Ray Saintonge wrote:
I absolutely agree. At this stage a merger may be
nothing more than
an intellectual ideal. It could be years before the conditions are
right, if ever. The most that can be done now is to make the
opportunity available.
Is it really a good precedent to separate Wikipedias based on political
differences among groups of people? By that notion, we should've split
up traditional and simplified Chinese long ago, but based on the
principle that splitting effort should be avoided as much as possible, a
partly-technical solution to keep them in the same Wikipedia was found
instead.
Plus, forcing political opponents into one Wikipedia should lessen the
tendency of ideologically-uniform Wikipedias to stray from a neutral
point of view. If, for example, en: were split up into en-us: and
en-everyone-else, I could see both of those being worse than the current
unified one on many areas---the tension between American and
non-American editors forces some sort of more neutral synthesis.
-Mark