[Wikipedia-l] Serbo-Croatian wikipedia

[Milos Rancic]

On 1/8/06, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> It is my understanding that Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian are mutually intelligible
> dialects of Serbo-Croatian and that the bigest difference is the use of scripts between
> and/or among them (which MediaWiki can deal with on the same wiki without forking
> articles).

No. Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian AND Serbo-Croatian are four (political)
standards based on Neo-Shtokavian dialect. The first three have
political support now, the last one doesn't have any political support
except Yugoslav nationalist like Cabrilo.

> So a far, far better question is this: Why do we have separate Bosnian, Croatian and
> Serbian Wikipedias instead of just one  Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia?

For sure, we would not have "one Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia" because
"Serbo-Croatian language" is very offensive term here. We can have
something similar, but, no one of people who advocates for
Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia wants to work on such project.

> Splitting things up purely for purely political reasons is a grave, let me repeat, GRAVE,
> violation of NPOV and does not serve our goal to provide an encyclopedia that the
> peoples of the Former Yugoslavia can use and understand.

Speaking strictly, Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian have different
standards (something like differences between Norwege Bokmal and
Danish). Almost all of that is possible to solve using software and we
are working on it.

In other hand, Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia is unlocked because of clear
political reasons: Some people couldn't wait for Latin version of
Serbian Wikipedia and they made a Latin fork of Serbian Wikipedia.

> We need to create a clear policy on the creation and shutdown of Wikipedias and apply
> that retroactively to fix this and other similarly horrid mistakes.

Yes.