Threatening is exactly what you are doing. And such
threats don't
strike me as a very helpful way to resolve this particular issue.
No, threatening is *not* what I am doing. All I'm saying is that if
the solution eventually reached is *not* mutually accomodative, there
will be a fork.
What we want to seek is a solution to this very real
problem which is
mutually accomodative to all interested parties. Whether this
ultimately means that a "two wiki" solution is best very much remains
to be seen.
I have yet to see a proposal that's actually doable in the near future
that would solve this problem to the satisfaction of all interested
parties.
A fork would only be successful or wise if the
alternative solution
that we come up with is less desirable than the fork.
Well, that's a bit obvious. Of course there would be no forking if the
solution was more desirable than the fork.
Will you agree to not threaten a fork while we all
discuss rationally
how we might best deal with the issue technically? That threat
is a
power play which poisons the discussion, and makes it harder for
people to come to the right conclusions.
As I said before I am not "threatening" a fork but merely stating that
if the end-result is not more desirable than a fork, that is what will
most likely happen.
The new wiki was shut down because it would be
irresponsible for us
to set off on such a major departure from present practice,
against
the objections of what is a majority (as far as I can tell) of the
existing Simplified _and_ Traditional communities, just on your say-so
and threats.
Threats? Who did I threaten? Even if you count the fork thing as a
threat, that was only recently and the new wiki was shut down well
before that - the new wiki was created by accident, not as the result
of threats I made to anybody. You also fail to mention that I wasn't
the only registered user, and that there are well over 1000 pages,
over 600 of them "probably legitimate". This is much larger than many
existing Wikis, and much of it is original. If a solution doesn't
satisfactorily work this content in, and work it in *in Traditional
Chinese* rather than converting it, and to not allow additions to it
that aren't in Traditional, I will copy the content somewhere else.
That's *me* doing something with content of which *I* contributed
about 99% (as I said before, I wasn't the only registered user, and a
couple of anons made edits too).
Also, the only people from zh: who have weighed in so far are people
who are high up in the community (and it has been suggested before and
seems at least partially true that the opinions of those Traditional
users in the zh: bureaucracy don't nessecarily reflect those of the
average Traditional user), most of which are Simplified users; so far
only 4 primarily Traditional users have weighed in (iirc), 1 of which
seems to agree for the most part with me and one other who may or may
not agree (Fuzheado and Lorenzarius afaict do not support a two-wiki
solution). As was already noted by somebody else, the proposed
technical solutions so far that are actually workable in the near
future are all focused on a dual-language user interface, which
although important isn't nearly as big as the issue of separate
articles, template messages, redirects from Traditional to Simplified
articles (and as was noted, vice-versa), articles with a title in one
but content in the other, articles written partly in one and partly in
the other, talk pages (even for traditional articles, they're often
written in simplified), and so on.
I think the general standpoint of other Traditional users on zh: is
that continued unification is something that they'd like, but they are
beginning to find that it doesn't seem likely that a satisfactory
solution will be found in the near future.
If a solution really can be found that is satisfactory but does not
involve separate Wikis, of course I will support it and if anybody
ends up forking under those conditions I will not support it.
All I'm saying is that if independent Traditional content cannot exist
on Wikipedia under the solution, whether as part of zh: *or* as a
separate Wikipedia, chances are the solution won't be "satisfactory"
to all parties involved.
And I think that the idea that a separation will hurt NPOV isn't
entirely correct: en: doesn't include people from all the different
points of view, yet there are plenty who defend NPOV even if they have
a certain POV that agrees with whatever POV is being pushed. Just
because there would be a much much much smaller number of Mainland
users on a separate Traditional wikipedia doesn't mean all the
articles are going to have an anti-PRC slant.
Maybe we will end up with a two wiki solution. Maybe
we'll end up
with a single wiki solution. Just relax a bit, and let's
discuss it
further.
I'm sure it wasn't intended, but one of the major problems I have with
closed-zh-tw: is that the namespaces were changed back to their
default, breaking loads of links and making it appear less functional
than it was before it was closed (other than the fact that it's now
read-only, of course, which I understand).
Anyhow, as I said before if a workable solution is reached, even if it
doesn't involve a separate wiki for Traditional, I will support it.
--Jin Junshu/Mark