User:Menchi - Wikipedia

I just discovered Wikipedia a few days ago and has already fallen in love with it. It's a wonderful place and has limitless potential. --Menchi 07:43 Dec 16, 2002 (UTC)

I am a Canadian and a Taiwanese who is proud to have two places to call home. I am a Han, which, among other things, means that my ancesters were born in Mainland China, specifically, China proper. But it is many generations ago, and I don't have a single known relative in the Mainland. I'm the 574th Wikipedian, the 29th Canadian Wikipedian, and the fourth Chinese Wikipedian. My interests -- note, not necessarily "expertise" -- include, but don't restrict to, Star Trek, biology, history, geography, travelling, language learning, and cloud staring.

I'm officially a Wikipediholic, according to the test, on which I got 72 (on May 1, 2003). I had been delaying taking the test for some time, but I knew, deep inside, that it is unavoidable and inevitable to face the truth. As of March 10, 2003, I was the 131st most active Wikipedia, with 1118 edits.

I've started the following articles:

Hanja, the Chinese characters in Korean
King Sejong the Great
Flag of Taiwan
Korean family name
Do, Korean for "province", "the way (of life)", and "island".
Special cities of Korea
Poltical divisions of Taiwan
Vernacular Chinese
Asian-Canadian
Yuanfen, a Chinese social relation
King's Daughters, French-Canadian women
Chahar, a former Chinese province
Suiyuan, a former Chinese province
Mengjiang, a puppet state
Wayson Choy, a Canadian author
Jin Shengtan, a Chinese editor
Qian Xuantong, a Chinese phonetician
Gary Locke, the Washington governor
Petuntse (china stone)
Athens, Georgia
Hunmin jeong'eum
Hunmin jeong'eum (document)
Hunmin jeong'eum haerye

I've contributed to or edited the following articles:

Chinese family name: Table of the Top 60 Family Names in Characters, Mandarin and Cantonese Transliterations
Hangeul, the Korean alphabet
Wang: "king" & a surname
Three Principles of the People, Chinese political doctrine & Taiwanese national antheme
Zhuang Zi, a Chinese philosopher
Punctuation
Talk:Transcription of Chinese: Summary of "Library of Congress Romanization (Pinyinization) Guidelines"
Talk:Dao de jing: Comparison btwn e, ê, eh in pinyin and Wade-Giles
Courtesy name, a.k.a., style or zi (字)
Emperor of Japan
Chopsticks
Adrienne Clarkson
Chinese language(s)
Carnation, a flower
Quetzal, a bird
eh, an interjection
palindrome: + Chinese examples
Chinese proverbs: + Hakka examples

I've also added Chinese characters (and when possible, their literal meaning), hanja, kanji, pinyin and tones to several pages.

Feel free to edit/correct the silly mistakes, including errors on info, typos and grammatical errors, that I made.

Image I uploaded:

:Image:Greenland small.png & :Image:Greenland_big.png
:Image:Pyramid.png, a ridiculously simple b/w diagram

Tips on CJK Computing

How to see CJK characters instead of the squares?

Download traditional Chinese[?] from this site from Hong Kong (http://www.info.gov.hk/digital21/eng/hkscs/download.html) and simplified Chinese from Microsoft (http://www.microsoft.com/msdownload/iebuild/ime5_win32/en/ime5_win32.htm). If these two fonts don't work, there are tons of alternative fonts on this page about Unicode fonts (http://www.hclrss.demon.co.uk/unicode/fonts.html). The author of the font page also created another page with general info about "Unicode character ranges and the Unicode fonts that support them" (http://www.hclrss.demon.co.uk/unicode/fontsbyrange.html).

How to get the HTML Unicode for CJK characters?
Currently Wikipedia seems to automatically converts CJK char to Unicode, but if that doesn't happen for you, here are some of the ways that we used to employ when the 'pedia didn't automatically convert.

In Internet Explorer:

Select encoding to be Western European. (An important step, it wouldn't work otherwise)
Type the characters in Google (http://www.google.com)'s search field and click enter.
The result page that comes up will have the the characters in code in teh search field.

Note: It only works with ten or less characters. Any more characters will result in the shutdown of the explorer (version 5.0).

See Wikipedia talk:Wikipedians/China for an alternative method.

In Mozilla (which is like Netscape Navigator, only better):

It automatically converts.
Done!

How to get the Han'geul when you don't have a Han'geul input (typing) program?

I don't have means to enter Han'geul, so I enter the Hanja at Korean Yahoo (http://kr.yahoo.com/) and the result page that turns up contain entries in Han'geul. Most of the time there will be pages that turn up, but not all the time.

Why do I Love the 'Pedia So Much?

It's imperfect.
- Imperfection can be beautiful too. (See wabi-sabi & the crack on the Liberty Bell.)
- I can be of help.
- It's like me, as I'm nowhere near a paragon of virtues, epitome of perfection, or personification of sainthood.
It's editable and not carved[?] in stone once written.
- I can change others' mistakes, and others mine.
- Ever done something that you regret later but can't change? Well, the 'pedia is like a time machine -- where you can undo your mistakes.
It's simple.
- It's relatively easy to locate articles[?] and read them.
- Most people can learn how to contribute in relatively short time, a few days or even just a few minutes.
It's friendly.
- In specific, those helpful and gung-ho Wikipedians that I've met are -- in alphabetical order --Brion, Kt2, mav, sannse, and Scipius.
- Voice is nearly always heard. When help is needed, go to Wikipedia:Village pump. Very soon, usually within an hour or two, somebody will respond -- Unless it's early in the morning[?] in North American time.
- Friendliness motivates me to contribute more.

Discussion/Talk

To discuss something with me, please post on my Talk Page (all old discussions have been moved there). However, sometimes real life takes me away from the 'pedia, so I wouldn't be able to respond for a while -- In this latter case, I apologize in advance, but I'll try to respond ASAP.

Bonsoir Menchi. Merci de ton commentaire. It really moved me. I am glad you are appreciating them :-) User:anthere (your talk page is 10 kb over what my browser can assume)