On Fri, February 11, 2005 4:18 pm, Anthere said:
Hello Felix
Out of curiosity, do we know how many editors would currently actively work on the cantonese langage ?
Ant
Actually I have no idea.
Someone invited me to support the creation of zh-wuu (Shanghainese) Wikipedia, and I found the proposal of Cantonese Wikipedia on the same page on Meta http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages, so I supported both. Then I learned about the opposition in the mailing list and joined the discussion. I never expected that I need to be so vocal here, almost taking a leading role.
Someone signed on Meta. There are some support beside opposition in the mailing list. Alex Kwan on this list edited my introduction to the test site: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Test-WP/zh-yue with an anonymous IP. We can expect him to contribute more when he is back from vacation.
While I am writing this email, I just discovered that I had forgotten to "Save page" after "Show preview" when I added link to the test site. If number of editors or whether a project can be sustained is the only issue, I think a test site should be a good indicator of potential support of any new language project.
You may also want to review the thread "Wikipedia in Chinese dialects", where I proposed writing 3 good articles of medium length and 20 good stubs in any new language. They will also serve to test the hypothesis that written Mandarin and written Cantonese are the same, or are too similar to deserve a separate project.
People may still disagree, but at least that will be better than arguments without any backup.
Felix Wan