English people and Japanese people also have the same universe, sun, planet, species, maths, logic, and universal history, yet we have separate Wikipedias for English and Japanese... By your logic, there shouldn't even be a zh: and we should only have one Wikipedia (which would probably be en: although I would much prefer is: or lb: or something of that sort)
You just missed my point. That's my fault not to express my point clearly. I mean we have the same vocabulary in most cases, we call things using the same name and same concepts in most cases, this is important, this means we enjoy the same language. The writing system is different, but most of them can be mapped each other.
So what? One could make the same arguments for not having separate Wikipedias for different languages.
You can't synchronize en: and jp: easily, because they are different language. But we can someday find a way to synchronize zh-cn: and zh-tw: easily. That is the different.
But the difference between the two isn't merely a "difference of character sets". Rather than converting on the level of the individual character which will inevitably produce poor results, it is nessecary to convert documents on the level of lexemes, for which one needs some sort of artificial intelligence capable of separating Chinese texts into individual lexemes before conversion. It is also nessecary to convert names of countries, special terminology
Did you not try the link I mentioned above? please visit http://fengzz.net/wiki/ to try. We are using some markup to solve this lexemes problem, and it works.
I agree with you that it is inconvenient for traditional Chinese users now. and I think the request on creating zh-tw version is proper. But we’d better have a good evaluation of different solutions before we decide. In my opinion, to keep a single version is benefit for future, and this is also the consensus of the Chinese Wikipedia community now. Maybe we should discuss this issue more.