Neil Harris (usenet@tonal.clara.co.uk) [050211 02:48]:
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.
It's a fairly easy proposal to argue against: zh: has already reached critical mass and will keep growing, barring the vicissitues of the Chinese government (which is a force orthogonal to this argument).
Further argument against: it's a "compromise" with a position that is untenable to start with - trying to take volunteers who've come forward for a different idea to work on your own project rather than that one.
Further argument against: there is no natural reason why someone whose interest is captured by a Cantonese wikipedia should be forced to work on a Mandarin one first.
- d.