[Wikipedia-l] Serbo-Croatian wikipedia

[Filip Maljkovic]

Since I was one of the blocked in the sh project and I am one of the 
guys that's "most responsible" for this, I thought that it would be best 
to write here.

I agree with Elephantus here and I think that this project represents 
nothing but a carbon copy of some articles from three distinct 
wikipedias. Pokrajac, one of the admins at SH constantly claims that 
Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian are same languages, which is completely 
insane. The languages have started diverging a long time ago and since 
the 1990s, they have become more distant. It is true that the speakers 
of those 3 languages are mutually intelligible, but that doesn't mean 
that they speak the same language.

Moreover, they speak culturally and liguistically 3 different languages 
and it's sometimes hard for me to understand what Bosnians or Croats are 
saying just because of the diversity (I'm a Serb, by the way). Also, 
these three wikipedias came out of Serbocroatian Wikipedia for a reason. 
And they are not going to converge again and merge into SH. It's an 
idealistic pro-yugoslavian thought that might work in an alternate 
reality, but taking cultural, linguistic and other properties into 
consideration, this can never be achieved and striding towards it is 
only one step forward, but seven steps back.

Furthermore, as far as I know, there aren't any statistics proving that 
a percentage of people claim that Serbocroatian language still exists, 
or even less that they use it. If there were some kind of evidence that, 
say, 20% of the people that speak sr, hr or bs, still consider 
Serbocroatian  as a valid language, then there wouldn't be problems. 
But, there is some kind of public awareness - it is my opinion that most 
of the people dislike the phrase Serbocroatian and that they would stick 
with something less contrived.

Conversely, I'd like to say that the space used for this project (read: 
duplication of material that could/should be found elsewhere) is the 
space that an African language of millions may use for spreading 
cultural beliefs etc.

Overall, I think that keeping this project alive would be a selfish 
idea, because only 3 people are willing to really contribute to it (btw, 
don't let the recent changes as they are now fool you - they are usually 
very slow, but filled with new articles with summaries like /Copied from 
Serbian Wikipedia/, /Pasted from Croatian Wikipedia/ et al.)

And now to reply to some earlier posts:
To Daniel Meyer:
As I said on IRC, you're very wrong. I'm sorry to break it to you this 
way, but Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian ARE different languages, albeit 
mutually intelligible.
And the political conotation is way too big to neglect. People have 
chosen to have separate wikipedias: just look at the growth of the three 
in comparison to the "united one" (which is basically a fork). The three 
didn't come out of the SH for no reason.

I agree with you that an active community means that the project should 
be kept. In this case, the community is only relatively active (in this 
case, activity = blatant copying and, although not a crime, it is 
generally frowned upon). What I'm trying to say is that 3 people with 
IMO wrong beliefs are holding this project down and because of that, 
they have sympathizers that agree with them, although they don't really 
know the problem itself.

To Dejan Cabrilo:
Knock it off with POV. I think it's better to have POV in some articles 
(that are properly tagged) and just wait for those articles to meet 
better contributors. Rome wasn't built in a day. What I think is wrong 
is the lack of policy of Serbocroatian Wikipeda - there is no policy 
about the script. You can write in Cyrillics, you can write in Latin 
script, and no one really cares, which is IMO inexcusible. Furthermore, 
this appearance of 2 scripts in the system messages is just wrong and 
useless. Since variants (script conversion) is going to be introduced in 
Serbian Wikipedia shortly, Serbocroatian is becoming obsolete.

Thanks for your time.
Filip Maljkovic, bureaucrat from Serbian wikipeda