While there is still currently a wide margin in favour of a separate Cantonese Wikipedia (35-13), the new votes encouraged by Angela's posting have followed a distinct pattern just as I predicted:
Those people who placed votes against the proposal since Angela's post are all from areas where Mandarin is the local speech, with the exception of "Truth" and "Fanghong" whose origins I was unable to determine and Elian who is from Germany:
Zy26 -- Northeast China (Northern Mandarin) Truth -- unknown BenBenI -- Chengdu (Southern Mandarin) Fanghong -- unknown Alexcn -- Nanjing (Southern Mandarin/Northern Mandarin) Kren -- Singapore, Beijing (Beijing is Northern Mandarin; Singapore's Chinese are still a mostly Hokkien-, Teochew-, and Cantonese-speaking population, but Mandarin has been "adopted" for many years now thanks to the government liking to bedek kacang)
...whereas the origins of the more recent votes FOR the proposal are a bit more diverse:
Millosh -- Serbia E2m -- Portugal (or Brazil?) Ffootballchu -- Hong Kong (Cantonese) Oscar -- Netherlands (?)
Now, if we just count the votes of confirmed native Cantonese, Wu, Minnan, or other non-Mandarin Sinitic varieties' speakers:
Support: Pektiong (Minnan) Chun-hian (Minnan) Kaihsu (Minnan) Bourquie (Cantonese) Connie (Cantonese) Eternal (Cantonese) Jogloran (Cantonese) Felix Wan (Wu) Enochlau (Cantonese) CantoneseWiki (Cantonese) Ffootballchu (Cantonese)
Oppose: Hello World (Cantonese) Zektonic (Cantonese) Crosstimer (Cantonese) Jeromy~Yuyu (Cantonese)
That's still 11-4. And even if you only count Cantonese-speakers, you get 7-4.
What I'm worried about is that a busload of people from Beijing who have never heard of Yueyu-baihuawen will pile on their "oppose" votes, which as I noted before is a bit like allowing other Serbians to vote on whether or not Kosovo should be independent, or allowing all Indians and/or Pakistanis to vote on the future of Kashmir, or allowing everybody in the world to vote for EU parliament or US president.
Mark
On 05/09/05, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
"Some dialect of English" implies that Cantonese is merely a dialect of Chinese.
Anyhow, if a Wikipedia in an English dialect were requested, and the person organising the vote sent private e-mails to all people claiming that to be their home dialect notifying them of the vote, those people would most likely vote "against" the creation of such a Wikipedia.
Why should we leave the future of a Cantonese Wikipedia up to Mandarin speakers? That would be like not only letting (which is what we're already sort of doing by allowing non-speakers to vote), but actually ENCOURAGING all of Serbia to vote in a referendum on Kosovar independence, which is by no rational measure fair.
Given the current results of the vote, and the fact that a huge portion of the people who voted are actually native Cantonese speakers (on both sides -- in fact,
Mark
On 05/09/05, Angela beesley@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/5/05, Walter van Kalken walter@vankalken.net wrote:
I found our policy with regards to Chinese languages stranger and stranger. We do not do this if we open another Germanic or Romanic language pedia!
It's not policy. There is no policy for creating new languages (just a draft one at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposed_policy_for_wikis_in_new_languages). I was just giving my opinion, and I feel that the relevant communities should be told about any language proposals, not only Sinetic ones. If some dialect of English were proposed, it would be very unfair to try to hide that from the existing English language communities within Wikimedia.
Angela. _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
-- SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM POSSIT MATERIARI ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE