7 ms·

Catalonia is an autonomous community inside Spain, and still there's a catalan wikimedia foundation as far as I can see https://www.wikimedia.cat/ https://www.w

Catalonia is an autonomous community inside Spain, and still there's a catalan wikimedia foundation as far as I can see https://www.wikimedia.cat/ https://www.wikimedia.cat/ It seems to me this Wikimedia Foundation === Country Level Only Status is bullshit. Yes, we catalans have another separate language besides spanish that grants for ourselves a whole encyclopedia in it (viquipedia. that's catalan wikipedia). So I don't see why Wikimedia Taiwan should be an issue regardless of the status of Taiwan inside China itself? And yes, the situations are 0 comparably in real life... just my random POV

bakuninsbart 6y ago
Taiwanese official language is also mandarin, so it doesn't really make sense. Apart from the obvious Civil War issues, there is also another aspect to this: The CPC has done their very best to disemphasize the differences between "Han" Chinese, and discouraging the use of local languages like Shanghainese or Cantonese. China is obsessed with unity and stability (with good historical reason), and very paranoid about foreigners trying to divide and conquer them (also with good reasons), and sometimes this takes on slightly ridiculous forms as in the wikimedia example.
- Anon1096 6y ago
  Taiwan's language is traditional mandarin, which in the context of a text site like Wikipedia, matters a lot. Using China's site would mean being forced to read simplified Chinese. There's other language differences as well that would make a Taiwanese person very confused if they had to read a China-based Wikipedia. Really the only sensible solution is for Taiwan to have its own chapter.
  - im3w1l 6y ago
    Simplified and traditional characters are in perfect correspondence right? Could maybe translate on the fly?
    - hker 6y ago
      > Simplified and traditional characters are in perfect correspondence right? No, there is no perfect correspondence between simplified and traditional Chinese. The simplified Chinese collapses important characters such as “after” and “back”, often causing confusion (you can read more here [1]). [1]: http://pages.ucsd.edu/~dkjordan/chin/SimplifiedCharacters.html http://pages.ucsd.edu/~dkjordan/chin/SimplifiedCharacters.ht...
      - dheera 6y ago
        Not only that, but there are a couple of characters that are collapsed in traditional but split out in simplified: "乾" in Simplified refers to only one of the 8 trigrams, as is used in the word "乾坤" "乾" in Traditional can mean either the above OR the Simplified "干" (dry) "干" also exists in Traditional but only means "stem" not "dry" However, GP's point about translating on the fly is possible. You don't need a very advanced algorithm to translate simplified<->traditional almost perfectly. Unless you're translating poetry they can almost always be disambiguated by the nearby characters very well. Note though that there are lots of actual word differences in mainland Mandarin and Taiwanese Mandarin. It's not difficult for one to read the other and maybe occasionally asking a question or two but it's nice for every human to have materials available in their native dialect and vocabulary. Much like you probably appreciate that your system offers both UK English and US English and doesn't force you to use the "other" one from what you're used to.
        im3w1l 6y ago
        As a non-native English speaker, I actually hate that there is a split.
        dheera 6y ago
        You should check out Singaporean English or "Singlish", which uses a lot of Chinese grammar and Hokkien and Malay vocabulary in English sentences. It's a wonderfully efficient dialect taking the best from all of these languages.
  - eloisius 6y ago
    The most popular language in Taiwan is Mandarin, and they use the Traditional characters, but it’s the same Mandarin, albeit with small, regional differences like pronouncing 和 as hàn instead of Northern Chinese hé. Additionally, there are other official Taiwanese languages like Taiwan Min Nan and various Formosan languages. Pedantry out of the way, You could make a case that the Wikipedia is the same language and you can change the character set pretty much interchangeably by machine, but I wouldn’t want to see China have its claws on the only ZH-language Wikipedia either.
    - jimworm 6y ago
      My view is rather different. Written Chinese does not "belong" to Mandarin or any other spoken Chinese language, but is its own entity. While the mainland-China version of simplified Chinese is based around Mandarin, written Chinese is most definitely not Mandarin. 裏 is not 里. 只 is not 隻. 后 is not 後. They might sound the same in modern Mandarin but that is where the similarity ends. Those are characters with entirely different meanings and often different pronunciations in various forms of Chinese. I believe that alone makes the assertion that traditional Chinese is "just another character set" as controversial as calling English "just another Newspeak".
      - eloisius 6y ago
        You're absolutely right. Written Chinese is called Standard Chinese on the mainland and it is "Chinese" whether you speak Cantonese, Mandarin, or Shangaianese. That fact blew my mind when I learned it. Written Chinese can be understand by people that speak mutually unintelligible spoken languages. And not just that it _can be_ understood. They share the same written language. There are informal written version of regional languages, but that's a rabbit hole. My point was really not to get too deep into the pedantry of it, but simply that Taiwan and China do share the same written language with a different character set because you can generally replace the characters without substantial grammatical or vocabulary changes. It's not in the same ballpark as equivocating Spanish, Catalan, Languedoc, and French. There are different vocabulary variations like saying 哪兒 Nǎ'er and 哪裡 Nǎlǐ (both mean "where?"), but you can also find variations between Brit and American English vocabulary. IMO, the Trad/Simplified difference is closer akin to American English deciding to drop a lot of U's in words like "colour." My point was that you could say they share the same written language so it makes very much sense to have one ZH-language Wikipedia, and use machine conversion to present it in the character set preferred by the reader (as it does currently). And, that there is plenty of good reasons for Taiwan to have its own Wikimedia organization because there are non-ZH languages like Min Nan that deserve to be represented. Edit for sake of illustration. Take the sentence "I like this cat." It's read "Wǒ xǐhuān zhè zhī māo" no matter if you're reading it in Traditional or Simplified characters. There may be some pronunciation differences North v South that is above my level so far, but the characters (notably 只 that you mentioned) are the same meaning and sound. 我喜歡這隻貓我喜欢这只猫
  - bawolff 6y ago
    Chapters are separate from which languages have a site. (E.g. thee exists Wikimedia Canada, Wikimedia NYC, wikimedia cascadia etc. That is unrelated to there being an english language wikipedia) Http://zh.wikipedia.org uses some weird auto conversion to try and be both lsnguages.
- jariel 6y ago
  ??? Taiwanese expression of identity has nothing to do with 'foreigners'. There's no reasonable defence for the dystopian nightmare the CCP is pursuing and the arguments fall flat. Europe was at war for 2000 years and didn't need help from outsiders, the same can be said of most places.
JdeBP 6y ago
That's a Wikimedia thematic organization, not a Wikimedia chapter like Wikimedia Taiwan. And neither of them are the Wikimedia Foundation. * https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_thematic_organizations https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_thematic_organizat... * https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters
- agustif 6y ago
  Thanks I wasn't aware of the differences, just use wikipedia randomly but never been part of the community or active contributor
  - JdeBP 6y ago
    Count your blessings. It gets a lot more confusing than that. The Wikipedia community, the people that write stuff on Wikipedia wikis, isn't the same as Wikimedia, and the various different language Wikipedia communities even divide themselves up from one another. The Wikimedia Foundation, conversely, doesn't just provide the Wikipedia wikis, but it also provides wikis for projects like Wiktionary, Wikinews, and Wikisource. It even has its own wiki, the foundation wiki, not to be confused with "Meta", the wiki that I just pointed to. The Wikimedia Foundation also allows, as aforementioned, use of its name by chapters and thematic organizations. And of course, "wiki" is not the abbreviation for "Wikipedia". It's a word for something else. * https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Don't_abbreviate_as_Wiki.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Don't_abbreviate_as_... Then there's a piece of computer software, that one runs on a computer in order to provide a wiki, that is called MediaWiki …
    - fakedang 6y ago
      Jimmy Wales, proponent of creative commons, not so creative with names himself.
msoad 6y ago
I just want to thank Catalonians for .cat TLD!
kerng 6y ago
Taiwan is especially important because they are one of the few countries keeping traditional written Chinese alive!
capableweb 6y ago
> Their last-minute objections claimed Wikimedia’s application was incomplete, and suggested that the Wikimedia Foundation was carrying out political activities via the volunteer-led Wikimedia Taiwan chapter So seems China has a problem with that the Taiwan chapter is being used for political activism, rather than just serving/working on Wikipedia. Similarly if the Catalan chapter did activism in favor of independence, Spain might react to that in one way or another.
- fankal 6y ago
  I don't know about the Catalan chapter, but the Catalan wikipedia itself leans towards Catalan nationalism. For example, https://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalunya https://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalunya describes Catalonia first and foremost as a "european country", while German wikipedia and most others describe it as a region/autonomous community in Spain.

bakuninsbart 6y ago

Taiwanese official language is also mandarin, so it doesn't really make sense. Apart from the obvious Civil War issues, there is also another aspect to this: The CPC has done their very best to disemphasize the differences between "Han" Chinese, and discouraging the use of local languages like Shanghainese or Cantonese. China is obsessed with unity and stability (with good historical reason), and very paranoid about foreigners trying to divide and conquer them (also with good reasons), and sometimes this takes on slightly ridiculous forms as in the wikimedia example.

Anon1096 6y ago
Taiwan's language is traditional mandarin, which in the context of a text site like Wikipedia, matters a lot. Using China's site would mean being forced to read simplified Chinese. There's other language differences as well that would make a Taiwanese person very confused if they had to read a China-based Wikipedia. Really the only sensible solution is for Taiwan to have its own chapter.
- im3w1l 6y ago
  Simplified and traditional characters are in perfect correspondence right? Could maybe translate on the fly?
  - hker 6y ago
    > Simplified and traditional characters are in perfect correspondence right? No, there is no perfect correspondence between simplified and traditional Chinese. The simplified Chinese collapses important characters such as “after” and “back”, often causing confusion (you can read more here [1]). [1]: http://pages.ucsd.edu/~dkjordan/chin/SimplifiedCharacters.html http://pages.ucsd.edu/~dkjordan/chin/SimplifiedCharacters.ht...
    - dheera 6y ago
      Not only that, but there are a couple of characters that are collapsed in traditional but split out in simplified: "乾" in Simplified refers to only one of the 8 trigrams, as is used in the word "乾坤" "乾" in Traditional can mean either the above OR the Simplified "干" (dry) "干" also exists in Traditional but only means "stem" not "dry" However, GP's point about translating on the fly is possible. You don't need a very advanced algorithm to translate simplified<->traditional almost perfectly. Unless you're translating poetry they can almost always be disambiguated by the nearby characters very well. Note though that there are lots of actual word differences in mainland Mandarin and Taiwanese Mandarin. It's not difficult for one to read the other and maybe occasionally asking a question or two but it's nice for every human to have materials available in their native dialect and vocabulary. Much like you probably appreciate that your system offers both UK English and US English and doesn't force you to use the "other" one from what you're used to.
      - im3w1l 6y ago
        As a non-native English speaker, I actually hate that there is a split.
        dheera 6y ago
        You should check out Singaporean English or "Singlish", which uses a lot of Chinese grammar and Hokkien and Malay vocabulary in English sentences. It's a wonderfully efficient dialect taking the best from all of these languages.
- eloisius 6y ago
  The most popular language in Taiwan is Mandarin, and they use the Traditional characters, but it’s the same Mandarin, albeit with small, regional differences like pronouncing 和 as hàn instead of Northern Chinese hé. Additionally, there are other official Taiwanese languages like Taiwan Min Nan and various Formosan languages. Pedantry out of the way, You could make a case that the Wikipedia is the same language and you can change the character set pretty much interchangeably by machine, but I wouldn’t want to see China have its claws on the only ZH-language Wikipedia either.
  - jimworm 6y ago
    My view is rather different. Written Chinese does not "belong" to Mandarin or any other spoken Chinese language, but is its own entity. While the mainland-China version of simplified Chinese is based around Mandarin, written Chinese is most definitely not Mandarin. 裏 is not 里. 只 is not 隻. 后 is not 後. They might sound the same in modern Mandarin but that is where the similarity ends. Those are characters with entirely different meanings and often different pronunciations in various forms of Chinese. I believe that alone makes the assertion that traditional Chinese is "just another character set" as controversial as calling English "just another Newspeak".
    - eloisius 6y ago
      You're absolutely right. Written Chinese is called Standard Chinese on the mainland and it is "Chinese" whether you speak Cantonese, Mandarin, or Shangaianese. That fact blew my mind when I learned it. Written Chinese can be understand by people that speak mutually unintelligible spoken languages. And not just that it _can be_ understood. They share the same written language. There are informal written version of regional languages, but that's a rabbit hole. My point was really not to get too deep into the pedantry of it, but simply that Taiwan and China do share the same written language with a different character set because you can generally replace the characters without substantial grammatical or vocabulary changes. It's not in the same ballpark as equivocating Spanish, Catalan, Languedoc, and French. There are different vocabulary variations like saying 哪兒 Nǎ'er and 哪裡 Nǎlǐ (both mean "where?"), but you can also find variations between Brit and American English vocabulary. IMO, the Trad/Simplified difference is closer akin to American English deciding to drop a lot of U's in words like "colour." My point was that you could say they share the same written language so it makes very much sense to have one ZH-language Wikipedia, and use machine conversion to present it in the character set preferred by the reader (as it does currently). And, that there is plenty of good reasons for Taiwan to have its own Wikimedia organization because there are non-ZH languages like Min Nan that deserve to be represented. Edit for sake of illustration. Take the sentence "I like this cat." It's read "Wǒ xǐhuān zhè zhī māo" no matter if you're reading it in Traditional or Simplified characters. There may be some pronunciation differences North v South that is above my level so far, but the characters (notably 只 that you mentioned) are the same meaning and sound. 我喜歡這隻貓我喜欢这只猫
- bawolff 6y ago
  Chapters are separate from which languages have a site. (E.g. thee exists Wikimedia Canada, Wikimedia NYC, wikimedia cascadia etc. That is unrelated to there being an english language wikipedia) Http://zh.wikipedia.org uses some weird auto conversion to try and be both lsnguages.
jariel 6y ago
??? Taiwanese expression of identity has nothing to do with 'foreigners'. There's no reasonable defence for the dystopian nightmare the CCP is pursuing and the arguments fall flat. Europe was at war for 2000 years and didn't need help from outsiders, the same can be said of most places.

JdeBP 6y ago

That's a Wikimedia thematic organization, not a Wikimedia chapter like Wikimedia Taiwan. And neither of them are the Wikimedia Foundation. * https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_thematic_organizations https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_thematic_organizat... * https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters

agustif 6y ago
Thanks I wasn't aware of the differences, just use wikipedia randomly but never been part of the community or active contributor
- JdeBP 6y ago
  Count your blessings. It gets a lot more confusing than that. The Wikipedia community, the people that write stuff on Wikipedia wikis, isn't the same as Wikimedia, and the various different language Wikipedia communities even divide themselves up from one another. The Wikimedia Foundation, conversely, doesn't just provide the Wikipedia wikis, but it also provides wikis for projects like Wiktionary, Wikinews, and Wikisource. It even has its own wiki, the foundation wiki, not to be confused with "Meta", the wiki that I just pointed to. The Wikimedia Foundation also allows, as aforementioned, use of its name by chapters and thematic organizations. And of course, "wiki" is not the abbreviation for "Wikipedia". It's a word for something else. * https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Don't_abbreviate_as_Wiki.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Don't_abbreviate_as_... Then there's a piece of computer software, that one runs on a computer in order to provide a wiki, that is called MediaWiki …
  - fakedang 6y ago
    Jimmy Wales, proponent of creative commons, not so creative with names himself.

msoad 6y ago

I just want to thank Catalonians for .cat TLD!

kerng 6y ago

Taiwan is especially important because they are one of the few countries keeping traditional written Chinese alive!

capableweb 6y ago

> Their last-minute objections claimed Wikimedia’s application was incomplete, and suggested that the Wikimedia Foundation was carrying out political activities via the volunteer-led Wikimedia Taiwan chapter So seems China has a problem with that the Taiwan chapter is being used for political activism, rather than just serving/working on Wikipedia. Similarly if the Catalan chapter did activism in favor of independence, Spain might react to that in one way or another.

fankal 6y ago
I don't know about the Catalan chapter, but the Catalan wikipedia itself leans towards Catalan nationalism. For example, https://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalunya https://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalunya describes Catalonia first and foremost as a "european country", while German wikipedia and most others describe it as a region/autonomous community in Spain.