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