[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia in Chinese dialects

[Sj]

Hello Felix,

Thank you for writing such an articulate and descriptive email about this.
Many other discussions of the subject have been emotional and incomplete.

Let me second Lars's recommendation of this list of universal articles
(and again,  feel free to edit this list) :

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_articles_all_languages_should_have

I don't know much about arguments for or against getting speakers of
all of these languages to use a single Wikipedia.  But let me point
out, for those new to these language names [and to our list of
language WPs], that Wu is the most widely-spoken language/dialect in
the world which does not yet have its own Wikipedia version.  The
other three most populous languages which don't have their own WP are
also languages related to Chinese.

>From this list of languages, let's look at the top 20 by # of native
speakers, leaving out those familiar to most on this list.  In order
of popularity, do we have wikipedias for them?

Bengali?  Check.  (11+ articles)
Wu?   No.
Javanese?  Check.  (223+ arts)
Telugu?  Check.  (101 arts)
Cantonese?   No.
Marathi?  Check.  (39+ arts)
Tamil?  Check.  (485+ arts)
Min nan?  Check. (550+ arts) ... but controversial, & was initially
hosted on a third-party server.
Gujarati?  Check. (30+ arts)
Egyptian?  Check?  (Arabic, 1500+ arts)
Hunnanese?  No.
Kannada?  Check.  (192+ arts)
Malayalam?  Check.  (117+ arts)
Hakka?  No.
Oriya?  Check.  (1? arts)
Western Panjabi?  Check.  (0.5 arts)  
Eastern Panjabi?  No.   [not distinguished from Western Panjabi, above]
Western Farsi?  Check.  (Persian, 1200+ arts)
Bojhpuri?  Check. (1? arts)

[these are all langs with over 25M native speakers ca. 1997, according to:
http://www.nicemice.net/amc/tmp/lang-pop.var]


On Wed, 2 Feb 2005 18:55:15 -0800 (PST), Felix Wan
<felixwiki at earthsphere.org> wrote:

> Proposal
> 
> I propose that we agree on some policies on setting up a Wikipedia in a new 
> language. Since a new Wikipedia will need some good articles to start with 
> anyway, we may ask people who propose new Wikipedia to pick some topics 
> from the 1000 essential articles and write say at least 3 good articles of moderate 
> length and 20 good stubs in the proposed script. A possible location without new 
> setup for those experimental articles will be on meta by using pages with prefixes 
> like "Wikipedia:New/zh-yue-han/", "Wikipedia:New/zh-wuu-han/", 
> "Wikipedia:New/zh-guoyu-pinyin/". (By the way, I support Pinyin Wikipedia. If 
> there is a "Simple English" version, why not a pinyin version for people to learn 
> Chinese?)

I like this idea.  3 good articles and 20 good stubs, with a
translated main page, should be sufficient interest to start a new
language/dialect, or at least to provide content on which to base
arguments about why the new project should not start.

I would put such new content on Meta, with pages like
meta.wikimedia.org/New-lang/yue/Main Page
meta.wikimedia.org/New-lang/pinyin/Zhongguo

I don't have anything personal against nomenclature like zh-min-nan,
zh-yue-han, etc; particularly if that allows us to use some
third-party group's decisions on nomenclature; but the above short
names should at least identify the proposed new wikipedia
unambiguously.

-- 
+sj+