Sheng Jiong wrote:
And lastly I just want to clarity Wikipedia's policy on setting up a new Wikipedia: if a group of native speakers want to set up a Wikipedia despite the fact that majority of the speakers of that language do not wish to do so, should we allow them to have a new Wikipedia? As in the case of Cantonese, even Hong Kongers are generally opposed to the idea, and should we still allow few advocates to have it?
I think the problem is that we need to define what the language is before we can determine whether the majority of the language's writers are in favor of it. For Wikipedia's purposes, only written languages are relevant, and it would seem that a majority of people who write in what they call "written Cantonese" are in favor of the encyclopedia. What people who *speak* Cantonese but write "standard Chinese" think isn't the issue, since Wikipedia is a written encyclopedia. Of course, the entire debate is over whether "written Cantonese" exists as a real language in the first place. That I don't know enough about to comment on, but it would help if anybody had any information on just how common this writing system is in Hong Kong, and how many people would be interested in writing on such a Wikipedia.
It might be worth noting that we had a similar argument over German earlier. There are many spoken German dialects, but most people who speak any of the dialects read and write in "standard German". However, recently some people have started writing in written forms of some of the dialects, and some wanted to create a Wikipedia for those dialects separate from the main German Wikipedia.
(The longstanding linguistic flamewar over "dialect" versus "language" looks to be a regular spillover into Wikipedia-l.)
-Mark