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(a)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(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 9/5/05, Walter van Kalken
<walter(a)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.
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