About a month ago, Shizhao requested that the wiki at
minnan.wikipedia.org be moved to
poj.wikipedia.org, because the writing
there is Taiwanese, and not representative of Min Nan as a whole:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2004-July/011003.html
Kaishu Tai ridiculed the POJ term as "meaningless", and requested that
the wiki be moved to
zh-min-nan.wikipedia.org instead.
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2004-July/011013.html
I didn't know who to believe, and although I made some attempt to make
sense out of it, the end result was the status quo.
Just today, I did some reading of my own on the subject. The best
reference I found was this:
http://www.de-han.org/taiwan/chuliau/pehoeji-v.pdf
Other information sources are:
http://203.64.42.21/iug/ungian/POJ/siausit/2002/2002POJGTH/lunbun%5CK2-kloe…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_%28linguistics%29
Contrary to what Shizhao said, it seems that the Peh-oe-ji orthography,
as seen on
minnan.wikipedia.org, is not even representative of
Taiwanese, let alone Min Nan. In fact it is only used by a small
minority. Now I have every respect for the goals of those who promote
Peh-oe-ji, but I don't think Wikipedia should assign subdomains which
support one political viewpoint over another.
Currently the predominant form of writing in Taiwan is "Traditional
Chinese", given the code zh-tw. Writing of this form is commonly used on
zh.wikipedia.org. The Taiwanese people who write in
zh.wikipedia.org
speak the exact same language as those who write on
minnan.wikipedia.org. That language is a form of Min Nan, referred to in
Taiwan as Ho-lo-oe.
Based on the information I have now, I would like to move
minnan.wikipedia.org to
peh-oe-ji.wikipedia.org. I'm expecting
objections to this from the users of that wiki, who seem to be keen
promoters of the Peh-oe-ji orthography. All the same, I'd like to hear
any comments or objections anyone has.
-- Tim Starling