On 9/25/05, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
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).
I have a hard time believing this, since Littlalex was in fact an ardent supporter of a Cantonese Wiki the last time around.
That seems a bit silly to me. If you take a look at the vote, and exclude all non-Cantonese speakers (at least, as far as I am aware):
Consider the folks who were at the meeting part of the "no" votes.
That _still_ gives a majority for "support". Now, just because 7 people at a meetup agreed "unanimously", according to you (which I still doubt, given the fact that it would mean a drastic change in position for Littlalex),
If you look at the photo from the meeting, you'll see I am sitting right next to Little Alex. But why not ask her yourself?
You are still spreading the silly idea that a Cantonese Wikipedia will take away lots of people and resources from zhwiki. Why not use an example based on experience -- zh-min-nan?? How much did that take away?
Your exaggeration again. I never said it will take away "lots of people and resources" away. But every bit put behind zh: would help. The exaggerated case helps you try to make your case, but that's your error.
It's a shame we don't have an audio or video recording of this meetup. I sort of doubt the veracity of your claims here. And if these people have these feelings, they're welcome to vote, as they have always been.
LOL.
The meeting was attended by eight Wikipedians and two guests. The summary is sitting on a public wiki that anyone who attended could amend. Shek translated it into Chinese, so that's one more check on the record. Feel free to leave a message for any and all the folks who showed up, and ask for verification of the meeting observations.
But you, sitting in Arizona have a better sense of it, I'm sure.
This is bordering on tinfoil hat territory now.
- 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.
I'd not be surprised if you were the one who brought this up in the first place, trying to make it sound logical when it makes no sense whatsoever.
Wrong. It was Mcy_jerry who brought it up, talking about the generally poor article quality of the average zh: article compared to others.
"splitting the effort" is not going to happen. There will be no mass-exodus.
"Mass exodus" - these are your words, not mine or those of anyone at the meetup. It is not a case that was made.
- 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.
Well, others have testified here to the exact opposite. How are we to sort out which is correct, and which is not?
Again, this shows the whole flaw with the "Sinitic policy" vote, because there was no finding of fact laid out or debated to provide proper background on the merits of the idea, not to mention the selective publicity it received. It became a straight up or down vote with the flaw of roping Wu and Yue into one bin, pandering to the inclusionist, embrace anything-and-everything-attitude at the expense of any subject knowledge or first hand experience with the language, culture or issues.
The reason why I (and others) have not participated in the vote, is because of the major flaws with it. Participating in it would be implicitly endorsing the flawed methodology and structure setup by the originator of it (ie. you). The hope was that the existing discussion would dissipate with folks realizing the invalid "vote". But since it keeps being brought up as an indication of the will of the community, here's directly why it's not only nonbinding, but flawed and useless.
A few folks commented to me they did not want to get involved in the rancorous nature of the vote or the mailing list debate, even though they had opinions on the matter. To me, that's understandable and disappointing. I can only speak for myself here.
A properly run vote would have:
- Laid out the issues in an NPOV-like manner using community input, with historical background and a preset amount of time for crafting the parameters of the vote. A list of liks to generic articles about Chinese and Cantonese is not good enough. - Had separate voting sections for Wu, Yue and Hakka, like other proper votes in Wikipedia. See how reform of speedy deletion was handled: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Criteria_for_speedy_deletion/Proposal - Made an open call for participation in all relevant communities. Certainly, not advertising it on wikizh-l until late was problematic. Even the after-the-fact advertisement was not adequate, as the yea/nay lists had already been influenced by one particular set of constituents. - Avoided singling out folks right away as this one did with Shizhao and myself as the main opposition. I don't particularly care about being singled out, but it's improper to personalize a vote on the issues.
So we get to this point - you have somehow disregarded your own advice:
"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."
The fact is with the prevailing mood - the case for creating a Wikipedia has to meet a very high threshold with respected members of the Wikipedia community, and it's not there now.
-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)