[Wikipedia-l] New request for Cantonese Wikipedia: vote at 29-6

[Mark Williamson]

> When did membership to the email list constitute any more legitimacy
> than folks who are "offlist"? That's one of the more odd arguments
> I've seen about this issue.

I actually agree with you on this one.

> No, because the vote pertaining to Wu and Yue (Cantonese) was all
> stuck together into one combined poll, which I pointed out as a flaw
> very early on. In effect, the "votes for" became a union of folks
> interested in one or the other. You shouldn't take the AND of an OR
> vote.

When you originally "pointed [it] out as a flaw", somebody else
pointed out that you were not correctly understanding the
instructions.

As was previously noted by at least two users besides myself, "If you
wish to choose on a case-by-case basis, please vote in both sections
but note which requests you support and which you oppose" DOES NOT
mean that there is a separate section for each Wikipedia, but rather:

If you support the creation of one but not another, you should list
your name under both "Support" and "Oppose", noting which ones you
support and which you oppose. I don't see how you still didn't
understand this after it was explained to you. And, if you felt it was
unclear, you could always have changed it: after all, it IS a Wiki
page.

Some users did in fact say "I support _____, but not ______" or "At
this time, I only support ____".

Lankiveil supported Cantonese and Wu but not Hakka (at least not at
this time); CantoneseWiki noted that his vote was only for Cantonese
and that he doesn't have a comment on Shanghainese or Hakka at the
moment. Polyhedron said that he agreed to Classical Chinese, but none
of the contemporary "regional varieties" (probably the most neutral
term).

> How do you draw that conclusion? The issues brought up were that
> written Cantonese is used today in nonstandard ways, and that it is
> unusual to use it in formal writings. That might change over the
> years, but for now, to folks at the meetup it was not desirable to
> embark on the starup of an entire project in writing Cantonese
> encyclopedia entries the way you find in zh:, en:, de:, etc.

Had I been there, I would've brought up quite a bit more, including
that we have Wikipedias in "regional vernaculars" not used in formal
areas generally, such as Asturian, Platt, Limburgish, Sicilian,
Occitan... also, others which were until very recently not used in
formal situations, such as the Ukrainian WP.

> Pretty weak strawman argument. See Tim Starling's post earlier today.
> Wikipedia's goal is to make the sum of all human knowledge available
> for free. And right now, zh: is one, if not the most, prominent
> weakness in the Wikipedia universe.

You didn't really respond to his argument. The thing is, you haven't
yet explained why it is logical to assume that the Chinese Wikipedia
will lose a significant number of potential contributors if a
Cantonese Wikipedia is created.

> To quote Mark again: "Waerth and I both think it's unfair to let
> anybody but the actual language community make decisions about whether
> or not they should get a Wikipedia whether or not they should get a
> Wikipedia."

Yes, and if you look at the way Cantonese speakers have voted on the
Meta page, it's quite clear: the majority want a separate Wikipedia.

> Yet here we are, with non-Cantonese folks spearheading the effort, and
> a Cantonese-based
> meetup saying no, they don't want one.

Yes, since a meetup _obviously_ represents 100% of the
Cantonese-speaking world. You still haven't shown that a majority
opposes the idea -- on the votes page, more Cantonese speakers voted
"support" than "oppose".

Mark