It is comments like these that worry me, because it means there is very little knowledge about the ZH.wikipedia community, and of Chinese language/culture. Chinese is not a language owned by the "Beijing government."
1) The vast majority of Mandarin speakers are PRC citizens (not counting Taiwanese as PRC citizens). Historically, Chinese emigration has mostly been from Cantonese-, Minnan-, and Hakka-speaking areas rather than Mandarin-speaking ones, so the larger Mandarin-speaking communities outside of China are a very recent phenomenon.
2) You have said stuff about this before, about people not knowing much about the zh.wiki community. You're being overidealistic. It's quite easy to gauge public opinion on zh.wiki, and so far I've found that every person you've told to be mistaken about the zh.wiki community has pretty much been right.
3) The linguistic authority over the sweeping majority of speakers of ALL Sinitic languages rests with the PRC gov't in Beijing. If they should decide to replace hanzi entirely with pinyin or even cyrillic, you can bet your ass such a change would be complete in a couple of decades.
Waerth, as someone who lives in Asia, you might know that most Chinese in SE Asia don't like to be referred to as "overseas Chinese" for exactly this reason. The term "Nanyang Chinese" is mostly preferred, which basically means Chinese of the Southern Seas. They are not tools or satellites of Beijing, and do not have any allegiance politically to the People's Republic of China. So it is fallacious to turn this into a political issue.
Why?? What percentage of zh.wikipedians are from south of the PRC-Vietnam border? That's what I thought. Of course there is the minority, but the vast majority of zh.wikipedians are from the mainland, and smaller but very significant groups from HK and Taiwan.
Mainlanders may not be "tools" or "satellites" of Beijing, but they are very much indoctrinated with the linguistic propaganda of the Beijing gov't, and are unlikely to disbelieve it without personal experience (thus, it seems Cantonese native speakers are voting "support")
To reaffirm this - at the Wikimania conference, there were as many Chinese Wikipedians from outside the PRC than from inside - Malaysia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Germany, United States. We all got along swimmingly.
It's very easy to explain this. The main reason is because travel costs are going to be much cheaper for a Chinese in Germany to get to the Wikimania conference, than for a Chinese in Beijing to get to the conference.
I trust you and Node_ue will agree it is a legitimate thing to discuss, and that the opinion of Hong Kong folks has some relevance to the Cantonese Wikipedia discussion. But I would not be surprised to hear objection even to that.
Of course it is relevant. The whole point here is that Waerth and I both think it's unfair to let anybody but the actual language community make decisions about whether or not they should get a Wikipedia, with exceptions for artificial languages perhaps.
And obviously, most Hong Kongers fall within the boundaries of the Cantonese-speaking group. In fact, I'd be surprised if the meetup wasn't mostly in Cantonese.
Having said that, since I can't be there, I hope that it will be made very clear that this Wikipedia, if created, will be in Yueyu-baihuawen. This seems to have confused people a little already -- obviously Mandarin-based Baihuawen just read with Cantonese readings is identical or nearly identical to normal Baihuawen.
To my knowledge, "all ZH.Wikipedians" have not collectively come out with a position on the matter. Nor are they likely to, given the over-generalization.
On this point I agree with you. Most zh.wikipedians have not voted. There are also a few zh.wikipedians who expressed opinions on the village pump at zhwiki, but didn't go vote.
Why do Mandarin speakers feel they have to block requests for other sinetic languages? It beats me .... apart from being told by their government to be against it.
Again, see above. Your equating a Mandarin speaker to a PRC citizen is simply wrong, and likely offensive to many ZH.Wikipedians.
It's difficult to avoid the fact that the vast majority of Mandarin speakers are PRC citizens.
Having said that, I don't think it's so much people's government telling them to, but rather inexperience with regional vernacular writing.
One user on the zhwiki village pump said something along the lines of "A Cantonese Wikipedia?? Maybe we should ask for a Chengdu dialect Wikipedia!?", which is patently absurd since Chengdu is a Mandarin dialect by any measure (although admittedly written Chengdu vernacular, when it is used, does differ from putonghua-based baihuawen, though not by enough to make it difficult to comprehend)
As Ffarr said, perhaps Mandarin speakers should try reading an article on the test wikipedia before judging. They will probably find that it's actually very difficult for them to read, which is contrary to what they have been told since childhood.
Mark