On Sat, 12 Feb 2005 06:02:20 +0800, Andrew Lih <andrew.lih(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, 11 Feb 2005 14:31:09 -0700, Mark Williamson
<node.ue(a)gmail.com> wrote:
So this means you believe a Cantonese Wikipedia
will have no users and
will not be sustainable?
You're sure changing your tune fast. A minute ago, it was "My pet
project will lose resources!!!", but when you saw that didn't go over
too well with anybody you change it to "I feel deeply for these
people, and my primary concern is that they'll be lonely and I think
their minds are being controlled by Mark."
As usual, wild exaggerations by Mark. Please find a quote or a pointer
to anything I've said that resembles "My pet project will lose
resources!!!" It's getting tired.
They're not meant to be quote-quotes. And they're not exaggerations. "
To me, that means encouraging most of the labour towards making a
"Mandarin" Wikipedia. As a side effect, Wikipedia can be an experiment
in Internet democracy or a way to preserve/promote languages. But the
primary goal should be to write an encyclopedia.
One done in Mandarin will benefit over 1 billion people who simply
don't have a good free encyclopedia, in both senses of the word - free
as in beer, and free as in freedom. The faster we get there, the
better. And I don't think that's a selfish notion.", I simply quoted
it as Alex Kwan characterised it.
I just love how you try to say "Alex Kwan, speakers of Cantonese and
Wu, I am right, you should side with me because Mark is giving you
delusions", basically.
If I recall
correctly, zh.wikipedia's history does not involve having
the interface translated and a critical mass of people and articles
/before/ the creation of the subdomain, and even when articles started
to be created this was hardly true at first.
I think it was a pretty safe bet that the language of 1 billion
speakers would be started sooner than later. Also, zh: was started in
October 2002 by Mountain who drove the development of Unicode support
in Wikipedia. So this is beyond critical mass - it was leadership in
the whole WP project.
The difference here is that there are already language-speaking
supporters PRIOR to subdomain creation. And I don't see how leadership
in the whole WP project has _anything_ to do with critical mass of
articles and users.
And just
because you have relatives who speak five Chinese dialects
doesn't mean you can't be a linguistic imperialist.
<groan>
Hey, it's true.
Stalin, the
master of linguistic imperialism, came from a
Georgian-speaking family.
You're on the verge of realizing Godwin's Law.
No, not really. You seem to misunderstand Godwin's law. Stalin was a
linguistic imperialist. He made drastic changes to Soviet linguistic
policy with the intention to quash regional languages, including the
Georgian of his family and his schoolfriends. His birthname was
actually "Iosep Jugashvili", a very Georgian name. If Stalin can be a
linguistic imperialist on such a massive scale working against the
language of his hearth, surely you can be a linguistic imperialist on
a much more minor scale without your family exempting you from such
accusations.
Mark