The former Yugoslavia is one of the most difficult spots in the entire WMF universe.

If we were starting from scratch right now, the tradeoff, as always, would be whether Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin are different enough to warrant separate projects, or whether a single Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia could cover the whole ground. The current policy has potentially contradictory biases. On one hand, there is a bias TOWARD projects in individual languages, and AWAY from projects in macrolanguages. (In this case, Serbo-Croatian is a macrolanguage, and the others are considered constituent languages of that macrolanguage.) On the other hand, there is a bias TOWARD consolidated projects where the languages are mutually comprehensible, both to help prevent POV bias and to reduce unnecessary duplication. I frankly don't know which way we'd go if we were starting from scratch now.

(Technical interlude: the Cyrillic-Latin converters work just fine. That does not need to be a consideration for any of this.)

But in any event, we most assuredly are not starting from scratch. Each of these projects already has a community, a political point of view, and a bias. Those conflict IRL, and they conflict here, too. Again, if we were starting from scratch, there would be at least a fighting chance of setting up neutral ground rules in a Serbo-Croatian project. But we're not, and the ground rules and communities are already well established. Given the current conditions, I think the following questions, and the following questions only, are within the purview of LangCom:

1. Do we shut down all three individual projects, and require everything to be consolidated into Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia? (I recommend against this. There would be constant content wars, almost impossible to regulate, that would take energy away from the routine business of creating the encyclopedia. The communities would scream bloody murder. But if we want to go there, I want a Board vote on that, not just our vote.) 2. Do we shut down Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia as redundant (which it basically is), making sure that appropriate content goes to one or more of the other projects? (We could put up a trial proposal on Meta and see what people say.) 3. Do we let all of of these operate in parallel as they are now? (Action by inaction) 4. Do we allow a Montenegrin Wikipedia? (As people know, I favor this. If #2 above were to happen, I think we'd really have to allow this. If #3 happens, in theory you could say that Montenegrin is part of Serbo-Croatian and can contribute there. But Serbians still control that project, and the Montenegrin POV is routinely ignored or overturned. So in any world where the three grandfathered parallel projects [Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian] exist, one has to concede that the rule on parallel projects is already not in force in the world of Serbo-Croatian, and therefore allowing a Montenegrin project simply allows a Montenegrin POV the same footing the others already have.)

Any other question, such as whether Croatian Wikipedia currently so violates WMF's overarching practices, principles and rules for intervention, is something for the stewards, T&S and the Board.

Steven

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