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."
You should be more worried about sustainability of Wikipedias which have few people committed to using them, not something which has a few people committed to it like this proposal.
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.
And just because you have relatives who speak five Chinese dialects doesn't mean you can't be a linguistic imperialist.
Stalin, the master of linguistic imperialism, came from a Georgian-speaking family.
Mark
On Sat, 12 Feb 2005 04:50:34 +0800, Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, 11 Feb 2005 12:03:45 -0800 (PST), Felix Wan felixwiki@earthsphere.org wrote:
Even though I support the creation of a Cantonese Wikipedia, I will oppose writing Cantonese in zh: for the obvious pragmatic reason: every literate Cantonese speaker can read written Mandarin (standard Chinese), but the reverse is not true. Unfair, but that is the fact of life.
My primary concern is that everyone here understand the facts before making the decision. We live in a real world. We may deny Cantonese Wikipedia due to political, public relation, or pragmatic reasons, but let's be honest and state the reason. If we pretend that it is just because the two writing systems are the same, people will come again and again to demonstrate that they are different.
The community should nurture folks starting a new Wikipedia in a different dialect/language, as long as there is a critical mass of people, articles and interface translation. Again, my main concern has always been that a wiki with one person can be a lonely place. For example around SE Asia, I've been evangelizing for the smaller Wikipedias. Some have been successful, such as Malay, but sadly others have not, like Khmer (Cambodia).
Let's reframe this discussion not as the desire to "deny" a Wikipedia, but rather a way to be good stewards of new Wikipedias and launch them in good stead. The problem I have is in language enthusiasts (ie. Mark) encouraging the creation of new Wikipedias left-and-right just to get another notch on the post without regard to sustainability. Remember this is not an either/or proposition - folks can work on zh: and work on a dialect-specific version as well.
The honest dialogue is welcome given the bizarre sensational comments such as "eventually under increasing pressure from linguistic imperialists like Andrew, local Chinese vernaculars will be gone completely."
As there are five Chinese dialects represented among my immediate relatives, I got a chuckle out of it.
-Andrew (User:Fuzheado) _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l