As a total outsider I could imagine that naming it "Serbian-Latin" would not really be helpful because that name makes reference to one nation and one ethnicity exclusively. "Yugoslav(ian)" has just crossed my mind - would that be an option?

Well, Elephantus apparently hasn't been monitoring the growth of the Serbocroatian WP. The top contributors recently are: OC Ripper, Dejvid, Myself, Pokrajac, Belirac, anonymous user. Now, of all these people, the ONLY ONE who is not a native speaker is ME. Now, if anybody wants to accuse me of spelling and grammatical errors, there are a number of other people they should blame first: 1) The people who wrote the original article, since I have only been copying articles from other Wikipedias; 2) The people who wrote the Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian spellcheckers for MS Word since I often use them to make sure the source-article has no glaring errors. Now, perhaps you're referring to the fact that the majority of the articles I copy are using Ekavski, which is not used in Croatia. Well, as a form of Serbocroatian, it would hardly be considered incorrect. To be fair, some of the articles I make use Ijekavski, and a couple dozen use a mix of the two. Terms which are obviously split between Serbia and Croatia, like Spanija/Spanjolska (spain), or Jevreju/Hebreju (jewish person), I try to be careful with as well. As regards your wish to lock the Serbocroatian WP: According to you, Serbocroatian was an artificial political construct. That is true to a certain extent, but it is undeniable that Stokavian dialects of Croatian, and all dialects of Bosnian and Serbian are all over 99% mutually intelligible when spoken, but especially when written. These are the only "languages" for which that is the case, with the exception of Moldovan and Romanian, and Dari and Farsi (The Moldovan WP redirects users wanting content in Latin alphabet to the Romanian WP, the Farsi WP includes Dari as well). I recall something about a Croatian law requiring all Serbian movies to be subtitled (or vice-versa?). Rather than reacting with nationalistic pride when seeing these subtitles for a language that is basically identical to their own, moviegoers generally laughed at the attempts of "translation". Now, if the majority of Croatian WPdians do not want a united Wikipedia, that's fine. I think it should be everybody's choice. If you want to work at the Croatian WP and keep pretending that your language is somehow extremely differentiated from Serbian and Bosnian (and the emerging Montenegrin), I have no problem with that, although I think it is counter-constructive. Already, there are Croatians at the SH.wiki, I think... Now, perhaps a good example is Macedonian. Although Macedonian (FYROM, that is, just so we don't offend any Greeks) is very similar to Serbo-Croatian, and it would take little effort to make a unified language, since Macedonian is a bit further from Serbocroatian, I don't hold a hope of Macedonian WP being united to Serbocroatian WP. With Croatian, it seems that people try hard to make it a different language from Serbian, but it isn't really except in a sociolinguistic sense (and even then, not all Croatians perpetuate the idea of a separate Croatian language). Macedonian, on the other hand, has truly different words and spellings, rather than artificial divisions created by linguists for political purposes. Mark On 09/10/05, Arbeo M <arbeo_m(a)yahoo.de> wrote: -- SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM POSSIT MATERIARI ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE

Rather than letting politics blind you, why not try to look at things from the point of view of "What will be best for the Wikipedia in my language?". I think that the answer to this, is a merger of these 3 Wikipedias, because it will result in a much larger workforce and much more power and capability. Currently, Croatian WP has just over 10000 articles, Serbian WP has just over 14000 articles, and Bosnian WP has almost 5000 articles. Now, imagine, if all people from all 3 Wikipedias had been working together from the start, maybe we'd have 30000 articles in a unified Serbocroatian WP already.

In the future sh.wiki hopes to implement an automatic converter between Cyrillic, Latin, Ijekavski, and Ekavski, so these stylistic/dialect/variety issues won't be a problem anymore. Now, with such conversion, you wouldn't have to worry about edit wars over what norm is used, because no matter what norm it is written in, it is displayed in the chosen norm (possibly based on IP range-- users in Croatia and Bosnia get Ijekavian, users in Serbia get Ekavian; users in Croatia, Bosnia, and Montenegro get Latin alphabet, users in Serbia get Cyrillic, but of course you can change these preferences).

I recall something about a Croatian law requiring all Serbian movies to be subtitled (or vice-versa?). Rather than reacting with nationalistic pride when seeing these subtitles for a language that is basically identical to their own, moviegoers generally laughed at the attempts of "translation".

With Croatian, it seems that people try hard to make it a different language from Serbian, but it isn't really except in a sociolinguistic sense (and even then, not all Croatians perpetuate the idea of a separate Croatian language). Macedonian, on the other hand, has truly different words and spellings, rather than artificial divisions created by linguists for political purposes.

2005/10/9, Arbeo M <arbeo_m(a)yahoo.de>de>: No, sh had been locked because it had been replaced by sr+bs+hr. It was unlocked because I was pressured to unlock it. I still think that my first decision was the right one. Let's put this simple: EITHER Serbian and Croatian are the same language, and then we should not have separate Wikipedias for them, OR they are not the same language, and then we should not have a combined Wikipedia. Doing both is silly. And that's about the weakest expression I can think of. -- Andre Engels, andreengels(a)gmail.com ICQ: 6260644 -- Skype: a_engels _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 Andre Engels wrote: <snip> I agree. It would be like having an American English Wikipedia, a Commonwealth English Wikipedia, a Generic Other English Wikipeida, and our current English Wikipedia. Does anyone ever wonder where the phrase "Balkanisation is evil" came from? We're staring it in the face. We've got duplication of effort where we don't need it. Either they're the same language or they're not. Time to stop pretending that it's some weird quantum superposition of both states at once. On a macroscopic scale, it just doesn't happen. - -- Alphax | /"\ Encrypted Email Preferred | \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613 | X Against HTML email & vCards http://tinyurl.com/cc9up | / \ _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l