Southern Min Wikipedia
The Southern Min Wikipedia (Pe̍h-ōe-jī: Wikipedia Bân-lâm-gú), also known as Min Nan Wikipedia[1] and Holopedia[2] is the Southern Min edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.[3] It is the second largest Wikipedia in a variety of Chinese, after Mandarin.[4] Written in Pe̍h-ōe-jī, it mainly uses the Hokkien Taiwanese dialect. As of 19 October 2023, it has 432,728 articles.[5]
 | |
Screenshot  | |
Type of site | Internet encyclopedia project |
|---|---|
| Available in | Southern Min |
| Owner | Wikimedia Foundation |
| URL | zh-min-nan.wikipedia.org |
| Commercial | No |
| Registration | Optional |
| Launched | July 2003 (project established) May 28, 2004 (joined Wikipedia) |
Content license | CC-BY-SA 3.0 |
History
The Southern Min Wikipedia was founded as an independent project known as Holopedia (a reference to Hō-ló-oē, a colloquial name for the Southern Min dialect) by Wikipedians Pektiong (Tân Pe̍k-tiong) and Kaihsu (Tè Khái-sū) in 2003.[6] Following one year of development, Holopedia was moved from Holopedia.net to the Southern Min Wikipedia, creating a Wikipedia project for the language.[7] The Southern Min Wikipedia had 4,000 articles in 2004 and 11,000 articles in December 2013.[8][9]
ISO code
At the time of creation there was no ISO 639 code for Southern Min, so the founders decided to use "zh-min-nan", which had been registered as an IETF language tag.[10] Now there is an ISO code for Southern Min (nan) and the domain http://nan.wikipedia.org redirects to http://zh-min-nan.wikipedia.org/.
The Southern Min Wikipedia is the only Wikipedia to have two hyphens in the code, although "be-x-old" was formerly used for the Belarusian Wikipedia in classical orthography.
In August 2015, the Wikipedians of Southern Min Wikipedia reached a new consensus to officially use "nan" as the language code; however, as of 2023, the consensus hasn't been executed yet.[11][12]
Analysis
With 200,000 articles in 2020, Southern Min Wikipedia is the Sinitic Wikipedia with the second-most articles. As its articles largely use the Roman alphabet, it is "the only Sinitic Wikipedia with virtually no Chinese characters". The scholar Henning Klöter wrote, "If we take the Holopedia not only as a sign of the vitality of alphabetically written Taiwanese, it turns out that today, like 20 years ago, governmental and non-governmental language planners still do not pull together, in terms of both intensity and substance. It has to be emphasised that individual non-governmental agency in language planning cannot be limited to the Holopedia community."[13]
The Southern Min Wikipedia was the Chinese dialect Wikipedia with the largest increase in users, going from 39 to 119 between 2015 and 2017.[14] The scholar Hongyuan Dong explained this said that numerous diaspora groups exist outside of mainland China such as in Southeast Asia, North America, and Europe, which enable those people to be unaffected by Internet censorship in China. Dong said that the expansion of Southern Min Wikipedia was owing to the Taiwan government and linguistic groups' standardization efforts for the dialect.[14]
The Southern Min Wikipedia uses the phonetic alphabet Pe̍h-ōe-jī. The scholar Hongyuan Dong attributed this to three reasons. The first reason was political in that Min Nan speakers yearned for a singular identity that would substantially distinguish themselves from Mandarin Chinese. A phonetic alphabet accomplishes this. The second reason is that out of every Chinese dialect, Southern Min perhaps had the best phonetic system, having spawned a substantial amount of written matter. The third reason was that Taiwan's homogenizing of Southern Min had very limited impact on non-Taiwanese speakers of the dialect. Dong concluded, "to reach a larger readership, a phonetic writing system does seem to have its advantage given the high internal homogeneity among the major Southern Min speaker communities".[15]
References
- Dong 2017, p. 466
- zh:闽南语维基百科
- "Humanity Magazine article". Humanity Magazine 人生雜誌 (in Chinese). 2006. Retrieved 2023-08-21 – via Google Books.
- List of Wikipedias
- List of Wikipedias on Meta-Wiki.
- Wong, Yaping 王雅萍 (2009-12-15). "期待族語版的維基百科" [Looking forward to the indigenous Taiwanese language version of Wikipedia]. Lihpao (in Chinese).
- Yang, Yunyan 楊允言; Zhang, Xueqian 張學謙; Lu, Meiqin 呂美親, eds. (2008). 台語文運動訪談暨史料彙編 [Interview and compilation of historical materials on Taiwanese language movement] (in Chinese). Taipei: Academia Historica. p. 572. ISBN 978-986-01-3294-6. Retrieved 2023-08-21 – via Google Books.
- Iûnn, Ún-gián 楊允言 (January 2009). 台語文處理技術:以變調及詞性標記為例 [Processing Techniques for Written Taiwanese -- Tone Sandhi and POS Tagging] (in Chinese). National Taiwan University. p. 2. Retrieved 2023-08-21.
- Lun, Un-gian 楊允言 (2014). 臺語文語料處理kah線頂資源研究 [Research on Corpus Processing and Online Resource for Written Taiwanese] (in Chinese). Tainan: Asian A-tsiu International 亞細亞國際傳播. p. 138. ISBN 978-986-85418-9-4. Retrieved 2023-08-21 – via Google Books.
- language tag registration form: zh-min-nan
- "⚓ T30442 Rename zh-min-nan -> nan". phabricator.wikimedia.org.
- "⚓ T10217 Wikipedias with zh-* language codes waiting to be renamed (zh-min-nan -> nan, zh-yue -> yue, zh-classical -> lzh)". phabricator.wikimedia.org.
- Klöter, Henning (2020). "Writing Taiwanese: Then and now, how, why and who?". In Fell, Dafydd; Hsiao, Hsin-Huang Michael (eds.). Taiwanese Studies Revisited. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-367-20171-5. Retrieved 2023-08-21 – via Google Books.
- Dong 2017, p. 470
- Dong 2017, p. 477
Bibliography
- Dong, Hongyuan (2017). Zhang, Lan (ed.). "Language Policy, Dialect Writing and Linguistic Diversity" (PDF). Proceedings of the 29th North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics (NACCL-29). Vol. 2. Ohio State University. pp. 463–480. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2023-08-28. Retrieved 2023-08-28.
