On 3/31/07, Oldak Quill <oldakquill(a)gmail.com> wrote: It shouldn't be. I'll try to figure out what's going on there. -- Peace & Love, Erik DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees. "An old, rigid civilization is reluctantly dying. Something new, open, free and exciting is waking up." -- Ming the Mechanic

On 31/03/07, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: Thanks for clearing this up. I think the unannounced lock was one of the main points of confusion and contention among the community. -- Oldak Quill (oldakquill(a)gmail.com)

Tomasz Ganicz schreef: Hoi, The pywikipedia bot has a program that allows you to change strings .. so you can replace "[[be:" with "[[be-x-old". As to your question, the situation was stark and obvious. The official orthography was not accepted. Now the be code does stand for Belarus. The current situation is however not really acceptable. Both wikipedias should integrate. The current situation with two projects is horrid it will result in two biased projects. Thanks, GerardM

2007/3/31, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com>om>: But the true is that there is around 4 million people who really speak Belarusian as their mother tongue and vast majority of them are using old version. It is true that the new version is tough in schools in Belarus, but this country is really strange in terms of language, as the Belarusian is a minority language in Belarus. Vast majority of people, including president of this country and most of goverment officials does not speak Belarusian and they prefer Russian. Even most of the Belarusian law acts are curently originaly writen in Russian. In Minsk in 2006 only 15% of students of primary and secondary schools decided to learn Belarusian as it is not obligatory subject in schools. So, the question is what really matters in this case? Is it important which version of language is though in the govermental schools in the country, where only minority of people use this language or rather which version is prefered by majority of people really using this language? I ask again - did the LangComm checked which version is used by majority of people for whom Belariusian is their main, mother tongue? You could for example ask for this experts from US or German universities, who specialize in history and current state of this language. Wikipedias are not country located but language oriented. If they would be country located the be Wikipedia should be writen rather in Russian than in Belarusian, or it should be bilingual with majority of Russian speaking users... -- Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.poli.toya.net.pl http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html