Since I was one of the blocked in the sh project and I am one of the
guys that's "most responsible" for this, I thought that it would be best
to write here.
I agree with Elephantus here and I think that this project represents
nothing but a carbon copy of some articles from three distinct
wikipedias. Pokrajac, one of the admins at SH constantly claims that
Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian are same languages, which is completely
insane. The languages have started diverging a long time ago and since
the 1990s, they have become more distant. It is true that the speakers
of those 3 languages are mutually intelligible, but that doesn't mean
that they speak the same language.
Moreover, they speak culturally and liguistically 3 different languages
and it's sometimes hard for me to understand what Bosnians or Croats are
saying just because of the diversity (I'm a Serb, by the way). Also,
these three wikipedias came out of Serbocroatian Wikipedia for a reason.
And they are not going to converge again and merge into SH. It's an
idealistic pro-yugoslavian thought that might work in an alternate
reality, but taking cultural, linguistic and other properties into
consideration, this can never be achieved and striding towards it is
only one step forward, but seven steps back.
Furthermore, as far as I know, there aren't any statistics proving that
a percentage of people claim that Serbocroatian language still exists,
or even less that they use it. If there were some kind of evidence that,
say, 20% of the people that speak sr, hr or bs, still consider
Serbocroatian as a valid language, then there wouldn't be problems.
But, there is some kind of public awareness - it is my opinion that most
of the people dislike the phrase Serbocroatian and that they would stick
with something less contrived.
Conversely, I'd like to say that the space used for this project (read:
duplication of material that could/should be found elsewhere) is the
space that an African language of millions may use for spreading
cultural beliefs etc.
Overall, I think that keeping this project alive would be a selfish
idea, because only 3 people are willing to really contribute to it (btw,
don't let the recent changes as they are now fool you - they are usually
very slow, but filled with new articles with summaries like /Copied from
Serbian Wikipedia/, /Pasted from Croatian Wikipedia/ et al.)
And now to reply to some earlier posts:
To Daniel Meyer:
As I said on IRC, you're very wrong. I'm sorry to break it to you this
way, but Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian ARE different languages, albeit
mutually intelligible.
And the political conotation is way too big to neglect. People have
chosen to have separate wikipedias: just look at the growth of the three
in comparison to the "united one" (which is basically a fork). The three
didn't come out of the SH for no reason.
I agree with you that an active community means that the project should
be kept. In this case, the community is only relatively active (in this
case, activity = blatant copying and, although not a crime, it is
generally frowned upon). What I'm trying to say is that 3 people with
IMO wrong beliefs are holding this project down and because of that,
they have sympathizers that agree with them, although they don't really
know the problem itself.
To Dejan Cabrilo:
Knock it off with POV. I think it's better to have POV in some articles
(that are properly tagged) and just wait for those articles to meet
better contributors. Rome wasn't built in a day. What I think is wrong
is the lack of policy of Serbocroatian Wikipeda - there is no policy
about the script. You can write in Cyrillics, you can write in Latin
script, and no one really cares, which is IMO inexcusible. Furthermore,
this appearance of 2 scripts in the system messages is just wrong and
useless. Since variants (script conversion) is going to be introduced in
Serbian Wikipedia shortly, Serbocroatian is becoming obsolete.
Thanks for your time.
Filip Maljkovic, bureaucrat from Serbian wikipeda