210 Country Report: Wikipedia

For the sake of accessibility, Wikipedia separates pages by language rather than country. For this reason, all Chinese-speaking countries and territories, such as China and Taiwan, are included in the same collective Wikipedia community. While writing systems vary, the spoken language is largely the same. Therefore, on the homepage of the Chinese Wikipedia (zh.wikipedia.org), you can change between regional written varieties from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, and Macau.

For Taiwan specifically, there are two languages that are most prominent today. The first is Mandarin Chinese, which is their official language, and also the official language of mainland China. Chinese is ranked 13th in number of articles among all active Wikipedia languages with over 1.3 million, and has over 3.3 million users. While Wikipedia is technically blocked in China, it is still accessible, and it is likely the main contributor to the Chinese Wikipedia collection.

Taiwan’s representation is more concentrated in the collection of articles written in its main regional dialect, Min Nan Yu, also called Southern Min, Taiwanese Hokkien, or simply Taiwanese. Despite being a primarily spoken language, Min Nan Yu is ranked 33rd out of 318 active Wikipedia collections by number of articles with over 430,000, and the number of users listed as over 56,000. This language originally came from the Min Nan region of China, where many Taiwanese people originate from.

With so many users from so many places contributing to the Chinese Wikipedia page collection, Taiwan likely contributes just a portion of the content. However, the Min Nan Yu collection is likely created and maintained by mostly Taiwanese users, as well as Min Nan speakers from other parts of the world, such as China.

Sources:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Min