[Wikipedia-l] Individual Wikipedias for different Sinitic vernaculars (Cantonese debate) - update

[Mark Williamson]

People like you are far too worried about the "disproportionately
small"-ness of zh.wikipedia. Given the small percentage of zh.wiki
users that would actually gravitate to a new Wikipedia of this type,
it would make almost no difference in the size of zh.wiki, and zh.wiki
is already huge (it used to have a few hundred articles, then 10k
would've been huge, but now it just has got to be bigger or it is way
too small) and is growing at a good enough rate that such a minor draw
away from it would be compensated for completely in less than two
months.

In addition, this shouldn't be the choice of zh.wikipedians or even of
the speakers of these languages/dialects, but rather the
native-speaking proposers who appear willing to dedicate a great deal
of time (Nishishei, for one, is dependable because of his reputation).
Chances are it won't affect many of the native speakers already at
zh.wikipedia, and if it did they would probably edit bilingually (just
as most editors on non-hi: Indic-language wikipedias edit their
language AND hi: on a regular basis). Perhaps if they are a huge
success they will attract more usersers from zh.wikipedia, but that
wouldn't be in the very near future and ZH would be much bigger by
then.

This is not like a TC/SC split where it's really a good deal of the users.

Mark

On Fri, 28 Jan 2005 08:35:32 +0800, Andrew Lih <andrew.lih at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 27 Jan 2005 02:14:29 -0700, Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > 3. Why are you so much against these Wikipedias being created if they
> > are as you say so useless? Could it hurt?
> 
> Mark, the dialect-specific Wikipedias don't "hurt" per se.
> 
> But the ZH Wikipedia is already disproportionately small, even
> miniscule, given the worldwide population of speakers. That's why some
> are afraid of splintering the effort too early.
> 
> Andrew Lih (User:Fuzheado)
>