I thought Chinese Wikipedians have reached consensus at the beginning of the Chinese Wikipedia project two years ago that traditional and simplified Chinese should be put together, because essentially they are one language, with the same grammar and vocabulary. The difference between traditional and simplified Chinese sometimes is even subtler than the difference between American and British English.
Most native speakers of the Chinese language can read both sets of writing system. No one has yet complained that they cannot read simplified Chinese or traditional Chinese. Our ultimate goal is to develop an auto conversion script that would display simplified or traditional Chinese according to users' preference. Progress is slow, but efforts have been put in. (See http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:%E7%B9%81%E7%AE%80%E4%BD%93%E9%9...)
The Chinese Wikipedia is not a Simplified Chinese Wikipedia or Traditional Chinese Wikipedia, but rather a mixture of the two. You can contribute in both simplified or traditional Chinese. Currently very few articles are split into two versions, and we now encourage all contributors to concentrate their efforts in one version of the article with both traditional and simplified Chinese. Of course majority of the articles are written in Simplified Chinese, as most contributors come from mainland. But still there are many articles written mainly in traditional Chinese, especially those articles associated with Taiwan.
formulax
On Tue, 15 Jun 2004 18:43:44 +0000, Ian Mackinnon ianm2000uk@hotmail.com wrote:
Well, not really a new language, but I'm frustrated that Traditional Chinese is lumped into the Simplified Chinese version of Wikipedia. The problem with this is the main page is only in Simplified Chinese and when looking up articles, it does not go directly to the page but gives the option to choose whether you want to go to the simplified or the traditional version.
I strongly request that the Traditional Chinese version of Wikipedia be given it's own language space, tw.wikipedia.org would be better. It should be common sense that these 2 styles of writing should not be combined together. Overseas Chinese and non-China born/educated persons who studied traditional Chinese writing have difficulty reading the simplified version. The current configuration just makes it frustrating to browse articles.
A real good argument I can give for this is why does wikipedia have simple.wikipedia.org for "Simple English" instead of it being lumped into en.wikipedia.org? I hope you see what I'm talking about and split zh.wikipedia.org and tw.wikipedia.org so there's no more confusion for Chinese readers of wikipedia.org
Thanks!
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