[Wikipedia-l] New Wikipedia language

Wed Jun 16 03:40:32 UTC 2004

I thought Chinese Wikipedians have reached consensus at the beginning
of the Chinese Wikipedia project two years ago that traditional and
simplified Chinese should be put together, because essentially they
are one language, with the same grammar and vocabulary. The difference
between traditional and simplified Chinese sometimes is even subtler
than the difference between American and British English.

Most native speakers of the Chinese language can read both sets of
writing system. No one has yet complained that they cannot read
simplified Chinese or traditional Chinese. Our ultimate goal is to
develop an auto conversion script that would display simplified or
traditional Chinese according to users' preference. Progress is slow,
but efforts have been put in. (See
http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:%E7%B9%81%E7%AE%80%E4%BD%93%E9%97%AE%E9%A2%98)

The Chinese Wikipedia is not a Simplified Chinese Wikipedia or
Traditional Chinese Wikipedia, but rather a mixture of the two. You
can contribute in both simplified or traditional Chinese. Currently
very few articles are split into two versions, and we now encourage
all contributors to concentrate their efforts in one version of the
article with both traditional and simplified Chinese. Of course
majority of the articles are written in Simplified Chinese, as most
contributors come from mainland. But still there are many articles
written mainly in traditional Chinese, especially those articles
associated with Taiwan.

formulax

On Tue, 15 Jun 2004 18:43:44 +0000, Ian Mackinnon
<ianm2000uk at hotmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Well, not really a new language, but I'm frustrated that Traditional Chinese
> is lumped into the  Simplified Chinese version of Wikipedia. The problem
> with this is the main page is only in Simplified Chinese and when looking up
> articles, it does not go directly to the page but gives the option to choose
> whether you want to go to the simplified or the traditional version.
> 
> I strongly request that the Traditional Chinese version of Wikipedia be
> given it's own language space, tw.wikipedia.org would be better. It should
> be common sense that these 2 styles of writing should not be combined
> together. Overseas Chinese and non-China born/educated persons who studied
> traditional Chinese writing have difficulty reading the simplified version.
> The current configuration just makes it frustrating to browse articles.
> 
> A real good argument I can give for this is why does wikipedia have
> simple.wikipedia.org for "Simple English" instead of it being lumped into
> en.wikipedia.org? I hope you see what I'm talking about and split
> zh.wikipedia.org and tw.wikipedia.org so there's no more confusion for
> Chinese readers of wikipedia.org
> 
> Thanks!
> 
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