[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia in Chinese dialects

[Felix Wan]

On Wed, February 2, 2005 7:35 pm, Andrew Lih said:
> Felix, that's a good summary of the issues.
>
> Right now, I would encourage Chinese-savvy, prospective Wikipedians to
> work on ZH rather than spawning many, small Chinese-dialect Wikipedias.
> Jimbo's statement is the most compelling argument for
> this:
>
> "Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given
> free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing."
> -Jimmy Wales, July 2004
>
> To me, that means encouraging most of the labour towards making a
> "Mandarin" Wikipedia. As a side effect, Wikipedia can be an experiment
> in Internet democracy or a way to preserve/promote languages. But the 
> primary goal should be to write an encyclopedia.
>
> One done in Mandarin will benefit over 1 billion people who simply
> don't have a good free encyclopedia, in both senses of the word - free as
> in beer, and free as in freedom. The faster we get there, the better. And
> I don't think that's a selfish notion.
>
> -Andrew (User:Fuzheado)
>
Hi Andrew:

I do not find anything selfish about wanting to create a good free ZH encyclopedia, but I do not believe we must forbid creation of encyclopedia in other Chinese dialects to acheive the goal.

The main page of the ZH Wikipedia says, "hai3 na4 bai3 chuan1, you3 rong2 nai3 da4" (The sea receive hundreds of rivers. It accepts, so it is large.) People become editors for various reasons, and obviously some do not share our goal of producing a good free encyclopedia. Wikipedia accepts them, and it becomes great. Most Internet users are not Wikipedia editors. Let's think about getting more people involved rather than grabbing existing human resources.

My vision is different from yours. If a ZH-YUE Wikipedia were to setup, some people originally active in ZH may go there to help its start, but according to the current demography, I believe most resources will be initially drained from EN. Eventually ZH-YUE will either die out or attract new editors. Those new editors may also edit on ZH and EN, and there may be good articles in ZH-YUE to be translated into ZH and EN.

I am not really an advocate of literature in Chinese dialects. But if someone requests, I will testify that they exist and are not the same as standard written Chinese (Bai2hua4wen2), I will not oppose those that have reasonable number of readers and potential editors, and I will support those that I can contribute.

I consider myself an active EN editor, though not Wikiholic enough. Eventually I will spend most effort on EN, second most on ZH, and some effort on ZH-YUE and ZH-WUU if they can be successfully created. In terms of writing, my skills is EN > ZH > ZH-YUE. I still need to learn which characters to use to write in ZH-WUU from examples.

Here, I would also like to encourage Chinese people who know English to write more on China-related topics in EN because I think EN is the Wikipedia closest to completion, and it will benefit even more people than the ZH Wikipedia. However, I will not say that they should work on EN *rather than* Wikipedia in other languages.

Also, please remember: Wikipedia was an experiment, it still is, and we should not stop innovation just because we see some success.

Felix Wan