> > The entire goal of this project is freedom and openness.
That is incorrect. The entire goal of this project is to create the largest, most widely-used, and
best encyclopedia in the world and to give that to everybody on the planet. Everything else, and I
mean *everything* (including our openness and the community itself), is a means to *that* end.
Nothing more.
True, Wikipedia is effectively an experiment in openness and radical democracy. But that has never
been the goal or point of it. We have just found that experimenting in those areas have brought us
great success (at least in terms of growth). But the experiment continues and we will need to
adjust as events change. So we must change the way we do things if and/when any aspect of our
experimental methods show a systematic problem that adversely impacts quality.
Is the Seigenthaler incident a symptom of such a systematic problem? One can't use a single
example to prove such a thing, but it still should serve as a wake up call. That call is this: We
are big and popular now. Like it or not a great many people who never edit articles and never
will, trust (or at least use) us as a source. So I think we have an obligation to question our
methods when quality has slipped.
Saying SoGoFixIt when reads outnumber writes by more than 200 to 1 is no longer a valid retort.
However, I agree that killing the goose called Openness that laid the golden egg called Wikipedia
would be a huge mistake. But I think we can and should continue to improve the ways we try to tame
and monitor that beast (better RC patrol features, trust networks to filter RC and watchlists,
article validation, etc).
Openness has been a profitable gravy train for us. Let's not forget that the train is supposed to
be going toward a certain direction.
-- mav
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>You probably don't know the history of the language well. In fact both
>Romanian and Moldovans has been Orthodox Christians and used Cyrillic
>script for several ages.
Alexandru Niculescu: "Romanian is the only Romance language which has
developed in the Eastern part of Latin Europe"
Niculescu, Alexandru. Outline History of the Romanian Language. Bucharest:
1981
The first known text appeared in writing in 16th century (1521) which was
written in a _variant_ of old cyrillic alphabet and it was used in Walachia
and Moldova until the Re-Latinization in 1850s. Note that in the rest of
Romania starting from the late 16th century, _LATIN_ alphabet was used with
Hungarian spelling conventions (and switched to Italian spelling in 18th).
So let me count it...Uhm...It seems just in Walachia and Moldova until 1850
what you said is true, as for the rest of Romania - false, it has used latin
script since the 16th century. So even for Moldova region of Romania it has
been over 150 years since a variant of cyrillic alphabet has been used.
>The modern Latin script is relatively a news in both lands.
Oy vey, 150 years is new for sure. So I guess that makes my mobile phone as
modern as one could possibly imagine.
>So one can's speak in such a self-confindent way about
>Moldovan Cyrillics as "decreed in the unfree days". By the way, do you
>know much about the unfree days? They were not totally that "unfree".
>:) Be more neutral. ;)
I know about those days, we've studied about them in school, I've talked to
older people about them as well as discussed the matter with some professors
from university, they were forced to know russian, the only books they had
access to were russian, go figure how free and open is that.
>Maybe it would be a good choice just to move the whole thing to
>__mo-cyr.wikipedia.org__, leaving at [[:mo:]] the two links -- to the
>Romanian and to the old-fashioned Cyrillic-written Moldovan.
No, people from Moldova should have control over mo.wikipedia.org, having a
link on the main page to cyrillic is not acceptable, it's not our language,
why should we put links to another language on the main page ? Let them have
their weirdlanguage.wikipedia.org , but we shouldn't have any obligations to
put a link to it.
>Esperu cxiam!
Saluton.
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Adrenalin wrote:
> And who the hell on the main wikipedia page(http://www.wikipedia.org/)
> have written OUR name language using cyrillic ?
You are right. This is tactless towards the people of Moldova. It should
be changed as soon as possible.
Arbeo
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>But what about Transdnistria?
>As I know, they use Moldovan language (also Russian and Ukrainian) but
>use Cyrillic script.
Transdnistria is not an independent state, it is a part of Moldova and it is
not recognized in the world.If my neighbor suddenly decides to have the
official language written using chinese symbols that doesn't mean it has to
be on the official page of a country's official language. Whatever language
is used there it is not officially recognized and the ISO code mo stands for
the language based on latin alphabet and not cyrillic. And let's get serious
most of the people from the Transdn. region either know Romanian and write
it properly or don't know it at all.
And what you say sounds to me like that: There is a country A that has the
official language as english. Then there's a country/region B that adopts
english also as their language but written in morse code, so they modify the
en.wikipedia.org's main page to have a pleasant interface combined of both
and a warm welcome "If you want it in latin script click here" and ".. ..-.
/ -.-- --- ..- / .-- .- -. - / .. - / .. -. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-.
--- -.. . / -.-. .-.. .. -.-. -.- / .... . .-. . .-.-.-". Wonderful idea,
no ? This is exactly the current situation with mo.wiki
If you still want to have some weird language, no problem, invent your own
name for it (not derived from mo) and put it on wiki, just don't use our
official "mo".
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To Mark Williamson aka Node_ue,
>>Wikipedia is not about what is official and what is not. It's about
>>what is really happening.
I'm sorry but what IS happening in Moldova? I've moved to Moldova in 1991
and I have NEVER seen romanian/moldovan written in cyrillic. And this is not
the same as the usual "don't like it, don't watch it" TV kind of thing. MO
is the ISO code for the official language in Moldova which is written using
latin alphabet, therefore mo.wikipedia.org officially represents Moldova on
wikipedia. Imagine someone visits mo.wiki, what does he see - the HORROR! a
huge pile of mistakes (both in syntax and grammar), cyrillic alphabet, ugly
unfinished interface again in cyrillic, so what impression does one make of
Moldova ?
Basically I see this as one man (yes, Node_ue - you are the only admin)
running the show and not allowing anyone to edit (the main page is blocked,
also no way to edit the interface). If you want to do it properly remove the
cyrillic pages, write everything in latin. Why don't you understand that you
do is offending us. You don't know the language, you've never been to
Moldova, you don't know the situation here, why are you running mo.wiki
then, just to offend us ? At this point I see the site as making fun of
Moldova and the people of Moldova, creating the false impression that people
use cyrillic and are generally illiterate.
Give us the control of mo.wikipage and please stop vandalizing our language!
>>But it is undenyable that some people rather write in Cyrillic.
I see romanian is not the only language you are having problems with, it's
"undeniable" last time I checked my dictionary. That aside, what do you have
to back up your affirmation, I live here, I see the situation, I haven't
seen anyone writing anything in cyrillic romanian/moldovan. And an important
note is that we don't have something like "Moldovan language" in schools,
the course is called "Romanian language/Limba Romana", we don't even have a
"History of Moldova" it's "History of Romania".
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>From ISO-639 to MO code are assigned the Moldovan language.
In constitution of Republic of Moldova are written what the official
alphabet are latin.
http://xiv.parlament.md/en/legalfoundation/constitution/t1/
"Article 13
The National Language, Use of Other Languages
(1) The national language of the Republic of Moldova is Moldovan, and
its writing is based on the Latin alphabet."
How is that possible what the moldovian language what are officially
based on the Latin alphabet, is writted ussing cyrillic alphabet ?
On Sat, 3 Dec 2005, Walter van Kalken wrote:
>> section. There are other options we can consider, or new ways of citing
>> content online, that are different from the methods used in printed books.
>
> Like instead of having the references in and under the article have a
> seperate page like a talk page? And we just make "notes" which link to the
> references on that "references"page?
Precisely. An entire "references" page for each article, and an entire
article for/about each reference. This will revolutionize collaborative
research and analysis.
SJ
Several things:
1) The copyright message is moved up, between the main edit area and the
summary/checkboxes/buttons. This is to ensure that it is visible; presently on a
smallish screen it's possible to make thousands of edits without ever seeing the
notice.
This should also encourage site admins to keep the message short and legible.
2) A new message, MediaWiki:Edittools, is created which can hold those extended
character insertion boxes that some wikis use (currently hacked into the
copyright message). This message is now also displayed on the Special:Upload
form, so it can be used when composing file descriptions.
This displays below the buttons, so it's out of the way but not too far away.
3) The list of used templates is moved to the bottom, so it can grow as long as
it gets without pushing other things down.
This is online to try out on the test wiki at:
http://test.leuksman.com/edit/Main_Pagehttp://test.leuksman.com/view/Special:Upload (Log in to see the upload form.)
Avar has expressed objection to putting the notice above the buttons, but I
think it really *needs* to be if we want to pretend it means anything. Any final
comments, and preparation for the change (splitting bits out from the copyright
message) would be good to do; I plan to commit this change in the next day or two.
cf. http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4100
Note: the charinsert stuff doesn't currently seem to work in Safari. Have to see
about fixing that...
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)