On Wed, March 9, 2005 10:21 am, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales said:
Yes. I think a lot of difficulty has been caused by high emotions surrounding a type of case which is significantly different from Hopi. Dialects are much more difficult to decide about, as are cases where the written language is the same but the spoken language different.
In cases such as these, it is very hard to know where to draw the lines.
I must comment on this in case people may misunderstand the current state of discussion about Chinese regional varieties.
On Mon, February 21, 2005 1:13 am, Sheng Jiong said:
The current Chinese Wikipedia is purely written in Baihuawen, which is largely based on Mandarin.
Baihuawen is unversially understood by all literate Chinese, regardless of the dialects they speak.
Although written Cantonese is used, especially in informal writings, it is still uncommon for people to use Cantonese as a formal writing (eg. newspaper articles/books/academic works)
Although there is always dispute whether Cantonese is a language or a dialect, at least after some discussions, everyone agrees that written Cantonese is distinct from Baihuawen (standard written Chinese largely based on Mandarin). So this is not the case of same written language, different spoken language.
My experience with Wikipedia had been generally good before I got involved in the Cantonese Wikipedia request. It was extremely frustrating to debate when someone appealled to his contributions to Wikipedia, and some other people seemed to acknowledge that previous contribution is important and that because some unwelcomed people support a project, it will be rejected by the community. Someone determined to ignore the facts, no matter how hard I tried to present the case.
While I set up the test site in good faith to test support and to test a valid concern that written Cantonese could be too similar to Baihuawen, the response of the opposition was simply frustrating. Someone kept on complaining on the rate of growth, ignoring the fact that there are some significant contributions despite the lack of advertisement. Someone said that because most of the article titles were the same, the two writing systems are the same, and the difference was only a matter of writing style.
Fortunately, that issue has not been extended to a full scale POV war on the Wikipedia articles in any version. Interested people may still read related articles to get a fuller picture. I can only hope that such a POV war will never happen, just to prevent the Cantonese Wikipedia from being created.
I am very disappointed.
Can someone tell me what is the proper way to have this issue discussed by more people? What is the proper procedure to open a project page in Meta? Should I just open a page and hope that it will survive VfD?
Long time Wikimedians, do not know how frustrating it is for new comers to know how we should do things? We were encourage to be bold, but not told of the real community taboos, not warned that we must respond to messages, or someone may put us on RfC, say that we are incooperative and ban us forever. I spent a lot of time to help one user out of that.
Can the community be more friendly to new comers who may not understand the tricks and have not contributed much yet?
Felix Wan