Hello
[..] but here we have a real problem and need a real solution, okay?
Now that's good. This is definitively a more
constructive approach than
organizing carnivals.
If it is
"language" that you mean
FYI, the upcoming ISO 639 standard has totally
abandoned your terminology.
There are NOT anymore languages and dialects, all that we have is
"Linguistic entities".
This "linguistic entity" term is still a mystery to me. There is no word
about it on Wikipedia and Google doesn't say much (maybe someone has a
pertinent link?). So that for the purpose of this email, I'll hold to my
old-fashioned terminology.
You mean that RO.wiki
would accept having on ALL of its pages a link saying "this page in
cyrillic", or something like that?
Before answering this, I hope that the Language Committee agrees on the
following two points.
First of all, the WMF does *not* want to have any content in the Moldovan
dialect (Romanian as *spoken* in the historic region of Moldavia, which
would currently comprise Eastern part of Romania and Moldova with
Transnistria included). This would be completely stupid and trolls would be
the only serious contributors.
Secondly, the "Moldovan language" in its standard form is standard Romanian.
You might look
here<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moldovan_language#Controversy>sy>,
here<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_closing_projects/Closu…
here<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_closing_projects/Closu…
more information. "Even the loudest defender of the Moldovan language
concept, Vasile Stati, has
agreed<http://www.vremea.net/news/2005-01-13/18:45:35.html>that
Moldovan and Romanian are identical in their literary forms".
With these two points cleared out, the situation becomes less confusing. As
said in my previous email, the current content on the Moldovan Wikipedia is
standard Romanian written in Cyrillic, Moldovan Cyrillic alphabet (of course
with stylistic and grammar faults, and bad transliterations). It is not
reasonable to dedicate an entire Wikipedia section to this content, when the
Romanian Wikipedia exists.
The best solution would probably be installing a conversion script over the
Romanian Wikipedia with, as Berto mentioned, a link on all pages "in
Moldovan alphabet" or something similar (special attention should be paid to
the name of this link, as there has to be a contrast between the Moldovan
alphabet <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moldovan_alphabet> and the Romanian
Cyrillic alphabet <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_Cyrillic_alphabet>;
on a side note: personally, I would like a lot if a conversion script of
Latin Romanian to Cyrillic Romanian were also created, but technically this
would be more than a challenge).
The good news is that there already is a partially functional conversion
script <http://mcworld.org/McChirilic/?pagina=Limba_moldoveneasc%25C4%2583>(you
may change "Limba_moldovenească" to any relevant article on
ro.wiki). To my knowledge, it was created by Bogdan
Giusca<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Bogdangiusca>ca>,
and as he says himself, "It's not yet perfect, but it can be improved". And
it definitely needs improvements. It might get implemented in the way it is
on the Serbian
Wikipedia<http://sr.wikipedia.org/sr-ec/%D0%91%D1%83%D0%BA%D1%83%D1%80%D…82>,
with Latin being the storage content and Cyrillic conversion performed on
demand by clicking the link. Two reasons: nowadays Latin is, somewhat, the
"standard" for the Romanian language and you've already seen how many
people
are willing to contribute in Cyrillic. Taking into consideration that the
main objective here is for people still using this script to be able to
access content in Cyrillic, this is acceptable.
Now, I do not say that the Romanian Wikipedia would accept this. It is,
however, a reasonable solution to this controversial issue. Romanian was
historically written in three different scripts, so it would be logical to
have *one* Wikipedia section dealing with all the three writing systems. I
do not know the position of the Romanian Wikipedia admins, but I would
suppose that they'd need to be persuaded in a similar way that I am trying
to persuade the Language Committee. In any case, it would be better if
someone more familiar with the Romanian Wikipedia shed more light on this
point.
> Now do me a favour, will you tell me how we can verify that the ro.wiki
> admin structure will respect users and content coming from the cyr
> interface? It's no provocation, it's a serious question, and I want a VERY
> serious answer.
I seriously doubt that such problems arise. Romanian speaking persons from
Moldova are contributing to the Romanian Wikipedia for some time, already.
And, to this day, I've never heard of flag-based conflicts. As long as
content added is in line with NPOV and the rest of Wikipedia's principles,
there should be no persecution. There is no hatred between Moldovans and
Romanians. Frictions, yes. Maybe a bit of disrespect, randomly. But no
hatred. From personal experience, I would say that Romanians are generally
more friendly-intentioned towards Moldovans than the vice-verse. And they
don't really care if you come from Transnistria or not. In the sense that in
their eyes, Moldovans coming from the East of the Pruth river are their
Romanian brothers.
However, if you want to set some system of control (and there should be one,
for the beginning at least), there'd be two ways. Either name one-two
Moldovan nationals as Romanian Wikipedia admins (according to the rules, of
course, that I personally am not familiar with) that would be empowered to
intervene into relevant conflicts. Or simply - and probably better - empower
some existing respectable Romanian Wikipedia admins, that - in case
conflicts arise - will not act based on flag, but with respect to neutrality
and a given situation. Furthermore, upon account creation, users could get
informed on the admins dealing with different abuse problems.
Regards,
Liviu