On 9/24/05, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
Since it's now been 4 days over 2 weeks since a posting about this was made at the zhwiki village pump, as Angela proposed, and the voting is currently at 44-15, still a large margin of "support" votes.
Therefore, I am re-submitting the request.
The issue was discussed at the Hong Kong Wikipedian gathering last week, which is important since HK is the most prominent place in the world where Cantonese is used in official government communication, school teaching and the media.
The conclusion was emphatic among the Cantonese speakers. The consensus was - "not at this time." In fact, it was unanimous. (See below for full description of the meetup).
This was not a group without expertise. Among those present - Lorenzarius, one of the original zh: Wikipedians; Little Alex, currently studying for a degree in translation; Mcy_jerry, studying medicine in Chinese University (an institution coping with Mandarin/Cantonese/English issues as the medium of instruction); and Simon Shek, Carlsmith, W.F. Siu, Mapocathy, all folks who've grown up in the mixed language school environment.
And to quote from Mark's previous message:
"The whole point here is that Waerth and I both think it's unfair to let anybody but the actual language community make decisions about whether or not they should get a Wikipedia, with exceptions for artificial languages perhaps." (Sat Sep 10 20:58:59 UTC 2005, http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2005-September/041477.html)
This seems clear this idea should put this out to pasture, for now.
-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)
Recap of September18, 2005 HK Wikipedia meetup: http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:%E8%81%9A%E4%BC%9A/2005%E9%A6%99%E6%B... or http://tinyurl.com/apmch
Excerpt related to Cantonese Wikipedia: [...] Obviously, one of the biggest issues was Cantonese Wikipedia. After discussing it for a while, there was consensus (in fact unanimity) that though there is legitimate and desirable use for vernacular written Cantonese in casual use, arts, film, newspaper columns and the like, the conclusion about Cantonese Wikipedia was - "not at this time."
Several things stood out:
* Current state of Chinese Wikipedia. There was agreement that the general quality of the average article in Chinese Wikipedia is relatively poor, even though it has 40,000+ articles. The recent stats on "short articles" showed zh: contained unusually high number of them, and empirically Mcyjerry made the point that they are generally lacking in content. Folks felt that it was more important to shore up the existing zh: Wikipedia instead of splitting the effort.
* Universities and Cantonese use. Mcyjerry and Lorenzarius, students at Chinese University of Hong Kong explained that their science and medicine classes were not done in Cantonese, and if they were it would be confusing. They can elaborate more as to why, but Chinese University was setup to promote Chinese education in a (then) British Colony.
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