[Wikipedia-l] Re: Setting up a Wikipedia in _______ (what ever language)

[Mark Williamson]

"One china, one language" (with the exception of minority ethnicities'
languages) does seem to be true, and "one Wikipedia" seems to
partially follow. While I'm sure it's not an actual consideration of
the powers that be, I think there certainly is a link between the
sociolinguistic attitudes of some parties involved and official
linguistic policy in the PRC (Taiwan, OTOH, is moving gradually to a
more pluralistic view for Hakka and Minnan), which seems to be slowly
swallowing up linguistic policy in Hongkong (sometime in the next 50
years, I'd not be surprised if any special status Cantonese has now is
dropped by the PRC to promote national unity).

However, I think it's important to note again that this almost
certainly has nothing to do with official considerations, though I do
think there's a perpetuated fallacy of "trust any Chinese person" on
this and related issues (ie, in the original considerations for the
sc/tc issue, respected personalities were asked what they thought of
the question, but not one of them used tc primarily; people like
Shizhao and Jiaqing Bao seem to be trusted more because they know
"Chinese" even though neither claims a knowledge of Cantonese).

Overall though, I think that bias is mostly not present in such
considerations because people are very careful to evaluate different
opinions and sources.

Mark

On Fri, 31 Dec 2004 05:38:14 -0800, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales
<jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Fred Bauder wrote:
> > The problem is political. One China, One language, One Wikipedia, and so on.
> 
> I don't think this has anything to do with it, actually.
> 
> --Jimbo
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