15

The minimum 16-character title limit is incompatible with the site, given that Chinese/Japanese nouns are typically less than half the character length of their translations in a phonetically written language.

Here are some quick anecdotal examples:

  • 「何々」って、なんですか: 12 characters
  • 〇〇の使い方について: 12 characters
  • 「〇〇」の丁寧な断り方: 11 characters

I think that 10 characters is probably a good minimum.

This also applies to comments.

5
  • 6
    Good feature-request. Incidentally, in order to ask on ja.SO, we should enter at least 8 characters.
    – ra1ned
    Commented Dec 22, 2016 at 23:02
  • 5
    Possible refinement: Have a 10 character minimum unless the title contains only ASCII-type characters, in which case the current 16 character minimum would apply. This way, we can prevent short titles like "Kanji question" whilst still allowing the things mentioned above. (The exact minimum lengths may need adjusting, of course.)
    – GoBusto
    Commented Dec 23, 2016 at 10:46
  • 6
    @GoBusto Or just weight wide characters as 2 characters, so you can have 16 Latin characters or 8 wide characters.
    – user1478
    Commented Dec 24, 2016 at 0:27
  • 2
    @snailplane That might be a better idea, since it would more robustly handle titles such as 「Somethingは日本語で何ですか」 where a mixture of Latin and non-Latin characters are present. (My original suggestion was simply based on ease of implementation: if title_text.chars.all? { |c| c.ord < 128 })
    – GoBusto
    Commented Dec 25, 2016 at 9:40
  • Suggest changing title to 'minimum' char limit.
    – djechlin
    Commented Jan 11, 2017 at 23:36

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
4

I think @snailplane's idea of weighting wide characters is fairly reasonable. Some say Japanese in Japanese orthography has double density of English character-wise.

enter image description here (source)

Given that the software can handle Unicode properties, we can utilize East Asian Width feature for actual implementation. In this framework, every character in Unicode is categorized as either of W (wide), Na (narrow), F (fullwidth), H (halfwidth), A (ambiguous) or N (not East Asian).

So, for example we could count each of them:

  • W → 2 in length (kanji, kana, Japanese punctuations...)
  • Na → 1 in length (mostly Latin letters and their punctuations)
  • F → 1 in length, as they are variations of equivalent narrow characters
  • H → 2 in length, as they are variations of equivalent wide characters
  • N → 1 in length (most other non-CJK scripts)
  • A → 1 or 2 according to each case (some symbols)
    • could treat all of them wholesale as 1, or 2
    • could use their general category property to decide, e.g. Letters and Punctuations are 1, others are 2 etc.
    • could have other / more dedicated criteria...

Strictly speaking there are other considerations such as whether to pre-normalize using NFD or NFKD and such things, but this is the basic concept.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .