[Foundation-l] Chinese Wikinews: board action required

Wed Apr 13 22:08:50 UTC 2005

There has now been a vote, organized by Formulax, among Chinese language 
Wikimedians on whether there should be a Chinese Wikinews.

The results are at:
http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:%E6%8A%95%E7%A5%A8/%E7%BB%B4%E5%9F%BA%E6%96%B0%E9%97%BB

In an amusing demonstration of the problems of voting, there were 13 
votes opposed to the project, 13 votes in support, and 1 vote with 
support only if compromises could be made about NPOV.

There was a larger vote earlier on whether this should be up to the 
global community to decide, or to the Chinese community. That vote was 
inconclusive, too, with opinions evenly split (50% want it to be a 
global decision, 50% want it to be a local decision) and very strong 
expressions of emotions on both sides.

We can continue voting until we get a nice result, but I think it would 
be best now for the board to make a decision about this.

My recommendation is a compromise: the project should go ahead under 
somewhat more rigid conditions (at least 10 support votes with at least 
6 of them from Wikimedia regulars PLUS the process at 
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/New_language_pre-launch ). We can deal 
with problems of censorship as they arise.

Erik