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_Azerbaijani