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.
In the past we already discussed the possibility of creating a separate
Wikipedia in the Arabic script:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages/Wikipedia_South_…
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