With the advent of the computer and standardization of character sets specifically for Cantonese, many printed materials in predominantly Cantonese speaking areas of the world cater to their population using these written Cantonese characters.
According to the scholar Chaak-ming Lau, with over 40,000 articles, the Cantonese Wikipedia "is still by far the largest collection of written Cantonese articles to date".[1]
Naming
The Cantonese name of Wikipedia was decided in April 2006, following a vote. In a similar manner to the existing Chinese Wikipedia, the name of Cantonese Wikipedia (simplified Chinese: 维基百科; traditional Chinese: 維基百科; Jyutping: wai4 gei1 baak3 fo1) means "Wiki Encyclopedia". The Chinese transcription of "Wiki" is composed of two characters: 維/维, whose ancient sense refers to "ropes or webs connecting objects", and alludes to the Internet; and 基, meaning "foundations of a building", or "fundamental aspects of things in general". The name can be interpreted as "the encyclopedia that connects the fundamental knowledge of humanity".
The discussion in 2006 also decided the Cantonese name of the word "Cantonese" in the wiki. The result was "粵語". In a vote from August to September 2013 it was decided that the name be changed to "粵文", which literally means "Cantonese inscription".[2]
ISO code
At the time of establishment, there was no ISO code for Cantonese. Thus, zh-yue was used as the domain. However, some did not like the idea, as Yue is the Mandarin name of Cantonese. The native name is Yuet. Cantonese preserves entering tone while Mandarin does not. Some suggested using Cantonese instead, but zh-yue was chosen as the final domain name.
The ISO code for Cantonese is yue. Using the ISO code instead of current domain has been submitted as a proposal to Wikimedia, but as of yet, no action has been taken to implement this change.
Native name
There are various native names of Cantonese, namely Gwóng jàu wá (廣州話), Gwóng fú wá (廣府話), Gwóng dùng wá (廣東話) and Yuht yúh (粵語). Cantonese Wikipedians thus use the four names interchangeably, namely 廣州話維基百科, 廣府話維基百科, 廣東話維基百科 and 粵語維基百科. There is no consensus on the native name.
Starting from a small community, Cantonese Wikipedians have formed a consensus to follow, by default, the policies, guidelines, and customs of the English Wikipedia, wherever they are applicable. This consensus has provided stability and allows Wikipedians to concentrate on content.
As of 29 January 2024, the Cantonese Wikipedia has 2,089,810 edits, 137,402 articles, and more than 268,902 registered users, 12 of whom are administrators.[3] Behind the Chinese Wikipedia, out of all Chinese-dialect Wikipedias, the Cantonese Wikipedia has the second-most number of articles, users, active users, and administrators.[4]
There are two different scripts of written Cantonese: Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese. Some Cantonese-specific characters can only be written in Traditional Chinese. Cantonese Wikipedia uses Traditional following Hong Kong and Macau in their traditional usage, because most of the participants came from Hong Kong when Cantonese Wikipedia was founded. But this led to a dissatisfaction among Simplified Chinese users (mainly Cantonese speakers in Guangdong). To solve this problem, a JavaScript converter was created and provided for viewing the content in Simplified Chinese characters.
Unlike Chinese Wikipedia (where replacing a form of writing with another in source text is prohibited), if an editor writes a page in Simplified characters, they will not receive any warning from administrators, but the text will be manually converted to Traditional characters.
Other Chinese-language Wikipedias
Cantonese is a member of the group of Chinese varieties. Different Wikipedias have been established for different Chinese varieties (see below). The Cantonese Wikipedia is the second largest in this family.
