[Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikipedia in Chinese dialects

Fri Feb 4 17:42:44 UTC 2005

Also important, in my mind, is this: nobody argues that simply not
participating in a Wikipedia you don't like is bad, but would it be
right of us to override popular support of language-speaking
Wikipedians and deny creation of these Wikipedias citing a desire for
"linguistic unity" in a move that would be more expected of
Gongchandang/Gungchaandong/Kongchetaz than
Weijidang/Waigeidong/Viqitaz?

Mark

On Fri, 04 Feb 2005 05:47:09 -0500, Henry H. Tan-Tenn
<share2002nov at lomaji.com> wrote:
> 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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