized, since it makes it unreadable. The Chinese text in the title is there so that an English reader can use it to identify the title in Chinese if he/she sees it, not as an exotic decoration. Therefore it's important that it can actually be read, which I would say is not the case if it is italicized. It is natural for the editor of English Wikipedia to include also the Chinese name of the title inside of '':s, since the style manual says that work titles should be inside of '':s. Therefore it's also logical that such a wikitext will produce a graphically pleasing result for the reader.
(In reply to comment #2) > However, there's still no reason for the Chinese text to be italicized, since > it makes it unreadable. Correct, however I see the right way to fix this by editing wikipages which have it wrong.
