OK, as I was editing around in zh.wikipedia.org and having talked to some people, I've come to realize that it's in the best interest of the China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, etc communities to share one portal as it's important to share knowledge and views with each other to better understand each other. Just as China itself is wide and varied in culture and customs, the simplified script unifies the nation.
Also, from what I've been told, some people are currently working on some kind of conversion tool that will enable the automatic interchangeable conversion between Simplified vs Traditional script. Because of this I have decided to stop or try to engage as little as possible in updating articles as until the implementation of the conversion tool is in effect on zh.wikipedia.org
I was also told not to create seperate articles in Traditional chinese as two versions of the same article is not in the interest of the community, but rather having one version of an article that can be accessed and edited by anyone in either Simplified or Traditional script. The conversion tool will then do the work to display the script on the end user's screen according to their preference of either script.
In response to: ---------- Message: 8 Date: Fri, 18 Jun 2004 19:07:48 +0800 From: Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] zh-tw.wikipedia.org To: wikipedia-l@wikimedia.org Message-ID: 2ed171fb04061804075dfddfa2@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Please, no. We've discussed this in several places recently, but:
1) The ZH community has kept it consolidated to keep critical mass together 2) Doing so will make a future technical solution easier to implement 3) It's not a good time anyway, since the ZH accessibility is in flux from the PRC
-Andrew Lih (User:Fuzheado)
On Fri, 18 Jun 2004 10:48:29 +0000, Ian Mackinnon ianm2000uk@hotmail.com wrote:
I don't know how to reply to the list thread but I really like Mark's idea about splitting zh.wikipedia.org into zh-cn.wikipedia.org and zh-tw.wikipedia.org. This would really solve the problem of navigation conflicts. I wasn't suggesting this for political reasons but for practical reasons since the writing scripts conflict with each other.
Whoever is able to split the portal into 2 categories, please do so.
Thanks!
- Ian
Mark's comment: Interlanguage links are already done with [[zh-tw:]] and [[zh-cn:]], so perhaps we could simply split zh.wikipedia.org into zh-cn.wikipedia.org and zh-tw.wikipedia.org, with zh.wikipedia.org being a disambiguating portal? Of course, this is more up to Chinese-speakers than it is to myself; just a suggestion that would be consistent with our current usage. Having separate interlanguage links going to one encyclopedia that is effectively written in a mixture of two writing systems that are often not mutually intelligible is more than a little bit odd.
-Mark
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I don't want to get into the debate, but just FYI, such a convertor is considered impossible by many experts. By impossible, I mean impossible in the level of a perfect German to English to German machine translation software. Refer to Unicode mailing list and its archives for more details.
roozbeh
On Tue, 22 Jun 2004 14:33:09 +0000, Ian Mackinnon ianm2000uk@hotmail.com wrote:
Also, from what I've been told, some people are currently working on some kind of conversion tool that will enable the automatic interchangeable conversion between Simplified vs Traditional script. Because of this I have decided to stop or try to engage as little as possible in updating articles as until the implementation of the conversion tool is in effect on zh.wikipedia.org
Roozbeh Pournader wrote:
I don't want to get into the debate, but just FYI, such a convertor is considered impossible by many experts. By impossible, I mean impossible in the level of a perfect German to English to German machine translation software. Refer to Unicode mailing list and its archives for more details.
Just to provide some more concrete points of reference:
Jack Halpern and Jouni Kerman. "The Pitfalls and Complexities of Chinese to Chinese Conversion". Proceedings of the 14th International Unicode Conference, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, March 1999. [http://www.basistech.com/papers/chinese/c2c.html]
The biggest issue seems to be that certain simplified characters map to one of multiple traditional characters, depending on context. Thus a translator has to know the context, which requires solution of some fairly daunting natural-language processing problems. Conversion from traditional to simplified seems to be much easier, as it typically collapses the total number of characters used.
-Mark
Delirium provides a good reference - yes, something we can agree on! :)
However, I'd take issue with the convertor being considered "impossible by many experts." If a human being, with expert knowledge, can map it across, certainly it is not in the domain of "impossible" tasks.
In fact, ZH Wikipedia could be a leader in the development of such a system, and create a modular open source solution for others to use too. The "power of many" can certainly be seen in this task, which has a variety of special cases for mapping based on context. The mapping system itself could be run like a wiki, so people can contribute and alter the rules as needed, as colloquial grammar and usage changes with time.
The challenge now is getting enough critical mass and developers for ZH.
-Andrew Lih (User:Fuzheado)
On Tue, 22 Jun 2004 10:50:04 -0500, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Roozbeh Pournader wrote:
I don't want to get into the debate, but just FYI, such a convertor is considered impossible by many experts. By impossible, I mean impossible in the level of a perfect German to English to German machine translation software. Refer to Unicode mailing list and its archives for more details.
Just to provide some more concrete points of reference:
Jack Halpern and Jouni Kerman. "The Pitfalls and Complexities of Chinese to Chinese Conversion". Proceedings of the 14th International Unicode Conference, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, March 1999. [http://www.basistech.com/papers/chinese/c2c.html]
The biggest issue seems to be that certain simplified characters map to one of multiple traditional characters, depending on context. Thus a translator has to know the context, which requires solution of some fairly daunting natural-language processing problems. Conversion from traditional to simplified seems to be much easier, as it typically collapses the total number of characters used.
-Mark
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