Mark Williamson node.ue at gmail.com Fri Dec 24 03:03:54 UTC 2004
I see no problem here, but undoubtedly it will be cast in an extremely negative light by some of the users on zh: who will probably oppose it on the grounds that it will take oh-so-many valuable users away from the oh-so-poor zh.wikipedia.
I am a native Chinese speaker. I really don't think this may happen before hell freezes over. Believe it or not, written Cantonese is nearly indistinguishable from written Mandarin (or any other Chinese dialect). There are houndreds of co-existing dialects around. We have been using them for thousands of years. But we write in the same way.
So far there are no Jamaican, South African, Philipino or Texan English Wikipedias for these English dialect speakers. There is no need to setup a Cantonese Wikipedia following the same logic.
I have collected some good examples of formal Cantonese writing on the Chinese Wikipedia's talk page:
http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:%E8%81%8A%E5%A4%A9
or
http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:%E8%81%8A%E5%A4%A9#.E7.B2.A4.E8.AF.AD...
Personally I don't believe that setting up a Cantonese Wiki would drain the Chinese Wikipedia in anyway. You have created a nearly non-functioning Taiwanese Wikipedia. It has less than 600 articles and only 49 contributors. People are not using it.
http://zh-min-nan.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Recentchanges&...
http://zh-min-nan.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics
As you can see, there are less than five active Taiwanese contributors. Sometimes a day's job was totally done by one user (usually A-giĆ¢u, the sysop, she has made 4500 edits out of less than 8000 total edits). Why? Because every educated person in Taiwan knows how to read and write Chinese. It's been used for the past hundreds of years. Very few people knows how to write using the system used by the Taiwanese Wikipedia. I am living in Taiwan. I can speak Taiwanese. My mother's a native speaker. But I cannot read a single sentence without banging my head against the wall. Only a handful of books were published using that system. Most Taiwanese (or Minnan dialect) speakers decide to use Chinese Wikipedia. Most of us simply cannot contribute.
Network bandwidth is cheap. Disk storage is cheap. A useless encyclopedia is cheap. I don't mind to see you setup a Cantonese project. It will not drain Chinese contributors. because it will not be used by anyone. In the end, it will be used by a only few. Possibly, it will become another one man band. Next time, start a New York English (they don't speak English, do they?) encyclopedia. You'll know what I mean.
Best regards, Jiaqing Bao http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Toytoy