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

David Gerard fun at thingy.apana.org.au
Thu Feb 10 15:53:16 UTC 2005


Neil Harris (usenet at tonal.clara.co.uk) [050211 02:48]:

> 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.


It's a fairly easy proposal to argue against: zh: has already reached
critical mass and will keep growing, barring the vicissitues of the Chinese
government (which is a force orthogonal to this argument).

Further argument against: it's a "compromise" with a position that is
untenable to start with - trying to take volunteers who've come forward for
a different idea to work on your own project rather than that one.

Further argument against: there is no natural reason why someone whose
interest is captured by a Cantonese wikipedia should be forced to work on a
Mandarin one first.


- d.





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