Hi there, I am working on a suggested set of guidelines for improving the poor quality of the kosovo geographical articles while avoiding edit wars. I wrote up a summary here and would appreciate any comments and support. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Mdupont#Naming_and_status_of_Kosovo_… Basically my points are : 0. There is no point in trying to rename the funny characters in the serbian named articles, but we can hope to improve the quality in general. 1. we need to make sure the english language articles are useful for English speaking people dealing with albanian and serbian names. 2. we need to get rid of the POV forking of the Districts of Kosovo in Serbia. We dont need parallel articles describing the same administrative structures. 3. I need an agreement from the serbian wikipedia team that they will not continue to remove the albanian names from the articles, we need to encourage more local kosovar editors and I have been recruiting many of them. I have send this mail to the list before, but it did not get through. We should setup a wikipedia mailing list for the albanian language editors, can someone help with that? thanks, mike -- James Michael DuPont Member of Free Libre Open Source Software Kosova and Albania flossk.org flossal.org

I support your efforts. Please take this to the Wikipedia:Serbian Wikipedians' notice board and Project Serbia as well as keeping touch with Albanian and Kosovo editors. Do something to get everyone involved so that guidelines can be developed to deal with this matters.

I just want to point out that I am not ethnic, I really dont give a flying cow. about all the emotions right now. the real problem here is the quality of the kosovo articles, they are not useful. They lack basic information that people will need if they visit the place, like the names of things that people there call them. The current situation is just lopsided. it needs to be fixed.

I would like to point out that the "List of mountains in Serbia" and "List of mountains in Kosovo" are again POV forks. They contain the same data in different levels of quality. Additionally, the editors refused to include to albanian names so that we can even find the article. This is a problem with the wikipedia to allow such confusing things to happen. People don't care if some editor recognizes kosovo or not, they just want to know where the mountain is so they can go hiking or whatever. we cannot allow every list to be a POV fork. Either we define the individual mountains as templates to be included by both pages, or we include the kosovo list as a separate list on the serbian list, or we remove the kosovo list items from the serbian lists. We cannot have two lists of everything that have two POVs. thanks, mike On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 8:21 PM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- James Michael DuPont Member of Free Libre Open Source Software Kosova and Albania flossk.org flossal.org

Here is another prime example of how the user is misled when using the english wikipedia. lets say you are looking for Maja Pançiq, you wont find the article, because someone commented out the name in the article Pan%C4%8Di%C4%87%27s_Peak. Just because albanian is not an official language in central serbia, they say. First of all, there are many albanians living in that area, and second of all, the point is listed as a border point between Kosovo and Serbia in the GNS database. We cannot have a dysfunctional wikipedia, we need to contain both names and make it possible to navigate. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan%C4%8Di%C4%87%27s_Peak thanks, mike

You are, of course, correct, assuming the mountain has a commonly used name in the Albanian language, whether it is on the border or not.

On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 10:38 AM, Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net> wrote: The name is common, it is listed even in the albanian wikipedia, http://sq.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maja_Pan%C3%A7iq It is on wikimapia http://wikimapia.org/7522941/sq/Maja-Pan%C3%A7iq listed in wikibooks http://sq.wikibooks.org/wiki/Tokajon/Fjalorthi It has 32 results on google, and at least it should be mentioned. The point is that we are forced to monitor all changes all the time because some editors have a bad habit of POV deleting data, it is reoccurring and very annoying. thanks, mike

I think we'll have to have two lists for a while, as, according to one strongly held point of view, Kosovo remains part of Serbia. Our selection and naming of articles should not attempt to resolve an international political issue.

This is what I have to deal with : http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pan%C4%8Di%C4%87%27s_Peak&cur… any suggestions?

Address editors directly, not through edit comments in the course of edit warring.

I'd focus on places in Kososo, although Belgrade, doubtless, has an Albanian name which is in use. The article should probably include both names and be a guide to the reader with respect to alternative Serbian-Albanian place names.