Hi all, I have a question: why do we have separate Wikipedias for Malay and Indonesian?
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differences_between_Malay_and_Indonesian , "The differences between Malay (Bahasa Melayu) and Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) are comparable to the those between British English and American English."
If this is the case, then why does our policy on English differ so sharply than our policy with Malay/Indonesian?
Don't people realise that we're dividing labour? If they had col-laborated on a single Wikipedia from the very beginning, the Malay/Indonesian Wikipedia would probably have at least 15k articles by now.
Mark
Just for the same reason that we have seperate Serbian, Croatic and Bosniak Wikipedias. They consider their languages as being separate, and Indonesian is from above considered "the" Indonesian language, even though it is relatively unprominent in terms of numbers of speakers. You should be familiar with that issue, working on the Moldovan Wikipedia and now mingling in the discussion on Serbocroatian. Don't tell the Indonesians they speak Malayan, that will insult them, though (or just because) in the Dutch colonial era everyone called it so.
Wouter
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