Andrew Lih wrote:
Don't consider the lack of direct challenge to you as a sign of agreement or endoresement of the methodology. It could very well be that folks have tuned out the more farcical arguments, like how announcing a poll about Chinese language issues to Chinese Wikipedians is not necessary.
It doesn't happen many times but I kinda agree with node on this issue. Never before has it been made an issue that people from another languagewikipedia should be informed when a new languagewikipedia from a related language is being requested. Never in the two years that I have been on wikimediaprojects has it been an issue. Now only for Cantonese it is being made an issue. I find it very strange that Jimbo and Angela all of a sudden come with these statements while in the past they have not.
Fact is that any attempt to create a wikipedia for other chinese languages has been torpedo'ed (or they tried to) sofar by mandarin speakers. Who seem to agree with the Beijing government that any atempt to create information in another Chinese language should be surpressed, fact is it is an official policy by the Chinese government to discourage the use of anything but Mandarin. Question is should we adhere by the policies created in Beijing or use our own independent mindset? And yes the fact that all ZH.Wikipedians feel that they should be heard on the issue makes me feel it is a political issue rather than a normal one. When the Frysian wikipedia and the Limburgish wikipedias were created no-one on nl: was heard. And probably a couple would have voted against it if they knew it, as the feeling is those two are not necessary as our official language is dutch and everyone speaks it. Although the other language requests that are on now for other dutch dialects have been presented in the village pump, and people voiced opinions against it. No one will even think about going to meta and tell they are against it. Because they feel it is up to speakers of the languages in question to decide for themselves. Why do Mandarin speakers feel they have to block requests for other sinetic languages? It beats me .... apart from being told by their government to be against it. I personally feel that if a majority of native speakers of a language want a pedia they should be granted their request no matter how many other non-speakers of their language are against it!
The arguing that requesting a Cantonese wikipedia is the same as requesting an american english wikipedia is in my opinion a bad argument. American english and English english are mutuably intelligible. Cantonese and Mandarin are not! And they are written in different scripts according to 2 Hokkien Chinese Thai comedians that I work with day in day out (they might also be politically motivated with their answers as their parents were with the KMT and had to flee China)
Walter van Kalken (Waerth)