Andrew Lih ti 2005/2/2 EP 10:35 sia-kong:
To me, that means encouraging most of the labour
towards making a
"Mandarin" Wikipedia. As a side effect, Wikipedia can be an experiment
in Internet democracy or a way to preserve/promote languages. But the
primary goal should be to write an encyclopedia.
One done in Mandarin will benefit over 1 billion people who simply
don't have a good free encyclopedia, in both senses of the word - free
as in beer, and free as in freedom. The faster we get there, the
better. And I don't think that's a selfish notion.
No, but it is a statement of (nationalist?) faith in the ubiquity and
all-empowering contemporary relevance of Mandarin to today's Chinese
population, one not necessarily backed by empirical evidence and
ordinary experience. A recent well-publicized Chinese-government study,
for example, claims that only half of the Chinese population are capable
of speaking Mandarin ("neng2 shuo1 Pu3tong1hua4";
http://www.beijingtimes.com.cn/news.asp?newsid=88058). This is likely
to be shocking only to those who never venture outside of the circles of
urban, well-educated elite (of whom the Chinese Wikipedia can count many
members).
That is not to deny that a Chinese encyclopedia to benefit millions is
not a worthwhile goal. Only that we should not delude ourselves of the
power and grandeur of such a project which, after all, serves but one
language -- one spoken by hundreds of millions but nevertheless hardly
the primary, everyday language of millions more. And that is assuming a
very high literacy level, which again is supported neither by studies
nor our experience interacting with those outside of the elite classes.
(To be sure, Wikipedia could be voice-recorded, by human or machine,
or printed for the millions and millions too impoverished to own a PC,
but these media require more expensive -- not to mention,
censorship-prone -- means of presentation and delivery.)
Unfortunately it is all too common for both non-Chinese and Chinese
alike to imagine a kind of monolithic, timeless cultural norm, be it to
serve nationalism or to depict a simplistic other (see B. Anderson's
"Imagined Community"; Said's "Orientalism"), rather than engaging
with
the reality on the ground. Ultimately Wikipedians should not fall prey
to such imagination.
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