Talk:Wikinews/Vote/Zh/20041022

Hi,

there seem to be 4 no votes and 0 yes vote at the moment - can someone translate the objections to me? The Wikinews/Vote in English is going very well and I'd like to know if there's anything that the Chinese in particular are worried about.--Eloquence

I find it peculiar that the Chinese vote is the only one which has the No majority for Wikinews. The point on censorship is interesting and I understand it to an extent. On the other hand, that doesn't mean there should be no Wikinews. The other point is probably more universal - a lot of language Wikipedia community would be unwilling to embrace a 6th project (Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikiquote, Wikisource and now this). It would either create an inactive Wikinews because there would be no new users willing to participate, or it would create an inactive Wikipedia. This is already a problem with Wiktionary and Wikiquote, which are mainly inactive in a lot of language versions. However, this would be a valid argument if it were a standard project we were talking about, but, while I started off sceptical about Wikinews, I am finding myself excited and looking forward toward its launch! Therefore, we may get people drifting away from Wikipedia to Wikinews... is that a good or bad thing? Depends on how you view it. There's nothing inherently more important about Wikipedia than Wikinews. In any case, I don't see how opposing this project will do anything good. If you don't want to participate then don't! But we can still launching the site... Ronline 10:54, 25 Oct 2004 (UTC) (It's great that Wikinews is going so well - the votes will be counted as the composite across translations of the vote page, right?)

As I said on Talk:Wikinews, I think we can't and shouldn't try to tell volunteers how to spend their time. If they prefer to work on Wikinews, then that's their choice. Wikinews will drive contributors to Wikipedia and vice versa. To make sure that the project isn't dormant, there need to be at least five active people for a Wikinews version to be recognized as an official Wikimedia project.

You are right, the vote count will be aggregated. I'm against special casing Chinese, but the censorship situation has to be carefully assessed before we launch a Chinese Wikinews.--Eloquence