On 11/09/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)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