I say, all those who are native speakers of the language and are interested in building a Wikipedia in it should be allowed to vote. It shouldn't be anybody else's decision if they get a Wikipedia in their language or not.
Mark
On Mon, 21 Feb 2005 13:13:36 -0800 (PST), Felix Wan felixwiki@earthsphere.org wrote:
On Mon, February 21, 2005 1:13 am, Sheng Jiong said:
And remind you, if you have not already known, one of Chinese Wikipedia's founding member, [[User:Lorenzarius]], was from Hong Kong. And he was one of the main opposer of splitting Chinese Wikipedia into Simplified and Traditional version before there was a conversion script. And [[User:Tomchiukc]] is still an active Hong Kong Wikipedian.
I don't understand why that is relevant to the issue.
I will very much like to hear their opinions on this issue. They may bring some good insights. Can you invite them or should I?
Sorry, I misread your words. I thought you mean that there are only 3 Hong Kong Wikipedians in Chinese Wikipedia.
I think mailing list now has become a place that is not so useful for discussions: there are only a few left who is speaking on this issue. I think we can have a page on meta to discuss the issue, and we can bring in more people who are interested (and are kept unaware of the issue).
I think that will be a good idea. I certainly want to hear opinions from more people. What is the proper procedure to start a page on meta to discuss the issue? Is there any name space restriction or things like that? Perhaps a sub page of [[Requests for new languages]]?
For decision making, the board has the right to have the final say. But in most cases I think we should let the community decide first, and it can take the form of either consensus(if we can reach in the end), or a vote(which is not a preferred way of resolution, but in my opinion better than a board decision).
I think it is meaningless to continue arguing about the same things again and again, since none of us is likely to change our opinions now. So I have summarised some points that I think both sides can agree on (feel free to correct me, or add in more):
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)
Not going into the details, I generally agree with the above statements. Assuming good faith, I will take your previous assertions like "written Cantonese does not exist" or "Cantonese is not a written language" as hyperbole, a figure of speech.
The reason to give examples of written Cantonese was to prove its existence and illustrate it extent of usage, not to prove that it is as widely used now as Baihuawen was in the 1920s.
Then we shall summaries our differences, have more debate if necessary. And a consensus cannot be reached. let us put it to a vote.
formulax
More discussion is always good, but I am not sure whether a vote will be fair when people speaking a minority language wants to start a new Wikipedia. People speaking the majority language will always win if they want to.
Another important question is: who should be eligible to vote? The whole Wikimedia community? The zh: community? Everyone who can speak Chinese?
Felix Wan
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