I'm with Antony: what that admin did is ugly and wrong, but it's only a symptom, and according to what I know about this language, the right solution to the problem is to split the site, similarly to what is done with Punjabi and Hindi/Urdu.
The spoken language may be the same, but the written languages are not, in practice, mutually intelligible, because the Arabic script is not studied by people in the Republic of Azerbaijan, and vice-versa, so the languages are not unique enough to exist within the same site. As I wrote earlier, I'm surprised that they held together for so long. The codes should be az and azb.
There is an outstanding request for azb Wikipedia, and there is an active localization community, and we should simply approve it.
If the Azeri Wikipedia community wants separate Wikipedias for Latin and Arab script, I'm in favor of doing that, partially because of the impossibility of automatic conversion and partially because of the linguistic differences between Northern and Southern Azeri, which if I've understood the situation correctly are greater in the written language than the spoken language. (In this respect the difference between the languages is reminiscent of the difference between Hindi and Urdu: the spoken languages are largely mutually intelligible, but the written languages are not, for one thing because the scripts are different and for another because learnèd words are borrowed from different sources.)
If that is the route we go, then I'm in favor of keeping the status quo at az-wp, namely that it is written in Northern Azeri (the standard language of the Republic of Azerbaijan) in the Latin script; it need not be moved to azj.
I would prefer that the Arabic-script Southern Azeri Wikipedia use the code azb and not az-Arab.
Best,
Antony
On 2015-05-04 15:52, Mjbmr wrote:
South Azerbaijani has a iso 639-3 code and that's azb and not az-arab, there are resources that make this language separate from North Azerbaijani and that's not just script.
On 5/4/2015 5:53 PM, Michael Everson wrote:
On 4 May 2015, at 09:45, Oliver Stegen <info@oliverstegen.net> wrote:
Sorry, Gerard, but I'm voting with MF, mjbmr and Michael to let Azeri in Latin script keep az.wikipedia. I also vote for opening a new wikipedia for Azeri in Arabic script, preferably az-arab.wikipedia.I recommend that we go to the community and tell them that we want to create just that, az-arab.wikipedia, as the solution that we (the appointed experts) feel is best for their concerns.
I do not believe you will find them opposing it. If however we give them a basket of options (some of which this committee does not support) then we are only prolonging problems.
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/
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