David Gerard wrote:
Tony Sidaway (minorityreport@bluebottle.com) [050210 23:50]:
David Gerard said:
If we have a precedent that zh: can block the existence of a Cantonese Wikipedia, can en: block Quenya? Please?
I hope we have no such precedent. Allowing the speakers of a rival language to veto the production of a Wikipedia would not be right.
Fuzheado's arguments appear to be along those lines - in particular the argument that zh: needs the resources instead (as if volunteers are employees who can be reassigned at will, even assuming the argument it needs the resources so desperately is valid).
Their observations (and I've seen some potentially persuasive arguments on either side in the Chinese Wikipedia discussion though I have not investigated it closely) should not be dismissed as irrelevant, but they shouldn't be allowed to block an otherwise viable Wikipedia.
We have Wikipedias for things that are clearly dialects; Cantonese is mutually-unintelligible with Mandarin.
But let's start a Quenya Wikipedia instead. Hell, that's not grossly insulting! At all!
- d.
As I understand it, the argument against creating Wikipedias in Chinese local languages is that it will diffuse the effort needed in creating the Chinese Wikipedia. Whilst I have some sympathy with this argument, the justification for it will get progressively weaker as the Chinese Wikipedia grows in size and number of editors.
At some point, the diffusion of effort argument will become indefensible. However, that moment will always be defined as "sometime in the future" by die-hard supporters of that argument.
Here's a compromise proposal: the Chinese Wikipedia should be regarded as having succeeded beyond doubt when it has reached an article count of N articles, where N might be, say, 50,000. At that point, the barrier to creating other Chinese-language should be dropped. At the current rate of growth, that will probably be sometime next year.
Here's the nice, counter-intuitive consequence to this proposal: it provides an incentive to alternative-Chinese-language proponents to add content to the mainstream-Chinese Wikipedia, and recruit more people to do so, so that it will grow as rapidly as possible. When the 50,000 target is reached, it is probable that many of these new editors will start to concentrate on their own local language versions; however, many of them will, I imagine, also continue to work on the main Chinese Wikipedia, and there will be a major incentive for content to flow in translation between the different Chinese Wikipedias. So it's a win-win proposal.
This is also a fairly hard proposal to argue against, given that it is parametric, and ultra-hard-liners can simply suggest very high values of N (possibly infinity), and those who want the immediate creation of local Chinese Wikipedias will find that their proposal reduces to setting N to, or below, the current article count. I would imagine that many people wound accept as reasonable some value in the range 20,000 - 400,000. Then (I hope) the only question is what method to determine the consensus value of N -- arithmetic mean, geometric mean, mode, or median?
-- Neil