You're absolutely right. Written Chinese is called Standard Chinese on the mainland and it is "Chinese" whether you speak Cantonese, Mandarin, or Shangaianese.

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