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%…) 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(a)hotmail.com> wrote:

Ian Mackinnon wrote: I don't feel this is a strong argument for splitting Traditional and Simplified Chinese. The Simple English Wikipedia has only attracted 1500 articles so far. I expect it may have been far more successful had it been better merged with the English Wikipedia at the beginning. Angela.