Angela is right - the Proposal_for_Sinitic_linguistic_policy failed to make an open call to the ZH community for their opinion.
But then, it also failed to make an open call to any other Wikipedia community.
If it deserves advertising on zh.wiki, it should also be advertised on en.wiki and pt.wiki due to the relevance of those languages to the Cantonese language.
Wikipedia-l was the only public area where I saw fit to announce it: this is a request for the creation of a new Wikipedia.
If I hold a vote on the creation of a Wikipedia in Venetian, do I have to inform wikiit-l? No. Would it be nessecary? Probably not.
Due diligence has not been performed. My suggestions from July:
In fact, it has. Just because I didn't heed YOUR suggestions doesn't mean I suck.
I contacted all those users on en.wiki and zh.wiki who were listed with babel templates indicating they were native speakers of Cantonese.
You *were* proven wrong about voting separately for Cantonese and Wu, by at least two people.
I did not feel and still do not feel that links to the mailinglist discussion and Meta vote are nessecary; however as I said before you may add them yourself.
You claimed you weren't aware as to which discussions I was referring; however: There was only one major discussion re:Cantonese/Wu on wikipedia-l, and there is only one other page specifically about Sinitic languages on Meta.
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2005-July/041203.html http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2005-July/041207.html
were not heeded. The voting page does not have complete background materials; nor was the page translated into Chinese, the main relevant community; nor was the announcement made to wikizh-l or the main zh.wikipedia.org community pages.
1) What is the main relevant community is a personal judgement on your part. As Jogloran said "My mother tongue is Cantonese, not Mandarin, not 'Chinese', but specifically Cantonese", and others echoed similar sentiments, I don't think "Chinese" (aka Mandarin baihuawen) can be deemed any more relevant than can English: the English Wikipedia counts quite a few Cantonese native speaking users, and English is co-official in Hong Kong. Many Cantonese speakers live in countries where English is an official or very prominent language: Malaysia (-> Kuala Lumpur; Penang is more largely Hokkien-speaking), Singapore, overseas Chinatowns (TongSaan) in Australia, the UK, and the US... There are actually nearly identical numbers of self-identified Cantonese speakers on English and Mandarin WPs 2) I sent e-mails about it to all users who listed themselves as Cantonese native speakers with Babel templates. Thus, while Mandarin-only ppl didn't get a message, people who cared enough to note their mad Cantonese skillz on their userpage did in fact get one. Nevertheless, a few people from zh.wikipedia, like Milcheflasche, Jasonzhuocn, Pektiong, and Chun-hian, found the vote without me having to inform them of its existence. 3) Some section headings are in both languages. and I gave a list of Mandarin- and Cantonese-language links. As I noted before, it is a Wiki page, and for this reason you are and have always been welcome to be bold and add translations in any language you should so wish, from Arrernte to Mandarin to Italian to Haitian to Hopi to Luganda to Manx to Slovio. 4) The lack of announcement was partially intentional. I felt that it was most fair to send a message to wikipedia-l, and international mailing list, and then to individual Cantonese-speaking users.
Personal differences aside, the organizer of a vote, as an implicit "overseer," should show restraint in terms of commenting on individual votes and as a result, influencing the votes on the page.
I'm not sure how comments on votes could influence them. Other than those directed towards Jeromy~Yuyu, my comments were in a spirit of disambiguation rather than challenging the reasoning behind votes, as some people appeared to think we were talking about writing a Baihuawen Wikipedia in Traditional Chinese and then calling it "Cantonese Wikipedia", rather than writing a YutYuhBakWaMaan Wikipedia as was the idea.
One reason the final (sixth) GNAA VfD was accepted after several controversial rounds of voting was because of how professionally the vote was administered. We should learn from that.
And by "we", you mean "Node", right?
Mark