On 9/24/05, Mark Williamson <node.ue(a)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%…
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.
[...]