Gerard is opposed to allowing this, on the grounds that there is a solid community of contributors on zh Wikisource that opposes, and only evidence for one or two people who support it.
MF-W favors marking this as "eligible", as to a great extent Literary Chinese is to the modern group of Chinese languages as Latin is to Romance languages. Just as neither French Wikisource nor Italian Wikisource would really be the right place for Latin content, so too neither Mandarin Wikisource nor Cantonese Wikisource, say, is inherently the right place for Literary Chinese content.

That having been said, MF-W also appreciates that there is a lot of Literary Chinese content already in Chinese/Mandarin Wikisource. Also, if I read his email of 21 February (19:50 UTC) correctly, he is not proposing that we move the Literary Chinese content out of Chinese Wikisource (at least at the present time).

I think that we agree that in the long run we don't need or want duplicated content in these projects.

I'm open to suggestions. But at present, the compromise position I would like to suggest is this:

We mark this request as "on hold", pending evidence that a community exists that will create content in a Literary Chinese Wikisource test on oldwikisource. This is completely consistent with our practice in many other cases. We often have requests that are nominally eligible, but where no content is ever created—or perhaps a few pages are created right after the request is, and then people walk away. If a year passes with no further meaningful contributions, we close the request as "rejected-stale", inviting a new request in the future. By taking this approach, on-wiki activity would drive the subsequent result:

If, as Gerard assumes, only one or two people are involved, we can decide that there is not an independent community for this project, and we can reject it.
If there is a community that is seriously interested in this, the "on hold" will become an "eligible", as MF-W wishes.

I am going to suggest a special rule here: that documents in Literary Chinese that already exist on zh Wikisource <u>not</u> be duplicated on, nor moved to, oldwikisource. (I suppose, to be fair, that the rule needs to cut the other way, too.)

I am also going to suggest that even if the proposal becomes "eligible" in the near future, we are explicitly withholding our opinion as to how to execute any final approval until that problem is actually before us.

I would appreciate the Committee's feedback on this.

Steven