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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