>Answer me this question: Are you a traditional or a simplified user,
>primarily? Your e-mail address ends in .cn so I am just assuming you
>are primarily a Simplified user, please correct me if I am wrong.
Yes, I’m from Beijing, a mainlander. But just as you said,
how is my *nationality* any more relevant to /this particular issue/ than
the number of pets I have or my favourite colours?
>The reason there was only one active contributor is because zh-tw: was
>not being advertised at all. I assume if I had really looked for
>contributors there would have been at least one or two other people
>working on it w/me.
Yes, if you setup zh-tw, people will go there and write articles.
But the split of the community will only weaken the growth of the small project
and bring more difficult in the future. Suppose two project zh-cn and zh-tw now,
and someday we want to synchronize them, and you will find it is very difficult.
Yes, if you don’t want synchronize the two, there is no problem.
But why we write the same things twice, we just have the same language.
It’s really true there are some terminology are different in technical and
pop cultural fields. But how about the same part of zh-tw and zh-cn?
We have the same universe, the sun, the planet, species,
and same mathematic, logic, and the same thousands-years history.
Because these knowledge are formed into their modern shape
mostly before 1950s when Jiang’s government retreat to Taiwan.
Even in pop cultural fields, I don’t think the difference is so big.
Please notice the fact that A-mei has more fans in mainland than in Taiwan.
On 10 Sep 2004, at 13:16, wikipedia-l-request(a)Wikimedia.org wrote:
> Message: 2
> Date: Thu, 9 Sep 2004 21:00:18 -0700
> From: Mark Williamson <node.ue(a)gmail.com>
>
>> So far as I know, there is no major movement afoot to split the two.
>> A few people support it, and one of the main ones, the only one who
>> was actually working on the accidentally-created website, is a 15 year
>> old American living in Arizona. I mention this not to say that a 15
>> year old American living in Arizona can't possibly be right about
>> this, but rather to indicate what I understand *at the moment* to be
>> the situation on the ground.
>
> Just curious, Jimbo, but how is my *age* any more relevant to /this
> particular issue/ than the number of pets I have or my favourite
> colours?
>
> -Jin Junshu/Mark
Good point. Age and nationality should not be drawn into consideration.
The number of active contributors however should.
-- Jens [[User:Ropers|Ropers]]
www.ropersonline.com
Hello,
At ars electronica in Linz Jimbo and I had the idea to hold a Wikipedia
meetup next summer.
Since people from as many wikimedia projects as possible should be able
to participate we decided on Europe as the best place to do this, and
we'll be trying to get funding for wikipedians from other continents to
join in the fun.
Now, the exact location is to be decided. There are several important
criterias, like number of local wikipedians, closeness to an
international airport, costs and abilities of conference facilities...
The details can be found on
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_meetup_2005
Where the conference is hosted will be a community decision along the
lines of the Olympic games selection:
I'd like to encourage everyone to place proposals on
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_meetup_2005 with detailed
information so we can choose the place which offers the most advantages.
Most important are of course conference facilities and dates where they
are still free.
Since most conference facilities have to be booked long in advance and
there will be enough organisational stuff left to do, I suggest a
deadline of one month, ending 10th of october.
Please translate this posting and make it public in your project so that
as many wikipedians as possible have a chance to participate in the
discussion and the choice.
greetings,
Elian
On 10 Sep 2004, at 13:16, wikipedia-l-request(a)Wikimedia.org wrote:
> Message: 3
> Date: Thu, 9 Sep 2004 21:20:16 -0700
> From: Mark Williamson <node.ue(a)gmail.com>
>
> Sorry everybody, I'd like to apologise for being so... well, so...
> agressive.
>
> I hope you can understand why I might find it hard now to keep my
> cool: over 600 articles I am almost singlehandedly responsible for are
> to be deleted, I have been told to copy-and-paste them but come on,
> this is 600 ARTICLES we're talking about. Also, I did not even know
> this was going on until I tried to go to wantedpages on zh-tw: and
> found that I was redirected to wantedpages at zh:, and then asked in
> #wikipedia and was told to check the ML to which I am not subscribed
> (even if I were, I don't check my inbox on even a daily basis
> usually)
>
> apologies...
>
> --Mark/Jin Junshu
I for one don't feel you have to apologize.
I don't remember you saying anything rude.
Our views differ, but that doesn't preclude a civilized discussion.
Your input has already been very beneficial because it has highlighted
an issue which warrants a solution and has given people a push to solve
it. It may not be your initially attempted solution (zh-tw), but it's
still a step forward (towards fully integrated simple and traditional
interoperability in zh).
Thesis, antithesis, synthesis! ;-)
-- Jens [[User:Ropers|Ropers]]
www.ropersonline.com
On 10 Sep 2004, at 13:16, wikipedia-l-request(a)Wikimedia.org wrote:
> Message: 1
> Date: Thu, 9 Sep 2004 20:43:50 -0700
> From: Mark Williamson <node.ue(a)gmail.com>
>
> <snip>
>
> Exactly. Conversion between the two scripts is technically very
> difficult. We can use the Chinese version of ms word to convert, but I
> believe this may not be 100% legal and even if it is, it is not a good
> solution because it is not a server-side solution.
>
> -Mark/Jin Junshu
Maybe I'm naive, but if MS can code a working automatic conversion,
then is there any reason why the open source community couldn't do the
same?
-- Jens [[User:Ropers|Ropers]]
www.ropersonline.com
On 10 Sep 2004, at 05:41, wikipedia-l-request(a)Wikimedia.org wrote:
> Message: 8
> Date: Thu, 9 Sep 2004 20:40:54 -0700
> From: Mark Williamson <node.ue(a)gmail.com>
>
> <snip>
>
> It is not merely a difference in characters as perhaps some would like
> you to believe, but much more than that. It is very easy to convert
> traditional characters to simplified, but it is much trickier to do so
> vice-versa. zh: is almost completely in simplified chinese.
<insert user="delirium">
>> But is it going to be possible from a language point of view? People
>> have talked about automatic conversion, but several others have
>> pointed
>> out multiple academic studies on the subject, some from the Unicode
>> committees, that have concluded it's nearly impossible to do automated
>> conversion from one to the other (without fully solving AI anyway), as
>> it's not a one-to-one mapping. The only reasonable thing I've heard
>> proposed is doing a partial automatic conversion, and flagging the
>> characters that can't be automatically converted for human
>> intervention,
>> but this doesn't sound like something that's going to be implemented
>> in
>> the forseeable future.
>>
>> -Mark
</insert>
Well, there doesn't HAVE to be an exclusively automatic conversion. It
can be done by humans and yes, in an ideal world there'd be one
traditional and one simple version for every article
(non-transliterated/translated articles in the "other" writing style
should be shown along with a header that the article is in the "other"
character set and that the user is invited to translate/transliterate).
But I would agree that there should be a combined version, one that is
linked more closely than the mere concept of two different language
Wikipedias (simple and traditional).
Yes, this does require techies to lay additional groundwork and whether
that's gonna happen "in the foreseeable future" or not depends on our
kind developers and how nicely people interested in this will ask them.
> In addition, the entire user interface is in simplified. This makes it
> extremely uncomfortable for a person who uses *exclusively*
> traditional to use zh:, and it will scare many users away (as
> Laurentius admits, sie was at first scared away because of the
> dominance of simplified; for every user that comes back after being
> initially scared away by this there are perhaps 300 that never come
> back). zh-tw:, on the other hand, the last I checked, had a UI
> completely in Traditional.
>
> <snip>
>
> --Jin Jun-shu (Mark Williamson)
Then it seems obvious to me what needs to be done:
There needs to be a prominently featured preference on the Chinese
Wikipedia for switching the user interface between traditional and
simplified. As a traditional version of the interface already exists
(as you write) it should not be too much work for a person competent in
both traditional and simplified to add the traditional UI to the
current simplified one.
The plumbing for this again needs to be laid by our techies.
>> tech to-do list:
>> - add feature of preference-dependent dual article version (probably
>> under the same URL) and a dual user interface to go with it.
<sidenote>
OMG. THAT's gonna be a war on what (trad/simple) is gonna become the
default! ;-)
</sidenote>
-- Jens [[User:Ropers|Ropers]]
www.ropersonline.com
>I think this is a question for the speakers of the language to talk
to us about; it's really a question of mutual intelligibility, isn't
it?
In a manner of speaking, perhaps; but technically it is not because
Chinese writing, in either of the two forms, is only partially
phonetic, I believe the proper terminology has something to do more
with "mutual literacy" or something like that.
>So far as I know, there is no major movement afoot to split the two.
A few people support it, and one of the main ones, the only one who
was actually working on the accidentally-created website, is a 15 year
old American living in Arizona. I mention this not to say that a 15
year old American living in Arizona can't possibly be right about
this, but rather to indicate what I understand *at the moment* to be
the situation on the ground.
Just curious, Jimbo, but how is my *age* any more relevant to /this
particular issue/ than the number of pets I have or my favourite
colours?
-Jin Junshu/Mark
Delirium wrote:
>But is it going to be possible from a language point of view? People
have talked about automatic conversion, but several others have
pointed out multiple academic studies on the subject, some from the
Unicode committees, that have concluded it's nearly impossible to do
automated conversion from one to the other (without fully solving AI
anyway), as it's not a one-to-one mapping. The only reasonable thing
I've heard proposed is doing a partial automatic conversion, and
flagging the characters that can't be automatically converted for
human intervention, but this doesn't sound like something that's going
to be implemented in
the forseeable future.
>
>-Mark
Exactly. Conversion between the two scripts is technically very
difficult. We can use the Chinese version of ms word to convert, but I
believe this may not be 100% legal and even if it is, it is not a good
solution because it is not a server-side solution.
-Mark/Jin Junshu
Hi all,
Chinese Wikipedia (zh.wikipedia.org) was started in October 2002. At
that time, almost all texts were in simplified Chinese, because the
first Chinese wikipedians are mainly from mainland China. (Being a
traditional Chinese user since birth, I was "scared away" when I first
went to zh: and saw that the whole site is in simp. Chinese.) But at
that time, most of the zh wikipedians agree that there should only be
one Chinese Wikipedia, but not two, because simp. and traditional
Chinese is one language actually, the difference being that some
characters are written in a different way and that wikipedians from
different part of the world have different names/terms for the same
object. (Just like a British would write "The centre of a sulphur atom
on a railway ." while an American would write "The center of a sulfur
atom on a railroad.") Most of the zh wikipedians can read both form of
characters, though we write in our respective native form. That's why
we want to have ONE zh: only.
We have been discussing on how to deal with this trad/simp problem
since the beginning. The consensus is that pages would be converted
between simp. and trad. according to the need of the reader/editor by
some automatic script or software. Though the development of such a
software has not started until recently (due to a lack of technical
assistance).
I am writing this mail because I see that zh-tw.wikipedia.org has been
set up. Being a long-time contributor to zh:, I feel quite frustrated
because it seems that all the discussion we have on how to solve this
problem are in vain.
Therefore I request that zh-tw.wikipedia.org and zh-cn.wikipedia.org
be redirected to zh.wikipedia.org.
Regards
Lorenzarius
The second round in the Wikipedia-Register battle of 2004 has been
published, and Andrew Orlowski promises a third. You have to chuckle
at his description of the Wikipedia community as "the Khmer Rouge in
diapers."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/07/khmer_rouge_in_daipers/
He has the advantage of being able to cherry pick the most acerbic,
typo ridden email rants in order to make his case. Then again, the
Register folks have no high ground here - they didn't spell their own
URL correctly ("daipers" [sic]).
--
Andrew Lih (User:Fuzheado)