[Wikipedia-l] New request for Cantonese Wikipedia: vote at 29-6

[Mark Williamson]

Ahh, a few more things.

1) Regardless of whether or not the poll was "rigged", there has been
a message on the zhwiki village pump for a few days now, and Angela
sent a message to wikizh-l. Given a few more days or a week, I would
think that whatever problem you might have with me not informing that
community even though I didn't think it was particularly relevant to
them would be pretty much solved;

2) If you go back and look at Andrew's messages from the original
discussion on the issue... Andrew never argued that written Cantonese
and Mandarin are the same. I also don't remember him saying that there
should *never* be a Cantonese wiki. His reason for opposing its
creation was, if you'll recall, his belief that a separate Cantonese
Wikipedia would take away too many editors from zhwiki, and that
zhwiki was too small at the time (even though it had nearly 20k
articles).

Now, I don't know what his feelings are now, but I'm pretty sure that,
living in Hong Kong, Andrew would not contest the assertion that there
is a separate written Cantonese that is slowly gaining prestige.

Ffarr and Wooddoo also expressed on the zhwiki village pump the belief
that most Mandarin speakers would have a great deal of difficulty
understanding the articles in the Cantonese test-wiki.

Kaihsu and A-Giâu, among others, have also made comments to this effect.

The discussion isn't about whether or not they're written differently,
really. Sure, a few people have said they're written identically, but
that's not really the question anymore.

The real question is whether or not Cantonese is deserving of a Wiki,
which depends on the answers to a few questions.

1) Written Cantonese and written Mandarin are quite obviously
different (as anyone who has lived in Hong Kong for even a short
period of time should know), but are they different enough that
Cantonese deserves a separate WP? Nobody's really raised this issue
yet, at least not as a reason for opposing. However, people have said
things along the lines of Mandarin speakers not understanding written
Cantonese well, including Milchflasch, Ffarr, and Wooddoo.

2) Is written Cantonese "good enough" for a Wikipedia? Spoken
Cantonese is used in all walks of life, including, say, physics
lectures at university, but written Cantonese is largely limited to
instant messaging, entertainment periodicals, novels, SMS, informal
letters, and the like. This is slowly changing -- one can find a
website about vegetarianism in Cantonese, websites about music, love,
and a few about science. Blogs also tend to use Cantonese heavily.
There are some groups which advocate the expansion of written
Cantonese into all walks of life, and some people use it in such a
fashion. Both Commons and Meta have Cantonese mainpages. Especially
moving to me is a quote from Jogloran, a Wikipedian: "My mother tongue
is Cantonese, not Mandarin, not 'Chinese', but specifically Cantonese.
When I read through the sample articles in Cantonese linked above, I
was struck by how much clearer it was to my mind. When I read a text
written in standard language, it takes a little longer for the exact
meaning to become apparent."

3) Will a Cantonese Wikipedia take away too many users from zhwiki? I
personally don't think so. Just as the creation of a Minnan Wikipedia
only drew away a few users, I think that even most Cantonese speakers
will continue to contribute to zhwiki. People who do "move" are, in my
opinion, unlikely to move completely -- most will probably share their
time between the two.

4) Will a Cantonese Wikipedia get any readers? I think so. There are
millions of speakers of Cantonese, and while some Cantonese speakers
would laugh at a Cantonese Wikipedia, I feel that many would frequent
it and find it refreshing to be able to find so much information in
the language of their hearth. This is perhaps similar to Sicilian,
Luxembourgish, and other minority language Wikipedias.

5) There is currently no official standard for writing Cantonese.
However, there is a sort of consensus, in that most people use the
same characters for the same words, even though there's no official
way. This is due mostly to the effect of the media -- the way
Cantonese is written in entertainment periodicals, tabloids, and
advertisements has influenced the writing of the people, and also, the
different major sources of written Cantonese have influenced each
other until arriving at a sort of "finished product", where most
things have a single usual way of writing. Exceptions are cuss words,
such as "diu" (as in "diu lei lo mo chao lo hai", "throw your mother's
smelly old shoes in the garbage"), which people may write with the
"consensus" character, or may substitute it with a homophone to avoid
writing a character that is seen as taboo due to its meaning and
etymology.

Mark

On 11/09/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Stirling Newberry wrote:
> > You wonder why people don't trust you, this is why, you are not
> > trustworthy. The question as to whether Catonese is a separaete
> > *written* language is precisely the question that needs to be decided
> > by the community.
> 
> I don't think the personal attack was necessary, but nonetheless, I
> think it is worth noting that using a vote-stacked poll is extremely
> counter-productive and unpersuasive.
> 
> The *real* question here is not about polls or communities.  Let's
> imagine for a moment that somehow the US and UK governments got into a
> fight, let's imagine even that it's a war.  And let's imagine that in
> the aftermath, there is a huge community vote to split into two English
> Wikipedias: American English and British English.  And let's further
> imagine that there is a huge majority.
> 
> Well, we still wouldn't split the two, because it's still lunacy to split.
> 
> Having said that, of course there are borderline cases and complexities.
> 
> What I would like to hear is *nothing* about Node's rigged poll, but
> about some very simple practical questions.
> 
> Those in favor of the split claim that the two languages *in written
> form* (as well as spoken form) are mutually unintelligible.  Node has
> produced some testimony to that effect.  I would like to hear more about
> that, especially from (for example) Andrew Lih.
> 
> --Jimbo
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> 


-- 
SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES
QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM
POSSIT MATERIARI
ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE