User:SElephant/My letter to board of trustees

Dear sirs,

Recently I read a mail about elimating traditional Chinese on Chinese wikipedia mailing list. Being one of the administrators who live in Taiwan, I would like to point out some misunderstandings in the mail from Mr. George Herzog.

First of all, it's not true there is no representives for traditional Chinese or representives outside China among the community. There are 40 administrators on Chinese wikipedia right now, among us 5 are living in Taiwan (including me), 4 in Hong Kong, 1 in Singapore, and 10 in other American or European countries. We even have one administrator who is actually a French majoring in Chinese minority languages, and another who is a scholar of History of Taiwan independence movement. These are very good examples showing we are trying to balance the proportion of the representives who come from different Chinese-speaking groups. Although mainland Chinese users are still the majority, it's not true Chinese wikipedia were controlled by mainland Chinese, or even by Chinese government.

Secondly, the Traditional/Simplifed Chinese conversion function are running in an acceptable condition so far, after many contributions from both traditional and simplified Chinese users. The increasing of Taiwanese users recently shows that the conversion function do put some efferts in recruiting more traditional Chinese users than before. If someone is not very content with the performance of the system, we will suggest that he can join us and contribute his efforts to optimize the system. We all know the system is not perfect so far, it's not simple one-to-one translation between two different Chinese. So it needs lots of efforts to edit the conversion table manually. But, the new conversion system is still a great improvement.

Many points Mr. Herzog mentioned about were based on his own imagination about Chinese wikipedia, without participating and discussing with other Chinese wikipedian first. I'd like to suggest that he can come and talk with us on local village pump page. We will try as hard as possible to answer his questions about the fondamental ideas why put traditional and simplified Chinese in one wikipedia. There are both advantages and disadvantages in doing so, but we simply decided to work it out together after many discussions.

Sincerely, Sean H. Yu from Taipei User:SElephant