Benutzer:四特朗普通话

An imaginary scenario of US President Donald Trump discussing international affairs in fluent Sichuanese Standard Mandarin during his fourth phone call with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

I am a contributor to Chinese language conversion on Chinese Wikipedia.

About my username "四特朗普通话" (Pinyin: sì tè láng pǔ tōng huà)

This username is a direct result of a technical defect within MediaWiki's Chinese variant conversion system.

MediaWiki's language conversion adopts an approach that relies entirely on a subpar, rigid, and context-blind character replacement mechanism. Since all Chinese Wikimedia projects are built upon MediaWiki, they naturally inherit and operate under this very conversion scheme.

I deliberately chose this username to satirize this mechanical flaw, where a meaningless combination of unrelated words — the number "four" (四), "Trump" (特朗普), and "making a phone call" (通话) — across various Chinese language variants (zh, zh-Hans, zh-Hant, zh-CN, zh-HK, zh-MO, zh-SG, zh-MY) automatically converts into "四川普通話" (Sichuanese Standard Mandarin) when viewed under the Taiwanese Traditional Chinese variant (zh-TW).

To provide context for non-Chinese speakers, this error triggers because the Chinese writing system (Hanzi) features consecutive characters with no word boundaries or spaces; only punctuation marks—which were not used in Chinese until the adoption of punctuation from the West in the late Qing dynasty and the early Republic of China (the late 19th and early 20th century)—serve to separate sentences. This is fundamentally different from languages written in Latin, Cyrillic, or Arabic scripts, which rely strictly on spaces to delimit words. Crucially, MediaWiki lacks any innate capacity to intelligently segment or break up Chinese words; instead, it relies purely on blind, brute-force string matching against its conversion tables. In this specific case, because Donald Trump's surname "Trump" (特朗普) is officially translated as "川普" in Taiwan, and MediaWiki's built-in global Chinese regional conversion table enforces a rigid, one-to-one mapping that directly swaps the two strings for Taiwanese viewers (zhtable/toTW.manual#692), this rigid lookup dictionary blindly intercepts and splits the continuous character stream. Superimposed onto the flawed conversion logic, the system automatically and incorrectly concatenates these otherwise unrelated strings directly together into a local dialect.

Which one is the main account? Which one is the sockpuppet?

If you are a Chinese user from Mainland China (zh-CN), Hong Kong (zh-HK), Macau (zh-MO), Singapore (zh-SG), Malaysia (zh-MY), or a international user (zh^[1]) on Chinese Wikipedia or other Chinese Wikimedia projects with regional phrasing conversion enabled ("the zh wikis" for short), then User:四特朗普通话 is the main account, while User:四川普通話^(link) is the sockpuppet account. However, if you are a user from Taiwan (in a broad sense, including Kinmen and Matsu) on the zh wikis, then User:四川普通話 becomes the main account, and User:四特朗普通话 is the sockpuppet. After all, only zh-TW will blindly force-convert 四特朗普通话 into 四川普通話, right? Yes!

Related pages

mw:Language Converter
My user page on Chinese Wikipedia

Note

↑ In terms of HTTP protocol and MediaWiki localization backend, "a international user" refers to a user whose browser sends an Accept-Language header containing no Chinese language variant. Consequently, MediaWiki falls back to the default zh (variant-disabled) reading mode, ensuring the user sees the original registered username instead of the converted string.

[1] In terms of HTTP protocol and MediaWiki localization backend, "a international user" refers to a user whose browser sends an Accept-Language header containing no Chinese language variant. Consequently, MediaWiki falls back to the default zh (variant-disabled) reading mode, ensuring the user sees the original registered username instead of the converted string.

[1]