On 1/8/06, Dejan Cabrilo dcabrilo@gmail.com wrote:
Now, many people don't turn to Bosnian, Croatian, or Serbian Wikipedias, because they can't identify with any of those. They are all covering the same linguistic (or at least similar) region, but simply because they all exist, a bit of bias is assumed by many editors.
Huh, "many"...
People like me don't identify their nationality nor the language with either Bosnia, Croatia or Serbia (I happen to be a citizen of one of those, but that doesn't make much difference). So, if we decide that we need three projects for something that everybody could understand, anyway, why don't leave a fourth one as well?
This is true, but this way is just forcing separation.
Some people don't want Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia to exist, because they are very anti-Yugoslavian. Others don't want Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian to exist as separate editions because they are anti-cultural balkanization, and think that all of those regions share enough in language written to be able to cooperate without big problems.
Term "anti-cultural balkanization" is culture-fascistic.
Just for example, as Serbian Wikipedia was coming into existence, many of the articles had very strong Serbian Orthodox POV. This is getting much better now, and I applaud the hard work of few who are trying to fight that inherited POV. But still, it is enough for one person to run across an article on Serbian Wikipedia which is still that biased, see that it's in cyrillic (most Serbian websites use latin, because it's accessible to Croatian and Bosnian, as well as Slovenian audience that way, and using strictly cyrillic is a weak sign of nationalism - when people deliberately decide they don't want to be accessible to neighbours).
Serbian Wikipedia doesn't have POV articles more then English Wikipedia (of course, proportional). It is possible that some ov POV pages are not marked, but this is only because NO ONE marked them (Dejan could do it, but he didn't).
Latin alphabet is needed only because of Croats. Bosnians know Cyrillics; if Slovenians know Serbian/Croatian, they know Cyrillics, too. As well as Macedonians use only Cyrillics.
A lot of sites are in Latin only because of a lot of xenophobia toward Cyrillics.
So, we can either have 4 Wikipedias, and upcoming Montenegrin should be ready. OR, we can make an overarching Wikipedia for all of those languages, or like Milosh proposed, a neo-Shtokavian centric one (which is fine really).
In present way, Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia is just fourth faction. Also, you can't build anything on personal fiction. Partial and/or full merging between Neo-Shtokavian Wikipedias are possible only if people are working on Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian Wikipedia. It is not possible if people who want that are working on separate factional project.
Also, regarding the numbers of Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian Wikipedias: They also often use each others contents, and many of those pages are really just date templates.
Serbian Wikipedia has more then 10.000 normal articles; Croatian has at least 6.000-8.000 normal articles.
I think this really needs to be reformed somehow. If that software, which would transliterate between Cyrillic and Latin, appears, what's the reason not to have ONE SINGLE Wikipedia for all of those languages?
If you want to work on such project, try to think a little bit deeper what is possible now, what would be possible in two years etc. And, start to work on it. The problem with you and Pokrajac is that you are full of your ideals in emails and talk pages without any consistent work.
We would be in much better situation now if both of you gave 10% of your efforts from mails/talks like this instead of reopening Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is not a cultural project, it's an encyclopedia, aimed at bringing information to people.
You can use a blog for spreading informations, too.