There were the whole story about ICTY and Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian. They used translators for all languages (including Bosnian <-> Croatian <-> Serbian)... Until they realized that people can understand each other well.
It is hard to understand the problem... Maybe someone from Ireland may guess what the problem may be. If Irish people developed two a little bit different standards, I am sure that they would be maybe stronger in demands for two different Wikipedias.
Standard language is political question and the situation is a lot different then in English language relations. While English speaking people don't care for written variant, while cohesion between Chinese is much stronger (they developed the whole civilisation on their writing system) -- people from Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro and Serbia feel that standard language is important part of their separate identities.
Also, majority of people from those countries feel that the name "Serbo-Croatian" is offensive term. If you say to someone from this area that (s)he talks Serbo-Croatian, it is almost the same as you say to some African American that (s)he is a Nigger.
I think that software allows to us to make some "light" tools for translation between similar standard variants, such as en-uk <-> en-us, sr <-> hr <-> bs, Simplified and Traditional Chinese. As I said, I think that we can finish Serbian conversion (http://conversion.vikimedija.org/) in the next couple of months. But, this is not only our problem. A lot of standardized and non-standardized languages have and may have the similar problem. Occitan is the example, but it is not the only one; I am sure that there are some groups who would like to pronounce/write some Neapolitan or Sicilian in other way then it is "standardized" on Wikipedia. In other words, we need some kind of general tool for such situations.
And to back to SCB relations. There are two important things more:
- All attempts which try to unify Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian would be treated as an attack by all communities (and not only by Wikipedian communities). In other words, Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian Wikipedias should have their own URLs, their own main pages etc.
This means that it was good decision to separate Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian Wikipedias. It is better to have three strong Wikipedias then one weak.
Wikipedia is not technical, but cultural project. While we have a lot of "technical contacts" with a lot of FS and OS communities from former Yugoslavia, cultural relations are a lot more complex. In that sense, cooperation between communities from Croatian and Serbian Wikipedias are important cultural event for our cultures. (I.e., this is one more thing where Wikipedia made a great success.)
Also, I have to express one my frustration with (international) Wikipedian community (not with Jimmy, who completely understands the situation and who is willing to help): A number of times I asked (via different tools: using the list or the pages on Meta or using the pages on English Wikipedia) for help to solve some Balkan related problems. I got something more then zero response. But it is very interesting to talk what Wikipedia should exist and what should not even we were working a lot on our communication and our problems. In other words: if you don't want to help us, just don't make problems to us.
- Also, again, we are talking about four communities. It is not so easy as Mark says, because...
1. During around a year and half I was working with one community. Almost one year we have community strong enough to assimilate all new Wikipedians to work on Wikipedia which doesn't know for edit wars even it has more then 14.000 articles and a lot of contributors. I don't care for adminship on sh:. (I don't even remember when I used admin privileges on sr: last time.) Merging communities doesn't mean that some people from sr:, hr: and bs: should become admins on sh:. It means a lot more.
2. sh:, sr:, hr: and bs: have different relations between people. While it is not a big deal to become an admin or bureaucrat on sr:, while community from hr: is at the beginning of similar implementation, sh: and especially bs: have (as I think) have more hierarchy: in their communities it is a big deal to become admin (I think that they don't have any bureaucrat). If we make another kind of simple merging, community from sr: would have a great majority of admins. So, this should not be a good way, too.
...
Maybe I am boring to a lot of this list member :) But I think that more talk about this issue would help to a lot of people to better understand our problems.
On 10/13/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
Delirium wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
I absolutely agree. At this stage a merger may be nothing more than an intellectual ideal. It could be years before the conditions are right, if ever. The most that can be done now is to make the opportunity available.
Is it really a good precedent to separate Wikipedias based on political differences among groups of people?
No, it is a terrible precedent, but it happened before we understood it well enough.
It seems to me quite possible to move forward gently and slowly and to get consensus, and that there's no reason to force people together before they are ready.
--Jimbo _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l