Am Do., 21. Feb. 2019 um 00:03 Uhr schrieb Steven White < koala19890@hotmail.com>:
MF-W, I felt the same way you did at first. But in truth this is an extremely borderline case that the policy can allow to go in either direction. There have been further discussions both here https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Language_committee#Wikisources:_Latin_vs._other_old_languages_(re:_Chinese) and here https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/Wikisource_Literary_Chinese. Let me summarize a key point here, and then suggest what I think the real issue is.
Culturally, the comparison to Latin is apt. Literary Chinese was unquestionably the lingua franca of the region, and people everywhere used it. And the writing system of Literary Chinese was definitely used/adapted for other languages like Japanese and Korean. On the other hand, neither of those languages is actually linguistically descended from Literary Chinese. Korean is a linguistic isolate, while Japanese is only related to some languages used in and around Japan and neighboring islands. So Chinese is the clear principal descendant of Literary Chinese; it's not like Latin, where there are several strong descendants.
I have followed these discussions with great interest. "Chinese" is a language group, not a single language, so I don't agree with the claim that there is "the clear principal descendant" here. It also was shown that it can't be said that Mandarin is such a descendant, the other languages are as well spoken by millions and diverge more than some Romance languages. I am not arguing in favour of deleting Classical content, and appreciate the efforts of the local community to facilitate participation by non-Mandarin speakers. We are merely discussing eligibility here, and it is only consistent to follow the Ancient Greek showcase example (< https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/Wikisource_Ancien...) and declare eligibility, as there is no reason for non-eligiblity. For these reasons, approach number 2 appears to be the sole reasonable one to me.