Hi,
The thing I feared has happened: A conflict
erupted in the Azeri Wikipedia over the question of whether
articles in Arabic script should be there, or only in Latin. A
consensus was not reached, but an administrator decided to
delete thousands of pages in the Arabic script nevertheless.
This is a very severe action, and I suspect that
that administrator's permissions should be suspended, but
that's a matter for Meta stewards.
I raise this question here, because a proper
long-term solution for the problem is needed.
As a reminder, the Azeri language is written in
two scripts: Latin in the Republic of Azerbaijan, and Arabic
in the Azerbaijan region in Northern Iran. As far as I know,
both are actively used, and the users of each script cannot
read the other one.
Automatic conversion between the two scripts, as
it is done for Kazakh and Serbian, is impossible, because the
Latin orthography doesn't include capital letters and vowels.
Until recently, the two scripts somehow lived
together in the same wiki, despite the major technical
problems with it, among them:
* The users of the different alphabets cannot
really have common conversations ("Village Pump").
* Only one article can be linked using Wikidata
(to resolve this, major changes are needed in MediaWiki core
and in Wikidata)
* Be default the Latin script is used for the UI,
which is not useful for anonymous readers who want to use the
Arabic script.
* The two scripts have different directionality,
and this requires adding markup to show the pages correctly.
But as I wrote above, now this long period of
peace has ended, and unfortunately there is a major conflict.
IIRC, we decided not to
support it, but I'd like to discuss this again. My impression
is that there are good-faith contributors who want to write in
the Arabic script, and now they are essentially expelled, and
this is wrong.
Other opinions are
welcome.
--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore