Response from vipuser. - Wikipedia-l

3 Jun 2005

Hi all,

I have received a response from VIPUser which I reproduce in full here:

"about sc and tc

please stop clean the translation! the reason:
请问你了解维基百科处理简体中文和繁体中文的原则吗?如果你不清楚建议你到维基百科去了解一下，内容的书写可以暂时使用繁简两种字体，到时候使用程序自动转换就可以。这样可以大大增加中文的有效内容，减少重复的内容和劳动，谢谢!
if you can't understand the content, you can do the clean job after
you learn some chinese! thank you very much for your attention to the
chinese version wikimedia commons!"

What the Chinese part says is that basically asking if I understand
Wikipedia's policy towards Simplfied and Traditional Chinese, if I
want to know more I can check Chinese Wikipedia, that for temporary
purposes it's OK to use both but in the long term conversion... not
duplicate content... improve effectiveness... reduce workload... etc.

As a user of primarily Traditional Chinese, I can tell you that,
although it is manageable, the conversion software is certainly '''not
perfect''''  and that for official press releases, sites like commons,
and the like, it's best to have two separate versions.

One simple example is that the Simplified Mainpage on Commons uses
Roman numerals for dates and times; the Traditional uses Chinese
numerals. In other cases, there are special conversions which need to
take place concerning legal terms, computer terms, and all sorts of
other things which are not currently covered by the conversion
software.

If you go through zh.wikipedia, you'll quickly   find that much text
is either converted incorrectly or sometimes left entirely
unconverted.

I don't complain about it because it's still readable although it's
somewhat poor quality.

But in these cases, it's more important that people be able to read
content written in a correct manner.

Also keep in mihd that the situation is still basically a majority of
Simplified users who, from their point of view, are accommodating for
a minority to whom they can't relate - while most Simplified users
know Traditional pretty well and don't mind much reading content in it
occasionally, Simplified characters are very difficult and grating on
the eyes and mind of most people for whom Traditional is their first
script: Traditional is occasionally used on the Mainland because it is
used in historical documents, calligraphy (theoretically -
calligraphic forms are often more similar to the Simplified form),
sometimes as titles of books, and to make something seem a little
fancy. However, in Taiwan you will never see Simplified with few
exceptions. In Hong Kong, it used to be similar to Taiwan. Simplified
is becoming more common in Hong Kong and Macao, but still the
situation is not the same as the reverse on the mainland because its
use is still very rare in HK and Macao. In Singapore, although
Simplified is used officially, people actually use both (the same is
true in Malaysia).

So while a Simplified user might not mind a page written in Simplified
but with some words or phrases in Traditional, the reverse is very
annoying and visually displeasing to a Traditional user.

Mark

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