Threatening is exactly what you are doing. And such threats don't
strike me as a very helpful way to resolve this particular issue.
No, threatening is *not* what I am doing. All I'm saying is that if the solution eventually reached is *not* mutually accomodative, there will be a fork.
What we want to seek is a solution to this very real problem which is
mutually accomodative to all interested parties. Whether this ultimately means that a "two wiki" solution is best very much remains to be seen.
I have yet to see a proposal that's actually doable in the near future that would solve this problem to the satisfaction of all interested parties.
A fork would only be successful or wise if the alternative solution
that we come up with is less desirable than the fork.
Well, that's a bit obvious. Of course there would be no forking if the solution was more desirable than the fork.
Will you agree to not threaten a fork while we all discuss rationally
how we might best deal with the issue technically? That threat is a power play which poisons the discussion, and makes it harder for people to come to the right conclusions.
As I said before I am not "threatening" a fork but merely stating that if the end-result is not more desirable than a fork, that is what will most likely happen.
The new wiki was shut down because it would be irresponsible for us
to set off on such a major departure from present practice, against the objections of what is a majority (as far as I can tell) of the existing Simplified _and_ Traditional communities, just on your say-so and threats.
Threats? Who did I threaten? Even if you count the fork thing as a threat, that was only recently and the new wiki was shut down well before that - the new wiki was created by accident, not as the result of threats I made to anybody. You also fail to mention that I wasn't the only registered user, and that there are well over 1000 pages, over 600 of them "probably legitimate". This is much larger than many existing Wikis, and much of it is original. If a solution doesn't satisfactorily work this content in, and work it in *in Traditional Chinese* rather than converting it, and to not allow additions to it that aren't in Traditional, I will copy the content somewhere else. That's *me* doing something with content of which *I* contributed about 99% (as I said before, I wasn't the only registered user, and a couple of anons made edits too).
Also, the only people from zh: who have weighed in so far are people who are high up in the community (and it has been suggested before and seems at least partially true that the opinions of those Traditional users in the zh: bureaucracy don't nessecarily reflect those of the average Traditional user), most of which are Simplified users; so far only 4 primarily Traditional users have weighed in (iirc), 1 of which seems to agree for the most part with me and one other who may or may not agree (Fuzheado and Lorenzarius afaict do not support a two-wiki solution). As was already noted by somebody else, the proposed technical solutions so far that are actually workable in the near future are all focused on a dual-language user interface, which although important isn't nearly as big as the issue of separate articles, template messages, redirects from Traditional to Simplified articles (and as was noted, vice-versa), articles with a title in one but content in the other, articles written partly in one and partly in the other, talk pages (even for traditional articles, they're often written in simplified), and so on.
I think the general standpoint of other Traditional users on zh: is that continued unification is something that they'd like, but they are beginning to find that it doesn't seem likely that a satisfactory solution will be found in the near future.
If a solution really can be found that is satisfactory but does not involve separate Wikis, of course I will support it and if anybody ends up forking under those conditions I will not support it.
All I'm saying is that if independent Traditional content cannot exist on Wikipedia under the solution, whether as part of zh: *or* as a separate Wikipedia, chances are the solution won't be "satisfactory" to all parties involved.
And I think that the idea that a separation will hurt NPOV isn't entirely correct: en: doesn't include people from all the different points of view, yet there are plenty who defend NPOV even if they have a certain POV that agrees with whatever POV is being pushed. Just because there would be a much much much smaller number of Mainland users on a separate Traditional wikipedia doesn't mean all the articles are going to have an anti-PRC slant.
Maybe we will end up with a two wiki solution. Maybe we'll end up
with a single wiki solution. Just relax a bit, and let's discuss it further.
I'm sure it wasn't intended, but one of the major problems I have with closed-zh-tw: is that the namespaces were changed back to their default, breaking loads of links and making it appear less functional than it was before it was closed (other than the fact that it's now read-only, of course, which I understand).
Anyhow, as I said before if a workable solution is reached, even if it doesn't involve a separate wiki for Traditional, I will support it.
--Jin Junshu/Mark