Hoi, I have had some more thoughts on this..
My proposal is to have the az.wikipedia community decide what it wants...
Do they want a Latin only Wikipedia or not. When they do, there Wikipedia will be renamed to Northern Azerbaijani and they will lose the az code. When they want to keep Arabic after all, it is no longer an option for them to deny content in a legitimate script for their language.
When we agree that this makes sense in the light of our policy, we will inform the board and give the board two weeks to express their approval.
We will then put it to the az.wp community and it is for them to come to a decision they will have to live with. There will not be any other options considered. Thanks, Gerard
On 3 May 2015 at 07:36, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, The issue of Norwegian and its code was never an issue for us to decide. At this time it is for the Azerbaijanis to decide what they are and take the consequences. It is not as if there is no price to pay for splitting up. Our argument for no Southern Azerbaijani Wikipedia was EXACTLY that we did not want to break az up. The Northern Azerbaijanis have as much right to that label as the Southerns. Thanks, GerardM
On 2 May 2015 at 21:11, Antony Green toniogreen@web.de wrote:
I don't agree that az has to be moved in order to have azb. The code no is for a macrolanguage covering nn and nb, yet our Wikipedias are named no and nn, not nb and nn. So there's nothing wrong with keeping az where it is and having it be for North Azeri, while opening a second Wikipedia for South Azeri at azb. I also don't agree that having a separate South Azeri Wikipedia is any way denying anyone's roots; Azeri of all varieties has been written in the Arabic script longer than the Latin script.
So yes, I support creating azb.
Antony Green
On 2015-05-02 21:01, Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Hoi, The code az is fpr a macro language. There are two languages North and South Azerbaijani. North Azerbaijani is written in several scripts according to Ethnologue. To the point where it was only written in the Arab script until the 1920's Having it in the Latin script which is official in Azerbaijan is fine when we rename this project to azj.
I am fine with having an azb under the circumstances when they truly want to deny their roots. Thanks, GerardM
On 2 May 2015 at 19:50, Mjbmr mjbmri@gmail.com wrote:
Even if the conversion was possible, there is no possibility we can determine in software one article written in which script and show it with both scripts in public URLs to make search engines find them, because South Azerbaijanians are not gonna search in Latin, also there is no possibility one user can edit an article in Latin script and other user edit the same article in Arabic script.
BTW, there are a lot different between these two dialects, example:
*Page*: az: *Səhifə *(sahifeh), azb: *صفحه *(safhe)
Also, South Azerbaijani derives more words from Persian.
Indeed there should be a South Azerbaijani Wikipedia.
On 5/2/2015 8:52 PM, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
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_A...
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
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