On 3/11/06, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
What will be the reaction if the Romanian Wikipedia converts automatically to Cyrillic? Not just among Wikipedians, but among Romanians in general.
Anyone who reacts negatively is being frankly ridiculous. Not that such behaviour is unlikely, of course.
These seem to be the facts as I see them: (let me know if I get anything wrong)
1. There are some people who speak a language that is essentially a version of Romanian (whether under that name, Moldovan, or whatever) but read and write it in Cyrillic characters. These include some people unable to read Romanian in Latin script, and others who would prefer to read it in Cyrillic because they're more familiar with it that way. 2. There has proven to be, currently, insufficient contributors interested in producing a Cyrillic-script Wikipedia in this language to make it a truly vibrant and alive project. 3. It is possible to transliterate latin-script Romanian into cyrillic script in an automated fashion with few errors. Some words etc. have to be special-cased because it isn't always a 1:1 transliteration, but it's certainly feasible.
It seems to me that having a Romanian latin-script source base with automated transliteration into Cyrillic should keep most practical people in all communities happy. The source text base being in Latin script should satisfy most Romanian nationalists, since it puts latin script in the primary position and ensures that all new Wikipedia developments in the language are written in that version.
Having an automated transliteration into Cyrillic script should not be seen as a bad thing even from that perspective - but rather acknowledging the simple fact that some people would be unable to use a Latin-script Romanian project. Indeed, it could be seen from the Romanian-nationalist perspective as actually encouraging those people to learn or the Latin-script version in baby steps, since to contribute they'd have to learn it.
While this solution doesn't allow people to contribute in Cyrillic script, it acknowledges the fact that there seems to be little editor base to work on a Cyrillic script Moldovan wikipedia. A read-only but more complete and useful Cyrillic version obtainable by machine-transliteration from the Latin script would serve readers and users better than a Cyrillic-only but tiny project.
-Matt