On 12/10/05, Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org> wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
I absolutely agree. At this stage a merger may
be nothing more than
an intellectual ideal. It could be years before the conditions are
right, if ever. The most that can be done now is to make the
opportunity available.
Is it really a good precedent to separate Wikipedias based on political
differences among groups of people? By that notion, we should've split
up traditional and simplified Chinese long ago, but based on the
principle that splitting effort should be avoided as much as possible, a
partly-technical solution to keep them in the same Wikipedia was found
instead.
This is a good example, as the differences between Trad. and Simp.
Chinese are much greater than those between Serbian, Bosnian and
Croatian. In fact, they are great enough that the current converter
has quite a bit lower than ideal accuracy, which wouldn't be the case
for a Serbian <> Croatian <> Bosnian converter.
However, in zhwiki, (most) people see the value in keeping a single
WP, at least to a reasonable degree, and the prevailing attitude among
Traditional users is "it will get better, but for now we should endure
because the reward will be worth it". On the other hand the attitude
among many Simplified users seems to be "remind me what the problem is
again?", for two reasons: 1) probably about 80%, maybe 90%, of the
content on zhwiki is (stored on the server) in Simplified. 2)
Traditional-to-Simplified conversion is MUCH easier and produces much
better quality results than vice-versa, since there are only a handful
of Traditional characters with multiple Simplified counterparts, while
there are many Simplified characters with multiple Traditional
counterparts (to be fair, though, in many cases the secondary options
are Trad'l characters that are relatively infrequent)
Plus, forcing political opponents into one Wikipedia
should lessen the
tendency of ideologically-uniform Wikipedias to stray from a neutral
point of view. If, for example, en: were split up into en-us: and
en-everyone-else, I could see both of those being worse than the current
unified one on many areas---the tension between American and
non-American editors forces some sort of more neutral synthesis.
That is one of the main reasons I hope to see a merger eventually.
While opinions in the various Chinese communities are diverse enough
that they would be able to maintain a good degree of NPOV even if they
were separate, views in the Balkans are radically different.
One article I copied from bs.wiki to sr.wiki and hr.wiki a few months
ago started a big conflict because the article was (apparently)
obviously POV. From that I learned two lessons: 1) don't post articles
on religion or regional history unless you're confident about the
NPOV-ness of their content; 2) don't trust Balkan WPs to maintain a
good NPOV environment.
Mark