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

[Felix Wan]

On Thu, February 10, 2005 11:14 am, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales said:
> David Gerard wrote:
>
>> The thing is you're still presupposing that an existing wikipedia has
>> a right to block the existence of a new Wikipedia.
>>
>> I ask the Board: is this the case?
>
> Not speaking here for the board, but only offering my own tentative
> opinion, the answer to this is "no" in the general case, but that such 
> factors can be a part of the overall decision.
>
Nice to hear that.  I have never taken the resource argument seriously,
and no one here should. But I do take the similarity argument very
seriously.

> I am told repeatedly by many people that while Mandarian and Cantonese
> are mutually unintelligible in the spoken form, in written form they are
> the same.  This is pretty compelling for me.
>
I don't know how to convince you, but even the written forms are not the
same.  They are just similar, perhaps 80%-90% intelligible, depending on
the subject matter.  The written form eliminates phonetic differences,
leaving only differences in vocabulary and grammar.  Who told you that
they are the same?

> If there is a significant population of people who can not read/write
> standard written Chinese, but *can* read/write Cantonese in some writing
> system that is different, then I want to learn about that, because that
> would be a very compelling factor in the other direction.
>
The fact is, every literate Cantonese speaker can read standard written
Chinese, because that is what is taught in schools, not because written
Cantonese and written Mandarin are the same.

Do we want to set a language policy to disallow a Wikipedia if almost all
the literate speakers of that regional speech can read the written form of
another prestiged regional speech?  I am OK with that.  That may be good
for Wikipedias to limit the number of versions.  We just need to make it
clear and apply it consistently.

That policy will disallow Ebonics (African American Vernacular English)
and Singlish (Singaporean English) even though some linguists classify
them as creoles, but will not disallow Tok Pisin (we do have tpi:), which
is a creole with a distinct writing system.

I am not familiar with the European languages.  I remember I heard about
Catalan and three versions of Dutch, or something else.  Can other people
fill me in on how the language policy is applied to other regional
speeches?

Perhaps this is a good time for us to set a fair and workable language
policy.  We want our decision to set a good precedent, not a bad one.

Felix Wan