On 11/09/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
Mark Williamson wrote:
Jimbo, my whole point in informing an international mailinglist, and ALL people who listed themselves as Cantonese speakers (including a few who ended up voting against a Cantonese Wikipedia), was that it seemed to me unfair to give Mandarin-only users an extra tip-off when no other community got one.
Makes zero sense to me. Mandarin-only speakers are affected by this, and deserve a voice.
And they have a voice. I don't think they deserve a specific point-out though, I mentioned it on an international mailinglist which should be enough.
Zy26, "oppose", from "Northeast China" [zhongguo dongbei] (a Mandarin-speaking area) BenBenI, "oppose", from Chengdu (a Mandarin-speaking city) Alexcn, "oppose", from Nanjing (a Mandarin-speaking city)
And these people should be silenced?
Did I say that?
If Kosovo wants to be internationally recognised as completely independent from Serbia, who should vote on it? All of Serbia, or just Kosovars? Certainly, if it is up to ALL of Serbia, they will remain part of Serbia, while if it is up to the Kosovars only, they may very well not.
This is a wildly inaccurate analogy.
Here's a better analogy: if Kosovars want a separate *wikipedia* from the Serbians, for political reasons rather than linguistic reasons, who should vote on it? All of Serbian Wikipedia? Or just Kosovars? (Or, my position, everyone who takes an interest, with the poll widely advertised to everyone who might be affected, including Bosnians, Croatians, etc.)
What you've missed here is that the vast majority of Kosovars speak Albanian, which is only distantly related to Serbian (on the same level as, say, English and Russian), and thus already have their own Wikipedia.
If Kosovars wanted a separate Wikipedia from the Albanian Wikipedia, what would my opinion be? That everybody should be informed, but that only Kosovars, if anyone, deserves to have it pointed out directly to them in such a manner.
If it's obviously an unreasonable split, the majority of Kosovars will oppose it.
Before the vote, everyone who wanted a Cantonese Wikipedia was thinking, "what's the holdup?? how is it that andrew lih and shengjiong ran over us with a steamroller in the court of Jimbopinion, but we had the majority and we cited sources to support our argument when they didn't???". That was the motivation for the vote, to have something that screamed for attention by giving a concrete message of how many people support it, that would be difficult to ignore.
You raise many valid points, to be sure. But it is pretty easy to ignore a poll which is admittedly rigged to exclude those most likely to dissent.
You keep using the word "rigged". I did not exclude anybody. Again, I:
1) Informed the international mailinglist; and 2) Informed all people with Cantonese-N templates who allowed other users to send them e-mail.
There is no rule on the voting page that restricts Mandarin-only speakers from voting. If they're not subscribed to wikipedia-l, that's their fault. And if anybody else wanted to inform any person or group of people on their own, nobody was stopping them.
You did not inform Mandarin speakers. That's a pretty egregious error.
That is your _opinion_. Whether or not any given person thinks I should've explicitly informed the Mandarin-speaking community depends largely on their views of the relationship between Cantonese and Mandarin. Both you and Angela have shown through various comments so far that you're not entirely convinced that they're very different at all in written form.
I would recommend that you think about who is likely to be interested, and inform them. I would not complain at all if no one posted to the Hungarian Wikipedia village pump.
I would think that all Wikipedia communities, or at least all minority-language Wikipedia communities, would be equally interested.
It assumes that Mandarin speakers are dishonest or politically motivated, and not just a little bit, but to the extent that their voice should be silenced. That's a personal attack.
That's your personal conclusion, and it's wrong. I also purposefully did not inform the English, Malay, or Japanese Wikipedias. Does that mean I think speakers of these languages are dishonest or politically motivated? Or does it mean that I think they're less likely to be as well-informed as native Cantonese speakers?
I trust Cantonese speakers. I trust Mandarin speakers. Careful thoughtful reasoned discussion will help us all come to a consensus about this. Silencing people deliberately not informing them of a vote that you know to be relevant to them does not help.
"That you know to be relevant to them" -- that's just it. This vote isn't particularly relevant to Mandarin speakers. As Wooddoo at zhwiki put it, "對中文wiki有什麼負面影響?" (what possible negative effect could this have on the Chinese wiki?). Nobody answered that question.
Or this, which describes one of the things that has happened since the post to zhwiki village pump (this time from Ffarr):
"在提出所謂「粵語的書寫和中文很像」「粵語和中文只是發音唸法上的差別」這樣的意見 ... 假如中文版維基不能容納粵語,但又要說它的書寫跟中文沒什麼差別,這是不是很大的矛盾呢?希望想要反對粵語維基的人能思考一下,提出更好的理由來反對。"
(Opinions like "Cantonese and Chinese writing are the same" and "the difference between Cantonese and Chinese is just pronunciation" have been expressed ... I hope that Chinese Wikipedians who want to oppose the Cantonese Wikipedia will think a little first and come up with better reasons than these.)
It has never been an issue because I have never before seen a case in which someone deliberately rigged a poll by not including relevant people in the announcement.
Again, that it was "rigged" is your opinion. Just because I didn't inform a community to which I didn't think it was particularly relevant doesn't mean I am evil (you didn't say "evil", of course, and that's worth noting because you are the kind of person who likes to make it clear that you don't say stuff like that).
Mark