On Sat, 12 Feb 2005 06:02:20 +0800, Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, 11 Feb 2005 14:31:09 -0700, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
So this means you believe a Cantonese Wikipedia will have no users and will not be sustainable?
You're sure changing your tune fast. A minute ago, it was "My pet project will lose resources!!!", but when you saw that didn't go over too well with anybody you change it to "I feel deeply for these people, and my primary concern is that they'll be lonely and I think their minds are being controlled by Mark."
As usual, wild exaggerations by Mark. Please find a quote or a pointer to anything I've said that resembles "My pet project will lose resources!!!" It's getting tired.
They're not meant to be quote-quotes. And they're not exaggerations. "
To me, that means encouraging most of the labour towards making a "Mandarin" Wikipedia. As a side effect, Wikipedia can be an experiment in Internet democracy or a way to preserve/promote languages. But the primary goal should be to write an encyclopedia.
One done in Mandarin will benefit over 1 billion people who simply don't have a good free encyclopedia, in both senses of the word - free as in beer, and free as in freedom. The faster we get there, the better. And I don't think that's a selfish notion.", I simply quoted it as Alex Kwan characterised it.
I just love how you try to say "Alex Kwan, speakers of Cantonese and Wu, I am right, you should side with me because Mark is giving you delusions", basically.
If I recall correctly, zh.wikipedia's history does not involve having the interface translated and a critical mass of people and articles /before/ the creation of the subdomain, and even when articles started to be created this was hardly true at first.
I think it was a pretty safe bet that the language of 1 billion speakers would be started sooner than later. Also, zh: was started in October 2002 by Mountain who drove the development of Unicode support in Wikipedia. So this is beyond critical mass - it was leadership in the whole WP project.
The difference here is that there are already language-speaking supporters PRIOR to subdomain creation. And I don't see how leadership in the whole WP project has _anything_ to do with critical mass of articles and users.
And just because you have relatives who speak five Chinese dialects doesn't mean you can't be a linguistic imperialist.
<groan>
Hey, it's true.
Stalin, the master of linguistic imperialism, came from a Georgian-speaking family.
You're on the verge of realizing Godwin's Law.
No, not really. You seem to misunderstand Godwin's law. Stalin was a linguistic imperialist. He made drastic changes to Soviet linguistic policy with the intention to quash regional languages, including the Georgian of his family and his schoolfriends. His birthname was actually "Iosep Jugashvili", a very Georgian name. If Stalin can be a linguistic imperialist on such a massive scale working against the language of his hearth, surely you can be a linguistic imperialist on a much more minor scale without your family exempting you from such accusations.
Mark