Hi all,
Chinese Wikipedia (zh.wikipedia.org) was started in October 2002. At that time, almost all texts were in simplified Chinese, because the first Chinese wikipedians are mainly from mainland China. (Being a traditional Chinese user since birth, I was "scared away" when I first went to zh: and saw that the whole site is in simp. Chinese.) But at that time, most of the zh wikipedians agree that there should only be one Chinese Wikipedia, but not two, because simp. and traditional Chinese is one language actually, the difference being that some characters are written in a different way and that wikipedians from different part of the world have different names/terms for the same object. (Just like a British would write "The centre of a sulphur atom on a railway ." while an American would write "The center of a sulfur atom on a railroad.") Most of the zh wikipedians can read both form of characters, though we write in our respective native form. That's why we want to have ONE zh: only.
We have been discussing on how to deal with this trad/simp problem since the beginning. The consensus is that pages would be converted between simp. and trad. according to the need of the reader/editor by some automatic script or software. Though the development of such a software has not started until recently (due to a lack of technical assistance).
I am writing this mail because I see that zh-tw.wikipedia.org has been set up. Being a long-time contributor to zh:, I feel quite frustrated because it seems that all the discussion we have on how to solve this problem are in vain.
Therefore I request that zh-tw.wikipedia.org and zh-cn.wikipedia.org be redirected to zh.wikipedia.org.
Regards Lorenzarius
I personally support the notion of One Chinese Wikipedia. I think it makes the most sense from a language point of view, and additionally, I think it makes the most sense from the point of view of having a top quality NPOV resource.
--Jimbo
Lorenzarius wrote:
Hi all,
Chinese Wikipedia (zh.wikipedia.org) was started in October 2002. At that time, almost all texts were in simplified Chinese, because the first Chinese wikipedians are mainly from mainland China. (Being a traditional Chinese user since birth, I was "scared away" when I first went to zh: and saw that the whole site is in simp. Chinese.) But at that time, most of the zh wikipedians agree that there should only be one Chinese Wikipedia, but not two, because simp. and traditional Chinese is one language actually, the difference being that some characters are written in a different way and that wikipedians from different part of the world have different names/terms for the same object. (Just like a British would write "The centre of a sulphur atom on a railway ." while an American would write "The center of a sulfur atom on a railroad.") Most of the zh wikipedians can read both form of characters, though we write in our respective native form. That's why we want to have ONE zh: only.
We have been discussing on how to deal with this trad/simp problem since the beginning. The consensus is that pages would be converted between simp. and trad. according to the need of the reader/editor by some automatic script or software. Though the development of such a software has not started until recently (due to a lack of technical assistance).
I am writing this mail because I see that zh-tw.wikipedia.org has been set up. Being a long-time contributor to zh:, I feel quite frustrated because it seems that all the discussion we have on how to solve this problem are in vain.
Therefore I request that zh-tw.wikipedia.org and zh-cn.wikipedia.org be redirected to zh.wikipedia.org.
Regards Lorenzarius _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
I'm not sure why zh-tw was created recently. I can count at least three times before where we've requested it not be established so that ZH would work towards a traditional-simplified solution.
-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)
On Thu, 9 Sep 2004 03:17:09 -0700, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
I personally support the notion of One Chinese Wikipedia. I think it makes the most sense from a language point of view, and additionally, I think it makes the most sense from the point of view of having a top quality NPOV resource.
--Jimbo
Lorenzarius wrote:
Hi all,
Chinese Wikipedia (zh.wikipedia.org) was started in October 2002. At that time, almost all texts were in simplified Chinese, because the first Chinese wikipedians are mainly from mainland China. (Being a traditional Chinese user since birth, I was "scared away" when I first went to zh: and saw that the whole site is in simp. Chinese.) But at that time, most of the zh wikipedians agree that there should only be one Chinese Wikipedia, but not two, because simp. and traditional Chinese is one language actually, the difference being that some characters are written in a different way and that wikipedians from different part of the world have different names/terms for the same object. (Just like a British would write "The centre of a sulphur atom on a railway ." while an American would write "The center of a sulfur atom on a railroad.") Most of the zh wikipedians can read both form of characters, though we write in our respective native form. That's why we want to have ONE zh: only.
We have been discussing on how to deal with this trad/simp problem since the beginning. The consensus is that pages would be converted between simp. and trad. according to the need of the reader/editor by some automatic script or software. Though the development of such a software has not started until recently (due to a lack of technical assistance).
I am writing this mail because I see that zh-tw.wikipedia.org has been set up. Being a long-time contributor to zh:, I feel quite frustrated because it seems that all the discussion we have on how to solve this problem are in vain.
Therefore I request that zh-tw.wikipedia.org and zh-cn.wikipedia.org be redirected to zh.wikipedia.org.
Regards Lorenzarius _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
-- "La nèfle est un fruit." - first words of 50,000th article on fr.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
As a temporary measure, we are shutting it down right now. Switching it to read-only, moving it to closed-zh-tw subdomain so people can salvage their work if it's important.
Looking at it, I see exactly 1 user in the past 7 days. So we are not stomping on a group of people trying to do something.
If it continues to exist, it would attract an audience even if it is not a good idea.
We can leave the issue open for the zh community to decide. I personally advice for unity. Similar to "One China, Two Systems", I propose "One zh, two character sets."
--Jimbo
Andrew Lih wrote:
I'm not sure why zh-tw was created recently. I can count at least three times before where we've requested it not be established so that ZH would work towards a traditional-simplified solution.
-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)
On Thu, 9 Sep 2004 03:17:09 -0700, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
I personally support the notion of One Chinese Wikipedia. I think it makes the most sense from a language point of view, and additionally, I think it makes the most sense from the point of view of having a top quality NPOV resource.
--Jimbo
Lorenzarius wrote:
Hi all,
Chinese Wikipedia (zh.wikipedia.org) was started in October 2002. At that time, almost all texts were in simplified Chinese, because the first Chinese wikipedians are mainly from mainland China. (Being a traditional Chinese user since birth, I was "scared away" when I first went to zh: and saw that the whole site is in simp. Chinese.) But at that time, most of the zh wikipedians agree that there should only be one Chinese Wikipedia, but not two, because simp. and traditional Chinese is one language actually, the difference being that some characters are written in a different way and that wikipedians from different part of the world have different names/terms for the same object. (Just like a British would write "The centre of a sulphur atom on a railway ." while an American would write "The center of a sulfur atom on a railroad.") Most of the zh wikipedians can read both form of characters, though we write in our respective native form. That's why we want to have ONE zh: only.
We have been discussing on how to deal with this trad/simp problem since the beginning. The consensus is that pages would be converted between simp. and trad. according to the need of the reader/editor by some automatic script or software. Though the development of such a software has not started until recently (due to a lack of technical assistance).
I am writing this mail because I see that zh-tw.wikipedia.org has been set up. Being a long-time contributor to zh:, I feel quite frustrated because it seems that all the discussion we have on how to solve this problem are in vain.
Therefore I request that zh-tw.wikipedia.org and zh-cn.wikipedia.org be redirected to zh.wikipedia.org.
Regards Lorenzarius _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
-- "La nèfle est un fruit." - first words of 50,000th article on fr.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
-- Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
Andrew Lih wrote:
I'm not sure why zh-tw was created recently. I can count at least three times before where we've requested it not be established so that ZH would work towards a traditional-simplified solution.
There's a bug in the new wiki creation script which allows zh-tw, zh-cn, nn, and perhaps other language codes which are defined but had been intended as aliases to be automatically created as separate wikis. Such accidentally created wikis are not supported and may get closed down when noticed and someone gets around to backing up their content.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Brion Vibber wrote:
There's a bug in the new wiki creation script which allows zh-tw, zh-cn, nn, and perhaps other language codes which are defined but had been intended as aliases to be automatically created as separate wikis. Such accidentally created wikis are not supported and may get closed down when noticed and someone gets around to backing up their content.
I've altered it now so that languages have to be listed in both langlist and languages/Names.php before they can be created. So this sort of thing shouldn't happen anymore.
-- Tim Starling
Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
I personally support the notion of One Chinese Wikipedia. I think it makes the most sense from a language point of view, and additionally, I think it makes the most sense from the point of view of having a top quality NPOV resource.
But is it going to be possible from a language point of view? People have talked about automatic conversion, but several others have pointed out multiple academic studies on the subject, some from the Unicode committees, that have concluded it's nearly impossible to do automated conversion from one to the other (without fully solving AI anyway), as it's not a one-to-one mapping. The only reasonable thing I've heard proposed is doing a partial automatic conversion, and flagging the characters that can't be automatically converted for human intervention, but this doesn't sound like something that's going to be implemented in the forseeable future.
-Mark
Delirium wrote:
But is it going to be possible from a language point of view? People have talked about automatic conversion, but several others have pointed out multiple academic studies on the subject, some from the Unicode committees, that have concluded it's nearly impossible to do automated conversion from one to the other (without fully solving AI anyway), as it's not a one-to-one mapping. The only reasonable thing I've heard proposed is doing a partial automatic conversion, and flagging the characters that can't be automatically converted for human intervention, but this doesn't sound like something that's going to be implemented in the forseeable future.
I think this is a question for the speakers of the language to talk to us about; it's really a question of mutual intelligibility, isn't it?
So far as I know, there is no major movement afoot to split the two. A few people support it, and one of the main ones, the only one who was actually working on the accidentally-created website, is a 15 year old American living in Arizona. I mention this not to say that a 15 year old American living in Arizona can't possibly be right about this, but rather to indicate what I understand *at the moment* to be the situation on the ground.
--Jimbo
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