[Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia in Chinese dialects

Fri Feb 4 10:47:09 UTC 2005

Andrew Lih ti 2005/2/2 EP 10:35 sia-kong:
> 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.

No, but it is a statement of (nationalist?) faith in the ubiquity and 
all-empowering contemporary relevance of Mandarin to today's Chinese 
population, one not necessarily backed by empirical evidence and 
ordinary experience. A recent well-publicized Chinese-government study, 
for example, claims that only half of the Chinese population are capable 
of speaking Mandarin ("neng2 shuo1 Pu3tong1hua4"; 
http://www.beijingtimes.com.cn/news.asp?newsid=88058).  This is likely 
to be shocking only to those who never venture outside of the circles of 
urban, well-educated elite (of whom the Chinese Wikipedia can count many 
members).

That is not to deny that a Chinese encyclopedia to benefit millions is 
not a worthwhile goal.  Only that we should not delude ourselves of the 
power and grandeur of such a project which, after all, serves but one 
language -- one spoken by hundreds of millions but nevertheless hardly 
the primary, everyday language of millions more.  And that is assuming a 
very high literacy level, which again is supported neither by studies 
nor our experience interacting with those outside of the elite classes. 
  (To be sure, Wikipedia could be voice-recorded, by human or machine, 
or printed for the millions and millions too impoverished to own a PC, 
but these media require more expensive -- not to mention, 
censorship-prone -- means of presentation and delivery.)

Unfortunately it is all too common for both non-Chinese and Chinese 
alike to imagine a kind of monolithic, timeless cultural norm, be it to 
serve nationalism or to depict a simplistic other (see B. Anderson's 
"Imagined Community"; Said's "Orientalism"), rather than engaging with 
the reality on the ground.  Ultimately Wikipedians should not fall prey 
to such imagination.

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