This policy, Felix, would also disallow prestigious languages, such as Catalan and Frisian, which although they have many speakers are spoken almost exclusively by bilinguals, and I would remind everybody to keep in mind that Cantonese and Wu have far more speakers than either Catalan or Frisian.
If you raise the similarity argument, this would be a blow against our having separate Punjabi, Hindi, and Urdu Wikipedias, against separate Danish, Swedish, and Bokmål Wikipedias, and against separate Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian Wikipedias.
The difference with Singlish and Ebonics -> English and Cantonese and Wu -> Mandarin is that there is decidedly a continuum between Singlish and Ebonics -> "Standard" English, but not between Cantonese and Wu -> Mandarin, and that Singlish and Ebonics have no widely agreed-upon written form and that nobody would want to write a Singlish Wikipedia anyways (it is very low prestige and thanks to gov't campaigning it is regarded by most Singaporeans as poor English although experts disagree). [an exception is that Singlish is often used in instant messages and internet postings, but even tabloids don't use it and it has a relatively small number of native speakers when compared to Cantonese and Wu].
This is not to say that if somebody proposes and Ebonics or a Singlish Wikipedia I will be totally opposed, but I do not feel that the case is as strong as with Cantonese and Wu.
I do not see why we need a restrictive language policy when in the past our policy has been any and all - if the speakers of a speech variety want a separate Wikipedia, they are granted it, no matter how similar the two are, with the general exception of conlangs with few speakers. Our policy so far has worked fine.
The perception that it hasn't worked derives from the fact that critics of the current policy, who have little justification for their criticism, are still very vocal.
I personally don't see what would be wrong with allowing speakers of Ebonics or Singlish their own Wikipedia, as long as we could be certain it wasn't simply desired because the parties involved wanted to be able to insert their POV into articles.
I hope that people will take this e-mail at least somewhat seriously instead of saying "We do not value anything Mark says even though others have expressed similar concerns and nothing he is saying is very outrageous".
Mark
On Thu, 10 Feb 2005 12:32:40 -0800 (PST), Felix Wan felixwiki@earthsphere.org wrote:
On Thu, February 10, 2005 11:14 am, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales said:
David Gerard wrote:
The thing is you're still presupposing that an existing wikipedia has a right to block the existence of a new Wikipedia.
I ask the Board: is this the case?
Not speaking here for the board, but only offering my own tentative opinion, the answer to this is "no" in the general case, but that such factors can be a part of the overall decision.
Nice to hear that. I have never taken the resource argument seriously, and no one here should. But I do take the similarity argument very seriously.
I am told repeatedly by many people that while Mandarian and Cantonese are mutually unintelligible in the spoken form, in written form they are the same. This is pretty compelling for me.
I don't know how to convince you, but even the written forms are not the same. They are just similar, perhaps 80%-90% intelligible, depending on the subject matter. The written form eliminates phonetic differences, leaving only differences in vocabulary and grammar. Who told you that they are the same?
If there is a significant population of people who can not read/write standard written Chinese, but *can* read/write Cantonese in some writing system that is different, then I want to learn about that, because that would be a very compelling factor in the other direction.
The fact is, every literate Cantonese speaker can read standard written Chinese, because that is what is taught in schools, not because written Cantonese and written Mandarin are the same.
Do we want to set a language policy to disallow a Wikipedia if almost all the literate speakers of that regional speech can read the written form of another prestiged regional speech? I am OK with that. That may be good for Wikipedias to limit the number of versions. We just need to make it clear and apply it consistently.
That policy will disallow Ebonics (African American Vernacular English) and Singlish (Singaporean English) even though some linguists classify them as creoles, but will not disallow Tok Pisin (we do have tpi:), which is a creole with a distinct writing system.
I am not familiar with the European languages. I remember I heard about Catalan and three versions of Dutch, or something else. Can other people fill me in on how the language policy is applied to other regional speeches?
Perhaps this is a good time for us to set a fair and workable language policy. We want our decision to set a good precedent, not a bad one.
Felix Wan
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l