[Wikipedia-l] Why do we have them??

[Wouter Steenbeek]

>Hi all,
>I have a question: why do we have separate Wikipedias for Malay and 
>Indonesian?
>
>According to 
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differences_between_Malay_and_Indonesian
>, "The differences between Malay (Bahasa Melayu) and Indonesian
>(Bahasa Indonesia) are comparable to the those between British English
>and American English."
>
>If this is the case, then why does our policy on English differ so
>sharply than our policy with Malay/Indonesian?
>
>Don't people realise that we're dividing labour? If they had
>col-laborated on a single Wikipedia from the very beginning, the
>Malay/Indonesian Wikipedia would probably have at least 15k articles
>by now.
>
>Mark

Just for the same reason that we have seperate Serbian, Croatic and Bosniak 
Wikipedias. They consider their languages as being separate, and Indonesian 
is from above considered "the" Indonesian language, even though it is 
relatively unprominent in terms of numbers of speakers. You should be 
familiar with that issue, working on the Moldovan Wikipedia and now mingling 
in the discussion on Serbocroatian. Don't tell the Indonesians they speak 
Malayan, that will insult them, though (or just because) in the Dutch 
colonial era everyone called it so.

Wouter

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