I can see four good reasons for NOT creating a Montenegrin Wikipedia:
1. Standardised Montenegrin is practically identical to Standard Serbian,
except for a few words spelled differently. In addition, there is a
Wikipedia in Serbo-Croatian as well. There is no way that Montenegrins
would actually NEED such a project to have access to encyclopedic
information.
2. Political POV issues should never be a reason for splitting off
projects. We are already stuck with two Wikipedias in Belarussian and four
in Serbo-Croatian, a fifth one just to satisfy a different POV is not going
to be of any use to anybody. Besides, there won't be any POV issues when it
comes to articles about planets, maggots or the political system of Burkina
Faso, so the whole POV problem should not affect not more than, say 0.1% of
the entire content of a decent encyclopedia.
3. It is actually quite a waste that people, instead of having one large
encyclopedia, should be working on four or five small(er), incomplete ones.
This may be nice for editors, but not for the public coming to Wikipedia
for information.
4. To provide a Montenegrin Wikipedia with content, it is very likely that
articles will be massively imported (by hand or by bot) from its sister
projects, especially the Serbian one, which will probably lead to copyright
problems. If this won't be done, the project is likely to remain small and
largely limited to articles written from a Montenegrin POV. In neither case
such a project will be of much use to anybody.
Cheers,
Jan
2017-12-28 4:00 GMT+01:00 Steven White <Koala19890(a)hotmail.com>om>:
From a purely linguistic perspective, it's hard to
argue with any of this.
And I don't have a skin in the game here; objectively, it doesn't matter to
me if Montenegrin becomes eligible or not. Still, I would say the following:
Concerning MF-Warburg's comment: I fully understand that the others are
grandfathered and wouldn't be created now. But the fact that they exist now
means that the question about Montenegrin cannot be considered in a vacuum,
either.
Concerning Jan's comment: I hear you. But to extend your analogy, the
Irish are looking for an Irish English wiki because every time an Irishman
tries to bring a different POV to articles about Ireland on the British
wiki, s/he is being shot down. (Pretend it's 1975, or 1922, and the example
is more trenchant.) Also, this whole issue of language secessionism
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_secessionism> doesn't really
exist in English, so to make that comparison is only partially valid.
I do think we need to hear from Milos on this subject.
Let me add: On the Meta discussion page, I'm about to allow the discussion
to reopen, with a focus on really two questions only:
- The principal question is whether or not Montenegrins actually have
"free, unbiased access to the sum of all human knowledge" on the current
projects. What they keep suggesting is that they don't: Serbian POV
dominates, and Montenegrin POV is given short shrift. I am going to ask the
Montenegrin advocates to prove that with concrete examples. But if they do
so, then either (a) NPOV is going to have to be enforced from the outside
(if that's even possible, but thereby violating normal practices of project
autonomy) or (b) we're going to have to allow the Montenegrins to have
their own project.
- The second question: It's really quite remarkable in a way that the
Montenegrins got the Library of Congress to make the first change to ISO
639-2 in five years. I'll grant that was probably just a political victory.
But I'm going to invite the Montenegrin community to share any new evidence
that they may have that may have changed LoC's mind, and could change ours.
Maybe there isn't any new evidence. But if there is, we should be open to
it.
Steven
Sent from Outlook <http://aka.ms/weboutlook>
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