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@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, 27 Jan 2005 02:14:29 -0700, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
- 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)