[Wikipedia-l] Re: Quenya language request, and Chinese Wikipedia again

[Neil Harris]

David Gerard wrote:

>Tony Sidaway (minorityreport at bluebottle.com) [050210 23:50]:
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>>David Gerard said:
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>>>If we have a precedent that zh: can block the existence of a Cantonese
>>>Wikipedia, can en: block Quenya? Please?
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>>I hope we have no such precedent.  Allowing the speakers of a rival
>>language to veto the production of a Wikipedia would not be right.
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>Fuzheado's arguments appear to be along those lines - in particular the
>argument that zh: needs the resources instead (as if volunteers are
>employees who can be reassigned at will, even assuming the argument it
>needs the resources so desperately is valid).
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>>Their
>>observations (and I've seen some potentially persuasive arguments on
>>either side in the Chinese Wikipedia discussion though I have not
>>investigated it closely) should not be dismissed as irrelevant, but they
>>shouldn't be allowed to block an otherwise viable Wikipedia.
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>We have Wikipedias for things that are clearly dialects; Cantonese is
>mutually-unintelligible with Mandarin.
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>But let's start a Quenya Wikipedia instead. Hell, that's not grossly
>insulting! At all!
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>- d.
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As I understand it, the argument against creating Wikipedias in Chinese
local languages is that it will diffuse the effort needed in creating
the Chinese Wikipedia. Whilst I have some sympathy with this argument,
the justification for it will get progressively weaker as the Chinese
Wikipedia grows in size and number of editors.

At some point, the diffusion of effort argument will become
indefensible. However, that moment will always be defined as "sometime
in the future" by die-hard supporters of that argument.

Here's a compromise proposal: the Chinese Wikipedia should be regarded
as having succeeded beyond doubt when it has reached an article count of
N articles, where N might be, say, 50,000. At that point, the barrier to
creating other Chinese-language should be dropped. At the current rate
of growth, that will probably be sometime next year.

Here's the nice, counter-intuitive consequence to this proposal: it
provides an incentive to alternative-Chinese-language proponents to add
content to the mainstream-Chinese Wikipedia, and recruit more people to
do so, so that it will grow as rapidly as possible. When the 50,000
target is reached, it is probable that many of these new editors will
start to concentrate on their own local language versions; however, many
of them will, I imagine, also continue to work on the main Chinese
Wikipedia, and there will be a major incentive for content to flow in
translation between the different Chinese Wikipedias. So it's a win-win
proposal.

This is also a fairly hard proposal to argue against, given that it is
parametric, and ultra-hard-liners can simply suggest very high values of
N (possibly infinity), and those who want the immediate creation of
local Chinese Wikipedias will find that their proposal reduces to
setting N to, or below, the current article count. I would imagine that
many people wound accept as reasonable some value in the range 20,000 -
400,000. Then (I hope)  the only question is what method to determine
the consensus value of N -- arithmetic mean, geometric mean, mode, or
median?

-- Neil