Sheng Jiong wrote:
And lastly I just want to clarity Wikipedia's
policy on setting up a
new Wikipedia: if a group of native speakers want to set up a
Wikipedia despite the fact that majority of the speakers of that
language do not wish to do so, should we allow them to have a new
Wikipedia? As in the case of Cantonese, even Hong Kongers are
generally opposed to the idea, and should we still allow few advocates
to have it?
I think the problem is that we need to define what the language is
before we can determine whether the majority of the language's writers
are in favor of it. For Wikipedia's purposes, only written languages
are relevant, and it would seem that a majority of people who write in
what they call "written Cantonese" are in favor of the encyclopedia.
What people who *speak* Cantonese but write "standard Chinese" think
isn't the issue, since Wikipedia is a written encyclopedia. Of course,
the entire debate is over whether "written Cantonese" exists as a real
language in the first place. That I don't know enough about to comment
on, but it would help if anybody had any information on just how common
this writing system is in Hong Kong, and how many people would be
interested in writing on such a Wikipedia.
It might be worth noting that we had a similar argument over German
earlier. There are many spoken German dialects, but most people who
speak any of the dialects read and write in "standard German". However,
recently some people have started writing in written forms of some of
the dialects, and some wanted to create a Wikipedia for those dialects
separate from the main German Wikipedia.
(The longstanding linguistic flamewar over "dialect" versus "language"
looks to be a regular spillover into Wikipedia-l.)
-Mark