??????!
From our POV the issue is closed.
1) LangCom gave its recommendations, 2) the Board made a decision, 3) the domains have been renamed according to Board decision, 4) as per Board decision we wait for the setup of a Committee that will decide whether be-x-old shall be shutdown or not.
LangCom scope of activity ended at step 1. We are currently at step 4.
IMHO, you should all stop considering this thing as an internal Byelorussian fight, because it has long stopped being such. After 4) will come 5) and the time you waste in internal quarrels is time you should use in preparing a proper defense for be-x-old, if you care for it.
Let's be very clear: there is a suspect that political misuse *might* have been larger than just a "stolen ISO code". If this is proved (archives are archives, checking is easy) then the result of the process is obvious. If ANY political party/group/sect in ANY linguistic entity needs a wiki for their propaganda they are welcome to open one AT THEIR OWN EXPENSES but well away from wmf trademark/resources.
In instead, step 5) might find that be-x-old is just a regular encyclopedia (IMHO that's what it is, at least as far as I could read myself). Add to this a peaceful end for this stupid everlasting civil war and although it won't be me judging I believe that the conclusion would sound like "forget it, false alarm".
Only do not expect codes to be used improperly. LangCom will oppose ANY descriptive code; I'd rather drop dead than issuing one. If we issue one for you today, tomorrow we will have all the separatist groups of the planet standing in line to get a wiki and a code that will give them some sort of international recognition + free propaganda. Are you crazy or what!? We will apply just ANY ISO decision without discussing it, but we are not going to issue/modify ANYTHING AT ALL ourselves.
My personal wish is that all this will end well and that we will eventually hold a great social gathering of all Byelorussian wikipedians to share a beer and celebrate a new period of friendship :) Life's too short to make a tragedy of it, let's start to see things with a positive stance.
If everything ends well (and we all know that it will probably end well, after all) both editions will have had 100 times more traffic than they ever got before just because of this "scandal", which means some 10-15 new users for both of them. Be positive ;)
DISCLAIMER: this is not a collective LangCom statement, but just my own individual mail.
Berto 'd Sera Personagi dl'ann 2006 per l'arvista american-a Time (tanme tuti vojaotri) http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00.html
-----Original Message----- From: wikipedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Yury Tarasievich Sent: Wednesday, March 28, 2007 4:41 PM To: wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] belarusian wikipedia (be and be-x-old)
Ah, sorry forgot to add. You know, of course, I'm one if the inititative group of the standard language Belarusian wiki.
So, *personally* I wouldn't mind if the alternative version Be:WP would retain its previous be.wikipedia.org, AS LONG AS the standard language Belarusian wiki gets ISO standard code, with no tails or suffixes, too, -- here it would be *bel.wikipedia.org*. Shouldn't be too hard to organise making of this small exception??
---
_______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l