Ahh, and I'd like to add a little bit of advice for Elephantus:
Rather than letting politics blind you, why not try to look at things
from the point of view of "What will be best for the Wikipedia in my
language?". I think that the answer to this, is a merger of these 3
Wikipedias, because it will result in a much larger workforce and much
more power and capability.
Currently, Croatian WP has just over 10000 articles, Serbian WP has
just over 14000 articles, and Bosnian WP has almost 5000 articles.
Now, imagine, if all people from all 3 Wikipedias had been working
together from the start, maybe we'd have 30000 articles in a unified
Serbocroatian WP already.
Mark
On 09/10/05, Mark Williamson <node.ue(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Well, Elephantus apparently hasn't been monitoring
the growth of the
Serbocroatian WP.
The top contributors recently are:
OC Ripper,
Dejvid,
Myself,
Pokrajac,
Belirac,
anonymous user.
Now, of all these people, the ONLY ONE who is not a native speaker is ME.
Now, if anybody wants to accuse me of spelling and grammatical errors,
there are a number of other people they should blame first: 1) The
people who wrote the original article, since I have only been copying
articles from other Wikipedias; 2) The people who wrote the Serbian,
Croatian, and Bosnian spellcheckers for MS Word since I often use them
to make sure the source-article has no glaring errors.
Now, perhaps you're referring to the fact that the majority of the
articles I copy are using Ekavski, which is not used in Croatia. Well,
as a form of Serbocroatian, it would hardly be considered incorrect.
To be fair, some of the articles I make use Ijekavski, and a couple
dozen use a mix of the two. Terms which are obviously split between
Serbia and Croatia, like Spanija/Spanjolska (spain), or
Jevreju/Hebreju (jewish person), I try to be careful with as well.
As regards your wish to lock the Serbocroatian WP:
According to you, Serbocroatian was an artificial political construct.
That is true to a certain extent, but it is undeniable that Stokavian
dialects of Croatian, and all dialects of Bosnian and Serbian are all
over 99% mutually intelligible when spoken, but especially when
written.
These are the only "languages" for which that is the case, with the
exception of Moldovan and Romanian, and Dari and Farsi (The Moldovan
WP redirects users wanting content in Latin alphabet to the Romanian
WP, the Farsi WP includes Dari as well).
I recall something about a Croatian law requiring all Serbian movies
to be subtitled (or vice-versa?). Rather than reacting with
nationalistic pride when seeing these subtitles for a language that is
basically identical to their own, moviegoers generally laughed at the
attempts of "translation".
Now, if the majority of Croatian WPdians do not want a united
Wikipedia, that's fine. I think it should be everybody's choice. If
you want to work at the Croatian WP and keep pretending that your
language is somehow extremely differentiated from Serbian and Bosnian
(and the emerging Montenegrin), I have no problem with that, although
I think it is counter-constructive.
Already, there are Croatians at the SH.wiki, I think...
Now, perhaps a good example is Macedonian.
Although Macedonian (FYROM, that is, just so we don't offend any
Greeks) is very similar to Serbo-Croatian, and it would take little
effort to make a unified language, since Macedonian is a bit further
from Serbocroatian, I don't hold a hope of Macedonian WP being united
to Serbocroatian WP.
With Croatian, it seems that people try hard to make it a different
language from Serbian, but it isn't really except in a sociolinguistic
sense (and even then, not all Croatians perpetuate the idea of a
separate Croatian language). Macedonian, on the other hand, has truly
different words and spellings, rather than artificial divisions
created by linguists for political purposes.
Mark
On 09/10/05, Arbeo M <arbeo_m(a)yahoo.de> wrote:
Hi Elephantus!
Let me just try to answer a few of your points here:
The Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia was reopened in
June
after a request from a single user of the Serbian
Wikipedia -
[[sr:User:Покрајац|Pokrajac]].
This was
not announced beforehand in any way on the three
Wikipedias that
are most affected by this issue – Serbian,
Croatian and Bosnian, there was no public discussion
or
a vote. The idea was supported here by people
who weren't part of the growing communities of the
three Wikipedias.
Generally speaking, only opening all-new Wikipedias
requires public discussion, prior announcement, voting
or the like. Reopening a previously locked wiki is not
a comparable process. Locking a wiki is only a
temporary measure because of some specific reason, e.
g. vandalism and it can be upheld only as long as that
reason persists to exist. SH had been locked because
of inactivity. As soon as there were people willing to
edit it there was no alternative but to unlock it.
The "phenomenal growth" (1,019
articles) of the
Serbo-Croatian
is mostly a result of people (some of them with
little or no
knowledge of the three languages)
copy-pasting articles from Serbian (converting those
to Latin
alphabet), Croatian or Bosnian Wikipedias.
I wasn't aware that most of the editing at SH is done
by non-native speakers. Hmm ... you have any idea were
they come from? But there is one fact that one must
admit: the Wikipedia is active now, no matter where
that activity comes from.
My question is this: Why aren't Serbian,
Bosnian and
Croatian
Wikipedias provided the same treatment as e.g.
Danish and
Bokmal (Norwegian) which are also mutually
intelligible
in the written form? There is no common Dano-Bokmal
Wikipedia with well-wishing but mostly misguided
non-native-
speakers copying articles to it.
Well, this type of comparison is always a little bold.
But I'm getting your point. I guess the main reason is
because a "Dano-Bokmal" WP was never requested by
anyone. Interestingly though, there seems to be some
kind of common Scandinavian project going on.
Serbo-Croatian has been dead as a political
collection of
standard languages for 15 years now (30 years in
Croatia),
it is slowly disappearing, except as a historical
footnote
I must admit I'm not competent to evaluate the current
situation of Serbo-Croatian and it's future is even
harder to predict. All I can see is that there seems
to be some kind of interest in it here at WP
(actually, even more than in 130 other languages).
I'd like to propose a relocking of this
Wikipedia
I am well aware that the whole situation is not
perfectly ideal yet. But all things considered, I
think the current solution is a fairly just and
neutral one. There is a minority that wishes to write
in Serbo-Croatian. Even if you don't like their
standpoint, why exclude them? "Live and let live!"
or at least a
name change (Serbian - Latin, as a temporary bridge
to
the Latin conversion system now being tested for the
Serbian Wikipedia).
As a total outsider I could imagine that naming it
"Serbian-Latin" would not really be helpful because
that name makes reference to one nation and one
ethnicity exclusively. "Yugoslav(ian)" has just
crossed my mind - would that be an option?
Best regards,
Arbeo
P.S.: My congratulations for your 10,000th article at hr!
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