Hoi, There are several things on our plate (language sub committee) and what we seem to have consensus on in our little group is that we want to do finish a thing before we actively take up another. The mo.wikipedia is not at the top of our list at the moment. A few things I can say because they are my current ideas. When people vandalise the mo.wikipedia it is extremely disrespectful and destructive. My first advise would be to have anyone banned on any project who vandalises or disrupts the mo.wikipedia and the use of sock puppets is part of that problem. The second would be to investigate to what extend it is possible to convert from script to script. During this time the mo.wikipedia is allowed to function normally and to get its house in order. Essential is that this would be an undisturbed period of time ie more vandalism only extends the time that the mo.wikipedia stays separate. I would favour a merge of the ro and the mo wikipedia and certainly when it is possible to convert from and to either script / orthography that would be great. However, given the political problems involved, the war fought and not won by either party this can only happen when particularly the ro.community demonstrates that they will accept NPOV and are tolerant on this hot topic. As I have indicated before, the Moldovan language entity will be part of future development of the ISO-639. I have inside information to this effect from the ISO-639-6 standard that is under development. This means that it is perfectly reasonable to have a scenario where the mo.wikipedia stays active and is allowed to prosper. In such a scenario I will suggest to the WMF board to impose the banning of those people on all WMF projects who vandalise the mo.wikipedia if this scenario were to happen. To conclude; the merging of the mo.wikipedia and the ro.wikipedia is something that has to be earned. It can be earned by exhibiting the behaviour that we expect of good Wikimedians, tolerance and NPOV. Without this it is unreasonable to expect from those who are in favour of a mo.wikipedia to accept that they /have /to merge. When it is the /contributors /to the mo.wikipedia who misbehave, it would only make the arguments stronger for an end to the mo.wikipedia. Again, what I have expressed here are my personal ideas. I expect however that it is not far off from where the other languages sub committee members will be. Thanks, GerardM TSO1D From Wikpedia schreef:

Jacky PB schreef: At this moment it is not publicly available. I do not know much more then the fact that Moldovan is in there. There is imho no such thing as a language being "owned" by a country certainly not when it is crosses borders. There is no NEED for a country to be recognised to have a difference in language/dialect/language entity exist and to be recognised. The notion that something is a "relic of the cold war" is a political assertion and is completely irrelevant from a linguistic point of view. When people speak/use a language/dialect/linguistic entity, they do. That is all there is to it. The name Moldovan for the language is something that has its historic roots. By having a war and not winning it, by decreeing that the Cyrillic script is not to be used, you do not change the association of the name with the total populace speaking the language. Where the Moldovan government says that Moldovan equals Romanian, I expect that the Moldovan and the Romanian government work together when it comes to this, now shared need, to agree on how to manage the language from an official pov. The fact that a country does not own a language is demonstrated admirably by the Mapuche people who are suing the Chilean government and Microsoft because they disagree with the notion that the Chilean government can impose an orthography. Mupundungun is spoken in both Chile and Argentina. Your question of "who regulates this language in Transnistria" assumes that a language needs regulation. This is not necessary at all, many languages are recognised some are more like a language continuum. Thanks, GerardM

Although I have nothing useful add on mo.wiki, I am tempted to comment on the situation in a more general may. As some participants have noted, it is not an easy thing to say what is a language and what is not. The Norwegian linguist Einar Haugen used to say that a language is a dialect which has its own army. The question has been studied a lot in Norway, because the country uses two official variants of Norwegian which are quite close to each other (from an outsider's viewpoint). Swedish is both the national language of Sweden and the second official language of Finland. Although spoken Swedish in Finland differs somewhat from the Swedish spoken in Stockholm, the written languages are officially the same. In addition to Finland, Finnish is also spoken in Sweden and Russia. The language spoken and written by the original Finnish-speaking population of Lappland is called "meänkieli", and its ortography differs considerably from standard Finnish. In this form, it has a legal minority language status in Sweden, although most Finns in Finland would consider it just another dialect. You might say that this was a political decision to create a new language, but I would certainly welcome a wikipedia in meänkieli. Finnish is also spoken in Russia, but c. 1939 the Soviet government decided that the language should be written in cyrillic script and called Karelian. This experiment was abandoned after the war. If Moldovan is just the same as Romanian, then it is like Swedish in Finland. If it differs in some respects from Romanian, but uses the same script, then it is like meänkieli. When it is written in Cyrillic, it is like Karelian. If Moldova decides to accept all of them, then it would be like Norway. The problem with standards is that someone can always introduce a new standard. Pekka Gronow Jacky PB <dpotop1(a)yahoo.comSent by: wikipedia-l-bounces(a)Wikimedia.org 12.12.2006 12:22 Please respond to wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org To wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org cc Subject Re: [Wikipedia-l] Abuse on mo.wiki Right. But a **standard**, like ISO-????, is about **standardisation**. That is, some form of standard language different from other standard languages in the dialect continuum. My question is: what will be the characteristics of Standard Moldovan, as defined by the standard? You brought this standard in the discussion saying that it will close the Romanian vs. Moldovan discussion. I hope it will, but can't help asking myself how. Just assigning language codes is not sufficient. Someone has to say: this is standard RO, this is standard MO, beat off. Can you? Is ISO-???? going to define this? Or just follow, I repeat, old Soviet practices, by saying: On our side of the fronteer the language is called Moldovan with code MO, on yours it is called Romanian with code RO, and they are different? Dpotop The whole discussion here What you say about not needing regulatory bodies is simply that they are going to adopt the appro many http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l ____________________________________________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Everyone is raving about the all-new Yahoo! Mail beta. http://new.mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

Jacky PB schreef: A standard is there to provide information on what linguistic entities exist. When the Moldovans are happy to call their language Romanian that is what it will be. When others make a distinction between Romanian and Moldovan based on orthography, script whatever and, when this has always been known as Moldovan.. The notion of "old Soviet practices" is again very much a political way of looking at it. The notion of identifying linguistic entities is at issue. The whole point is in being able to identify unambiguously and having an application for such a distinction. Knowing what script/orthography to use is part of this. The WMF has been great in allowing people to use their own language. When the language is mutually understandable, like for American and British English (and all the other variations) we have a history of keeping things together. When this is not the case, we have a history of bringing things together like we do for Chinese. What is acceptable is for one community to trash talk another. The politics around the Moldovan project make that people do not accept that some need Cyrillic content. The arguments used are political and have nothing to do with linguistics. In order to get a solution people have to respect the needs of others and both vandalism or trash talking only serve to not get a solution where we can work on a joint project that can be read in either script/orthography and provides the NPOV which is central to what Wikipedia stands for. In my personal opinion, the quality of both the mo.wikipedia and the ro.wikipedia cannot be considered good when it is impossible to integrate and to serve the needs that are expressed by the existence of both projects. Thanks, GerardM

ISO 639 does not define standard languages. Language standardisation is a very complex issue. ISO 639 only defines codes for languages and dialects, and gives definitions for them. You seem to have the view that any language must be standardised before it can be used; this is not the case, most of the languages in the world do not have a standard form. We grow up speaking a language, if there is a standard form it only matters for school and work usually. Most literate people of the world write very similarly to how they talk, and a great number of them read and write in languages with no officially-defined standard. Mark On 12/12/06, Jacky PB <dpotop1(a)yahoo.com> wrote: -- Refije dirije lanmè yo paske nou posede pwòp bato.

Hoi, I would say that many people do not respect the decision to block the http://mo.wikipedia.org . Certainly the way it was handled and the outrageous way in which people were treated was not political correct (this is an euphemism). We have seen with some regularity that there is too much heat in this controversy. People INSIST that there way is the only way. That is tough on them. The language sub committee has been asked to come up with suggestions by one of the board members. In the mean time several of the committee members agreed that my outline of a potential way out of this has some merits. As a start I do think that Yann did the right thing. I also am of the opinion that anyone who vandalises the mo.wikipedia deserves to be banned on any project. Thanks, GerardM ro.wiki schreef: