Despite the underwhelming response to my wiki site for Chinese and foreign name translation, I went ahead and created a participation guide. Chinese version of this guide will be published soon. This article looks better here, due to the wiki syntax embedded.

Thanks.

==== How to participate ====
=== Quick start ===
Search for “**Please enter here**” in the search box, located in the left side of the page, below the navigation bar. Follow one of many links, then click “**Edit this page**”, replace “**Please enter here**” with information you know, click “**Preview**” to verify. Once you are satisfied, click “**Save**”. That’s all there is to it.

For example, if you know how to write Afghanistan in simplified Chinese, you can put that into the corresponding location by editing this page:
http://www.haidongji.com/wiki/doku.php?id=places:f2c:master

Do this for a few entries in person’s names, places’ names, and other object’s names, then come back to read the section below. That can probably give you a good feel of how things are organized. Hopefully you find this a worthy endeavor than following some people’s Facebook status or tweets!

=== Scan through Wiki syntax page ===
Once you’ve gone through some changes mentioned above, reading through wiki syntax will make more sense. Fortunately, it is a quick read, short and sweet.

http://www.dokuwiki.org/syntax?do=show

On this wiki we use a lot of tables and shorthand links to Wikipedia. So it pays to know that well.

=== Structure and naming convention ===
As you can see on the left side of the web page, this site is divided into 3 sections: person’s names, place’s names, and other object’s names. Each of those 3 sections is further divided into 2 sections: foreign to Chinese (f2c) and Chinese to foreign (c2f). Using the technical jargon, persons, places, objects, f2c, and c2f are all called namespaces in DokuWiki.

Person and place names are self-explanatory. As to other objects, this category is reserved for everything else that does not fall into person and place category. For example, university names, movie/song/book titles, drinks, and things like that.

Each section has an entry page. Written in wiki syntax, they are
[[Persons:PersonsMaster|Person’s Name]]
[[Places:PlacesMaster|Place’s Name]]
[[Objects:ObjectsMaster|Object’s Name]]

Each name entry is a row in a table. For foreign names to Chinese, the header of the table looks like this:
^Name^Mainland Simplified^Mainland Traditional^Taiwan Simplified^Taiwan Traditional^Hong Kong Simplified^Hong Kong Traditional^

In wiki syntax, it is:

^Name^Mainland Simplified^Mainland Traditional^Taiwan Simplified^Taiwan Traditional^Hong Kong Simplified^Hong Kong Traditional^

For Chinese names to foreign languages, here is what the header looks like:
^ Simplified ^ Traditional ^ Pinyin ^ Wade-Giles^

Once again, in wiki syntax, it is:

^ Simplified ^ Traditional ^ Pinyin ^ Wade-Giles^

For each record, we put links to the English Wikipedia entry behind the foreign name, and links to the Chinese Wikipedia entry behind the Chinese name. For example, in
[[persons:f2c:master]]
we have this entry for Vinegar Joe, General Joseph Stilwell:
|[[wp>Joseph Stilwell]]|[[http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%BA%A6%E7%91%9F%E5%A4%AB%C2%B7%E5%8F%B2%E8%BF%AA%E5%A8%81|史迪威]]|Please enter here|Please enter here|Please enter here|Please enter here|Please enter here|

Below is an example of c2f, Chinese to foreign:
|[[http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%82%93%E5%B0%8F%E5%B9%B3|邓小平]]|鄧小平|[[wp>Deng Xiaoping]]|Please enter here|

Notice the shorthand to the English Wikipedia entry:
[[wp>Deng Xiaoping]]
It works pretty well.

Note that I’ve found in some cases Baidu Baike and other Chinese wiki sites has more content than the Chinese Wikipedia entry. In that case, I put the link to the Baidu Baike page.

=== Examples ===
Adding a new person’s name
Suppose you’ve come across 17th century German missionary Johann Adam Schall von Bell (thanks bezdomny), who was appointed a ministry level position in Shunzhi era during Qing dynasty, you can simply append a record into the table in [[persons:f2c:master]], like so:
|[[wp>Johann Adam Schall von Bell]]|[[http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%BA%A6%E7%91%9F%E5%A4%AB%C2%B7%E5%8F%B2%E8%BF%AA%E5%A8%81|汤若望]]|湯若望|汤若望|湯若望|汤若望|湯若望|

This is actually an interesting example, in that there are additional reference data for him in the German Wikipedia, see reference section. I am still thinking what is the best way to point that out to a reader, perhaps in a footnote.

Creating a new page
Suppose you want to create a page for university names. This obviously falls into the object category. So you would create two pages: one for c2f, another for f2c. Here is how to do it:

First, go to http://www.haidongji.com/wiki/doku.php?id=objects:f2c:master and add a line like below and then save the page:
[[objects:f2c:university|University names]]
This page will be for foreign university name’s Chinese translation.

Second, after the page is saved, its link will be in red, indicating the page has not been created yet. Click on the link will leads you to page creation. Follow the same table format for persons and places.

Similarly, create a similar page for Chinese university names. This time create a link in http://www.haidongji.com/wiki/doku.php?id=objects:c2f:master, like so:
[[objects:f2c:university|University names]]

=== Keep track of wiki change ===
Subscribe this feed in your RSS reader:
http://www.haidongji.com/wiki/