Commons:CJK stroke order project

Welcome!

Hello and welcome to the Commons Stroke Order Project. This project aims to create a complete set of high quality and free illustrations to clearly show the stroke orders of Han characters (Chinese Hanzi, Japanese Kanji, Korean Hanja, and Vietnamese Chữ Nôm) , as well as related syllabaries and alphabets (Chinese Bopomofo, Japanese Kana, and Korean Hangul). The project was started in 2006 as there was none like it in terms of quality and it seems that it was the only one working on the three standards of Han character stroke order: ROC, PRC, and Japan.

You are free to use the graphics we've made and welcome to join us and contribute to our progress. It's easy, you just have to follow the simple steps stated in our graphics guidelines. And please, feel free to leave us an encouraging message :-).

The characters

The project mainly focus on the Han characters, but also on any phonetic scripts as well. See the status section in the top right of this page for a list of characters and their status.

This project specifically considers three stroke order standards for Han characters — that of the PRC (S), ROC (T), and Japan. In the cases where these share stroke orders, there are redirects linking these. See the Han characters page for more details.

ROC Standard	PRC Standard	Japanese Standard
same stroke order. 中-tbw.png should redirect.		same stroke order. 中-jbw.png should redirect.
生-tbw.png should redirect to 生-bw.png.
		伐-jbw.png should redirect to 伐-bw.png.

Image types

The stroke order project currently includes three image types. The black & white (*-bw.png) and the red gradation (*-red.png) sub-projects produce printable versions usable for making books or printed textbooks. The Order sub-project (*-order.gif) is based on stronger calligraphic interest, and though painstaking to create, the results are spectacular.

• pictures in black and white (1,066)
• pictures in shades of red (257)
• animated GIFs (589)
• GIFs to be animated (52)

Finding characters

The characters are categorised by image type and variant:

	ROC	PRC	Japan
Black & white sequences	*-tbw.png (10)	*-bw.png (1,061)	*-jbw.png (102)
Shades of red	*-tred.png (17)	*-red.png (252)	*-jred.png (28)
Animations	*-torder.gif (7)	*-order.gif (580)	*-jorder.gif (27)

Each character also has its own category (e.g. 書). You can look up a character with this form:

Free use, free license

Status

	Black & white	Red gradient	Animation
Bopomofo	37/40	Done	2
Hiragana	Done	Done	0
Katakana	Done	Done	0
Hangeul	1/35	0	0
Kangxi radicals	These aren't categorised separately. See the progress pages.
ROC standard characters	10	17	7
PRC standard characters	1,061	252	580
Japanese standard characters	102	28	27

News

• The project page has been moved to Commons:CJK stroke order project.
• After a discussion with input from the Village Pump, the ROC characters and Japanese variants will no longer fall back on the ROC characters. When there is overlap, redirects will be created.

Commons:Stroke Order Project members <ed>
Black & white images :
Animations : FanNihongo
Red images :
Organisation and accessibility: Swift

Contributors wanted

Joining the team is easy: just join our work! You can contribute images, or verify stroke orders. See our graphics guidelines and stroke order sources for more.

Collaboration is organised on the road-map page. Drop us a line if you have any questions. :-D

Animation requests

The Category:AnimationRequest is a collection of temporary GIF picture files to be replaced by their animations. All files are used as not-yet-animated place holders to show the stroke order in many articles like e.g. de:Radikal 176 or Category:Radical 176-0.

An SVG etymological sister-project

The Stroke order project was originally limited to the standard script (楷書 kǎishū) characters, showing their correct stroke order. Subsequently, some users began uploading historical characters, referencing www.internationalscientific.org, a dictionary of etymological research published online.

The Ancient Chinese characters project has taken these over and provides SVG images of characters in oracle bone, bronze-ware, great seal, and small seal styles.

E.g.: → → →

Who benefits from these images?

• Students who study Chinese characters' stroke order, this material ( pictures in black and white or animated GIFs) can be used to study that with a program to remember things (like Anki for example).
• The web page: www.handedict.de(DeutschWikipedia:HanDeDict) makes use of our free *-bw.png images.
• Wikibookians use these for the Chinese and Japanese wikibooks at the English Wikibooks, the Chinese wikibook at the Polish Wikibooks, and the Chinese wikibook at the Italian Wikibooks.
• Wikipedians use this work at pages such as fr:Tracé d'un sinogramme and en:Stroke order#Types of strokes.
• Wiktionarians are using it on pages such as wikt:fr:Wiktionary, wikt:la:Wiktionary, wikt:de:Wiktionary and on all the 214 German Radical pages.
• The web page: Openwords is working on a "handwriting learning module for Chinese utilizing the Wikimedia Stroke Order project" (quoted from the webpage).
• The Commons Stroke Order Project is especially useful as a graphic database, both for other Wikimedia projects and free databases such as EDICT and CEDICT. All the files are uploaded under clear, Unicode- encoded (UTF-8) filenames.

Priority work