And I would also like to add the same for the Indonesian/Malaysian Wikipedias. I think it's sad that these nearly-identical languages are spreading their resources thin over multiple projects based more on nationality than actual linguistic differences.
Mark
On 4/14/05, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
I guess that this is OK.
But I think that the majority of users of mo.wikipedia will, no matter what, always be primarily users of Cyrillic, and I think that it should be dominant there until such time as there are more Moldovan users there who use Latin, if that is ever the case.
By the way, why exactly is it that there are separate Wikipedias for Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian? If everybody worked together, you could have a much larger Wikipedia by now - Serbian has over 10k, but Croatian is quite large too and Bosnian has over 1000 - imagine if you worked together to make one Wikipedia.
And as I noted earlier, conversion between Latin Moldovan and Cyrillic Moldovan by computer is not possible or at least not practical (it would require neural networking or AI or something)
Mark
On 4/14/05, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
We had the similar situation with Serbo-Croatian standard language (divided into Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian standard). We solved that with separation of Wikipedias.
However, I think that Wikipedias are (standard) language-based, not national-based (in general, I am sure that we can find some national-based Wikipedia). So, solution is (as I see) very simple:
- Moldavians who think that their language is Romanian should write
into Romanian Wikipedia (only in Latin alphabet).
- Moldavians who think that their language is Moldavian should write
into Moldavian Wikipedia. Also, those Moldavians can implement Chinese (and future Serbian) solution for them: they will have tabs (where "edit", "dicsussion" and "history" tabs are) where they can choose script. Also, they would have possibility to choose their interface (Cyrillic or Latin).
Also, note that content on Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian Wikipedia can be treated as "duplicated content".
On 4/14/05, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Milos,
Thanks for your message.
The problem is indeed similar but there is an added problem.
Imagine for a moment that Serbian was only written in Cyrillic, but that there was another language, let's call it "Naibres", which was basically identical to Serbian except for political purposes. Now, Naibres is officially written in the Cyrillic alphabet, but 10% of Naibres users use the Latin alphabet.
Now, with a Serbian Wikipedia already existing and being relatively large, would users wanting to add Latin-script content (in this hypothetical case, not in the real world) be allowed to add it to the Serbian Wikipedia since no "Serbian" speakers would use the alphabet, or should a separate Wikipedia be created for Naibres?
And if a separate Wikipedia were created for Naibres, should it only be written in Latin because any Cyrillic content would be a duplication of the Serbian content?
I know the hypothetical is confusing, but if you can work your mind around it that is basically the situation on the ground with Romanian and Moldovan.
ro.wiki has over 11000 articles, but there is no willingness to accept content in the Cyrillic alphabet, which is fine. So people started having content in both scripts at mo:, but the very small community at mo: (two or three people) has decided to redirect all Latin-script pages to ro.wikipedia because the text is basically identical and we don't want to create a content fork.
Ronline believes we should move Cyrillic pages to a separate subdomain since Cyrillic is not the official or majority script of "Moldovan language", but I believe that, since we already have two separate Wikipedias, we can use ro.wiki for /all/ Latin-script content, and mo.wiki for /all/ Cyrillic-script content, as long as there is a prominently-placed link on the mo.wiki mainpage (see http://mo.wikipedia.org , where it says "click aici" is the link)
Mark
On 4/14/05, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/13/05, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
Many Serbians (though certainly not all) believe Bosnian is a dialect of Serbian or is identical, but there is no interference with Serbians complaining about the Bosnian Wikipedia or vice-versa, and Serbian is bi-scriptal even though Latin is mostly used for "Montenegrin" which is in a similar situation to Moldovan (except it isn't officially recognised as a separate language).
Serbs are using both scripts (in Belgrade, Podgorica and Banja Luka) and it seems that situation with Moldavians are similar (not the same) with Serbian problem.
So, I suggest Chinese solution for Moldavians. They would have Latin and Cyrillic interface such Chinese have Simplified and Traditional script. Please, look Zhengzhu's page at Meta: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Automatic_conversion_between_simplified_and_t...
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