is, all Chinese dialects other than Mandarin remain a spoken language, and extremely few books/articles/etc. are published in dialects.
...citation? How do you know? From what studies are you pulling this information from? You can't just say it and assume it to be true.
From my common sense and my frequent visits to bookshops and libraries
all around the world! I have never, in my entire life, seen a single book that is written *completely* in any dialects in China, apart from Mandarin. And as I have said before, apart from some tabloids in Hong Kong, no Chinese newspapers in the world would write in dialects too!
I mean, many printed ads in Hong Kong that are written in Cantonese/Yue, using puns and so on. Many slogans of those products are written in Cantonese/Yue. The most recent example I can think of, in fact, is a government ad (from the Equal Opportunity Committee) trying to discourage racism.
I'm not sure about that honestly. But are the books completely written in Cantonese? Or just some puns? And slogons are quite, quite different from encyclopedias, where millions of words have to been written.
fact we do not even know what writing system we should use should there be a Chinese dialect Wikipedia.
Well, I would suggest Hanzi script first and consider whether we should do the romanization later on, though I think romanization would be too confusing to really be useful.
That is not the point! It is not important what *you* think. It is important whether our readers can understand? Some HKers may, but how about people in Guangdong? If you are writing an encyclopedia for them and they have not even seen such characters, what is the point. Reminder you one more time: There is no standardised writing system for Cantonese/Wu/etc. dialects.
[[User:Formulax]]