[Wikipedia-l] One Chinese Wikipedia

Thu Sep 9 10:11:42 UTC 2004

Hi all,

Chinese Wikipedia (zh.wikipedia.org) was started in October 2002. At
that time, almost all texts were in simplified Chinese, because the
first Chinese wikipedians are mainly from mainland China. (Being a
traditional Chinese user since birth, I was "scared away" when I first
went to zh: and saw that the whole site is in simp. Chinese.) But at
that time, most of the zh wikipedians agree that there should only be
one Chinese Wikipedia, but not two, because simp. and traditional
Chinese is one language actually, the difference being that some
characters are written in a different way and that wikipedians from
different part of the world have different names/terms for the same
object. (Just like a British would write "The centre of a sulphur atom
on a railway ." while an American would write "The center of a sulfur
atom on a railroad.") Most of the zh wikipedians can read both form of
characters, though we write in our respective native form. That's why
we want to have ONE zh: only.

We have been discussing on how to deal with this trad/simp problem
since the beginning. The consensus is that pages would be converted
between simp. and trad. according to the need of the reader/editor by
some automatic script or software. Though the development of such a
software has not started until recently (due to a lack of technical
assistance).

I am writing this mail because I see that zh-tw.wikipedia.org has been
set up. Being a long-time contributor to zh:, I feel quite frustrated
because it seems that all the discussion we have on how to solve this
problem are in vain.

Therefore I request that zh-tw.wikipedia.org and zh-cn.wikipedia.org
be redirected to zh.wikipedia.org.

Regards
Lorenzarius