- Wikipedia Pinyin (from my July 30 message): The test running on
Incubator (under the ISO 639-3 code for Mandarin) has about 250 pages. As
I said in that message, there are arguments on both sides. Would people
please look again at that and provide some input? You can do that on
langcom-l if you prefer, of course.
It's probably even easier to use language converter to convert existing
Chinese
Wikipedia into pinyin using language converter than converting
between traditional/simplified Chinese so I don't get why a separate
Wikipedia for zh-cmn-Latn would be needed. The standard orthography of
Chinese is already very close to the spoken standard Mandarin variant and
most (not all) Chinese characters only have 1 pronunciation so a simple
machine conversion should be able to pretty reliably convert the existing
Chinese Wikipedia into pinyin. The space delimitation between vocabulary
might be a problem but that's only for good-looking/easy-reading purpose.
[That is, if Chinese Wikipedia editor want to add a pinyin version to the
site's language converter, which I personally don't think that is the case.
Someone can still raise the question about language converter on Chinese
Wikipedia Village Pump though to see how many people support the language
converter proposal].
As for those existing 250 articles, I checked some of them, and many of
them seems to be word-to-word, character-to-character copies of Chinese
Wikipedia article that whoever put those article there didn't even mention
their source in edit history or whatever. They should be deleted for
copyright violation. Some will need to see if there're any content that are
actually not copy-paste from Chinese Wikipedia before making decision about
what to do about it.
One of the reason being stated regarding why a pinyin version of the
Mandarin Wikipedia is needed was that it will help illiterate people to
read and edit Wikipedia. I guess it would make more sense for Wikipedia to
integrate a Text-to-speech module and expand available accessibility
options to reach those audiences.