[Wikipedia-l] Peh-oe-ji on minnan.wikipedia.org

[Tim Starling]

About a month ago, Shizhao requested that the wiki at 
minnan.wikipedia.org be moved to poj.wikipedia.org, because the writing 
there is Taiwanese, and not representative of Min Nan as a whole:

http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2004-July/011003.html

Kaishu Tai ridiculed the POJ term as "meaningless", and requested that 
the wiki be moved to zh-min-nan.wikipedia.org instead.

http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2004-July/011013.html

I didn't know who to believe, and although I made some attempt to make 
sense out of it, the end result was the status quo.

Just today, I did some reading of my own on the subject. The best 
reference I found was this:

http://www.de-han.org/taiwan/chuliau/pehoeji-v.pdf

Other information sources are:
http://203.64.42.21/iug/ungian/POJ/siausit/2002/2002POJGTH/lunbun%5CK2-kloeter.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_%28linguistics%29

Contrary to what Shizhao said, it seems that the Peh-oe-ji orthography, 
as seen on minnan.wikipedia.org, is not even representative of 
Taiwanese, let alone Min Nan. In fact it is only used by a small 
minority. Now I have every respect for the goals of those who promote 
Peh-oe-ji, but I don't think Wikipedia should assign subdomains which 
support one political viewpoint over another.

Currently the predominant form of writing in Taiwan is "Traditional 
Chinese", given the code zh-tw. Writing of this form is commonly used on 
zh.wikipedia.org. The Taiwanese people who write in zh.wikipedia.org 
speak the exact same language as those who write on 
minnan.wikipedia.org. That language is a form of Min Nan, referred to in 
Taiwan as Ho-lo-oe.

Based on the information I have now, I would like to move 
minnan.wikipedia.org to peh-oe-ji.wikipedia.org. I'm expecting 
objections to this from the users of that wiki, who seem to be keen 
promoters of the Peh-oe-ji orthography. All the same, I'd like to hear 
any comments or objections anyone has.

-- Tim Starling