You're absolutely right. Written Chinese is called Standard Chinese on the mainland and it is "Chinese" whether you speak Cantonese, Mandarin, or Shangaianese. That fact blew my mind when I learned it. Written Chinese can be understand by people that speak mutually unintelligible spoken languages. And not just that it _can be_ understood. They share the same written language. There are informal written version of regional languages, but that's a rabbit hole.

My point was really not to get too deep into the pedantry of it, but simply that Taiwan and China do share the same written language with a different character set because you can generally replace the characters without substantial grammatical or vocabulary changes. It's not in the same ballpark as equivocating Spanish, Catalan, Languedoc, and French. There are different vocabulary variations like saying 哪兒 Nǎ'er and 哪裡 Nǎlǐ (both mean "where?"), but you can also find variations between Brit and American English vocabulary. IMO, the Trad/Simplified difference is closer akin to American English deciding to drop a lot of U's in words like "colour."

My point was that you could say they share the same written language so it makes very much sense to have one ZH-language Wikipedia, and use machine conversion to present it in the character set preferred by the reader (as it does currently). And, that there is plenty of good reasons for Taiwan to have its own Wikimedia organization because there are non-ZH languages like Min Nan that deserve to be represented.

Edit for sake of illustration. Take the sentence "I like this cat." It's read "Wǒ xǐhuān zhè zhī māo" no matter if you're reading it in Traditional or Simplified characters. There may be some pronunciation differences North v South that is above my level so far, but the characters (notably 只 that you mentioned) are the same meaning and sound.

我喜歡這隻貓

我喜欢这只猫

> I believe that alone makes the assertion that traditional Chinese is "just another character set" as controversial as calling English "just another Newspeak".

I strongly disagree. The simplified/traditional split is not the first time new character sets have been introduced. This has happened many times throughout the history of written Chinese. E.g. ever wonder why things that have to do with body parts and organs have a moon radical associated with them? That's because of a conflation of two separate radicals (moon radical and meat radical) that were distinct in Qin Dynasty seal script. And yet this doesn't mean that our Classical Chinese works are all of a sudden written in a different language when written in modern standard script or Han Dynasty clerical script or even seal script (which in turn is definitely _not_ the original script that these works were written in).

Moreover the vast vast majority of differences between simplified and traditional Chinese characters are one-to-one mappings between different characters. While simplified Chinese characters sometimes map multiple traditional Chinese characters to a single simplified one, the reverse direction also happens! See e.g. 乾 which is split into 干 and 乾 depending on meaning and pronunciation.

> Those are characters with entirely different meanings and often different pronunciations in various forms of Chinese.

The fact that a single character can have different pronunciations and different meanings which can coincide or not among different varieties of Chinese has endured for as long as we've had written records of non-standard Chinese varieties. This is not something new with simplified characters.

At a higher level, there has been a split in Chinese between officially sanctioned characters and non-standard variant characters since the first unification of characters under the Qin dynasty (which characters are sanctioned has changed over time). Traditional Chinese and simplified Chinese characters are simply changes in which characters receive official sanction.

Basically at the end of the day the simplified/traditional split is nothing new in Chinese, it's happened many times before and it's very easy to learn one if one knows the other.

> E.g. ever wonder why things that have to do with body parts and organs have a moon radical associated with them? That's because of a conflation of two separate radicals (moon radical and meat radical) that were distinct in Qin Dynasty seal script.

They're distinct in modern Chinese too, if you look closely.

(And if you use a Taiwanese font.)

Indeed it is! Although that's actually a later re-invention of modern fonts rather than a preservation of a continuous tradition and is not consistent because it cannot be since there are multiple potential ancestors of 月 (e.g. 朋, which does not preserve its seal script roots in any modern font I know of).