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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