Ask The Tropers

For now, it should be changed back, yes.

Undo and ask Kage Fuusha if they'd be interested in making a forum thread to get some sort of official agreement on spelling to use. Anyone also can start the thread themselves.

Also there's a labelnote on-page that just says "†", it should probably be changed to "notes" or something understandable that it is a clickable labelnote.

I changed the trope text back, because the trope description itself was made incorrect. It originally said it is pronounced "sempai", and Kage changed it to it is pronounced "senpai", which is untrue.

The reversion should be done given that it was a fairly big change done unilaterally, but Kage Fuusha isn't wrong. The standard romanization of that word is with the "n" not the "m".

Also I suspect the subtlety between the pronunciation of “senpai” vs. “sempai” is functionally void.

That character is almost without exception Romanized as an “n” and pronounced that way.

^ That's what I was thinking. IIRC, the manga I read in the early '00s used sempai, but nowadays I almost always see it written as senpai.

Is it a first-come first-served thing now like commonwealth spellings?

To be clear, a sentence that originally said that sempai can also be pronounced "senpai" now said that senpai can also be pronounced "senpai". That's the kind of sentence change that makes no sense, regardless of which spelling you prefer.

I'm wondering if it's a replacement plug-in, because it's not the only page they've replaced these things on.

Should we make a note on the IPA pronunciation of ん/ン^note Uvular Nasal /ɴ/, as opposed to the Bilabial Nasal /m/ or Alveolar Nasal /n/ to explain the confusion there?

Since "senpai" appears to be the commoner term (my OS even marks "sempai" as a misspelling), we could discuss changing it to the redirect with the n in TRS.

Does this need to go through TRS? I feel like just citing a link that explains how the switch from m to n came to be along with this ATT thread would suffice, no? It's not a content change, but a grammatical correction.

To sum up both links: pre-1954 ん/ン used to be romanized as an "n" in most cases, but as an "m" before b, m, and p sounds, which would make "sempai" correct by those standards, but what is widely used today is the post 1954 "modified" version that removes the switching and always romanizes ん/ン as an "n", making "senpai" widely recognized as the correct romanization.

^ Well, it'd still need an organized wick-changing effort... But personally I don't see much of a point? To me it's sort of like gray/grey.

Grey/Gray are both still used interchangeably in the English speaking world (especially if we include British spelling). Sempai/senpai is different in the sense that sempai is pretty much a relic at this point. You can find older textbooks with it written, but nowadays the VAST majority of times, it's going to be "senpai". A better comparison would be to goodnes v. goodness, the former being the Old English way of spelling the latter.

Re: wick changing effort, can that not just go to the wick cleaning thread instead of TRS?

Fair, I guess, but since the Senpai version is already a redirect I guess it's just hard for me to really find the motivation to change the status quo here. Maybe it won't need a TRS thread (Transgender didn't, for instance), but it'd be a little harder to get the manpower to make the changes without having an organized effort (rather than just slapping it on TRS wick cleaning). Completely doable, I wouldn't argue if the change goes through, I'm just being a realist.

I'm still more concerned about why these things got changed though. I'm still convinced it's a plug-in.

Accuracy is a fine enough motive for a wiki, imo.

But also since Senpai Kouhai already exists as a redirect, does this actually need a site-wide wick cleaning? Can we not just edit the description, make Senpai Kouhai the main link and switch Sempai/Kouhai as a redirect and be done?

I meant personal motive, tbh :P It's not exactly a situation that gets me fired up to do some cleaning, but if others want to then, like I said, I've got no problem with it. I do think we'd need to change the wicks though, for alphabetization purposes as well as because it's dumb to have a redirect with more wicks than the main title.

...But no seriously we really need to figure out if the dude used a plugin or just had a very weird wonk. Changing sempai to senpai in the "sounds like senpai" sentence smacks of either a really poorly-handled manual swap or an automatic plugin.

They haven't edited since mid January, and Michael Katsuro sent a PM.

Gotcha.

Should we spin the other discussion off to Trope Talk?

This discussion is getting long so probably best to move it to Trope Talk

They've answered me, and claimed that translation sites do not translate "sempai" to "senior" but do translate "senpai" to that word. (To be clear, they didn't specify any particular site.)

EDIT: In other words, their point is that "sempai" is not a valid transcription at all.

As asked, further posts are better suited here.