In this article, I list the reference dictionaries we used for determining tricky cases and other character and pronunciation related issues. Not much will change in practice, the main difference is that we will be more consistent in applying this and so increase Skritter’s reliability.
Read more about our choice of references in the blog post:
http://blog.skritter.com/2015/02/standard-references-for-skritter-chinese.html
One thing I’d like to mention too is that I keep a record of more interesting cases so I can share them later. These include all sorts of issues, but I will focus on those that I think are useful for learners in general or those that are so common that they should be mentioned. Stay tuned!
we’re currently using Mainland references for pronunciation, which isn’t optimal for students in Taiwan. We’re working on addressing these issues!
Thanks for keeping that in mind!
Having an option to enable a Taiwanese pronunciation set (overwriting Chinese Mainland) would be great.
Providing consistently checked pronunciation for both locations is probably not something we will be able to provide in the near future considering how much work it would entail, but we are working on the option of allowing custom pronunciation. I realise that this is not ideal, but it’s definitiely better than being forced to use pronunciation you don’t want to use.
I was recently showing off my character-writing skills (acquired on Skritter) to a native speaker, and she told me that she learned a different stroke order for one my characters. Not sure which one of us is more “standard”. This leads me to ask:
Is there a standard reference for stroke order for Chinese characters? What source does Skritter use its stroke orderings?
That’d work too! 
For similpfied Chinese, the standard reference work is 现代汉语通用字笔顺规范, but since it hasn’t been published online (as far as I know, anyway), we usually just refer to any of the high-quality dictionaries that are more easily accessible such as 漢典 or Pleco.
For traditional Chinese, we use the 國語辭典 published by the Ministry of Education (Taiwan).
We do also have the option to allow more than one stroke order in cases where there are numerous widely used variants (such as for 忄).
Remember, stroke order exists to make characters easy to write (and read, to some extent), so if that goal is achievede, the stroke order is good. That doesn’t mean that learners should invent their own stroke order, but that is’t possible in Skritter anyway, we only allow additional variants when they are commonly used by native speakers.
That being said, there are errors here and there and we do our best to fix them. If you think a character has the incorrect stroke order, please report it and we’ll have a look!
Hm… I should probably write a blog post about this…