Hi, we are editors in Chinese Wikipedia. We are planning a project (The Center For Studying Chinese as Second Language) to help non-Chinese-native-speaker with basic Chinese reading and writing ability to join Chinese Wikipedia.
Although this project is not activated completely, we already have some volunteers who want to help.
If you need anything to read and edit Chinese Wikipedia, you can leave some message at this talk page, we will answer as soon as possble.
Maybe for the benefit of those who have never used the Chinese Wikipedia, you could give a brief introduction of what a foreign person learning Chinese could expect to do there? The Chinese articles are written for native speakers, and unless you set up a “Simple Chinese” Wiki (which I personally would very much support and would help with) I’m not quite sure what a beginner or even intermediate student would do there.
It’s a wonderful resource and I can certainly see myself wasting a LOT of time over there reading stuff, but it would be nice to know how we could participate more actively.
I am thinking more about what a foreign person learning Chinese could expect to do in Chinese Wikipedia.
However, with my poor English, I can do some contribution at English Wikipedia.
I think that many non-Chinese-native-speaker can do a lot of thing in Chinese Wikipedia, especially when some native speaker is willing to help.
By the way, we (some Taiwan Wikipedians) talk about your idea about “Simple Chinese” Wikipdia through Skype. We think that would be a good idea, although we don’t have enough poeple to do that.
Maybe Wikijunior is a project we can look forward to.
We will meet up at Taipei in March. The time and place is under discussion. I’ll come here to post our final decision. If you are interested, pleace come to discuss with us. It’s OK to write in Englsh, I will translate your word if you want me to do that. If you want to join our meet-up, pleace sign you name or username in the talk page, or tell me.
Pleace come to meet up with us, then we may talk about how to help non-Chinese-native-speaker to take part in Chinese Wikipedia and improve reading and writing ability. Of course, if you are already a Wikipedia user, we can talk about how to improve our edit work.
Okay, ladies and germs, for those of us who want to practice writing Chinese articles and/or translating from English into Chinese (not recommended for professional endeavors but very useful to learn Chinese!), the folks at zh.wikipedia.org are incredibly accomodating. I’ve been rummaging around there and there are a couple of things someone with a fairly good level of Chinese could do.
Reading material – obviously there are scads of articles on all sorts of topics. Whether there are factual errors or not (a common criticism of wikis) the Chinese is written by native speakers, and at least there is a wide variety available (and more daily).
Writing practice – I’ve begun translating one of the English wikipedia articles into Chinese for the zh: site and it’s better than lessons – you translate as much or as little as you want, and darned if there weren’t corrections made the same day. Plus, there’s a “history” function where you can compare any two historical versions of an article, which means you can very easily see what corrections were made to your Chinese version – the changes are in red and the versions are side by side.
If you haven’t used wikipedia it’s a bit daunting at first – hard to figure out where to find things and how to do things. Editing articles is straightforward enough, but stuff like finding templates, adding stuff to your user page, etc. I still haven’t figured out. But for broad reading and free editing of your Chinese writing, seems like you can’t beat it with a stick. 