Before you reply next time, please read the entire e-mail.
Nobody is trying to force anything on anybody.
I said it is my hope that the 3 wikis will DEMOCRATICALLY merge.
That means that if there is a vote, and the majority of Croatians
votes against it, then of course Croatian WP won't merge.
But the vast rest of my e-mail you didn't reply to, namely the parts
about that you're fooling yourself when you say that you speak a
different language from the Serbians, and that it is harmful to
Wikipedia because it limits possible number of articles. This is just
a suggestion, I don't want to force anything on anyone, but I really
think that everybody would be better off here with a single WP where
all standards is converted and/or accepted.
Mark
On 10/10/05, elephantus <elephantus(a)net.hr> wrote:
Well,
Elephantus apparently hasn't been monitoring the growth of the
Serbocroatian WP.
The top contributors recently are:
OC Ripper,
Dejvid,
Myself,
Pokrajac,
Belirac,
anonymous user.
Now, of all these people, the ONLY ONE who is not
a native speaker is ME.
[[sh:User:Dejvid]] is also not a native speaker and his main activity
was also copy/pasting articles from the other three Wikipedias.
So two out of the top three contributors aren't native speakers and
what they're doing is basically making an internal fork.
From the standpoint of the Croatian Wikipedia,
there are two main
problems about Serbo-Croatian Wiki:
1. User confusion. Nontechnical, casual passers-by who stumble
upon Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia and, in many cases, automatically assume
that there is no Croatian (or Serbian, for that matter) Wikipedia.
I tried to make a partial fix for this by adding a banner
to the top of the S-C Main Page pointing people to the other 3
Wikis, but you and Pokrajac removed this.
2. Fragmentation of user base. The people who consider their
language to be Serbo-Croatian form a small minority, with political
views which are usually at the left end of the political spectrum.
By providing these people with their own Wiki you're possibly
depriving the three of small, but potentially valuable
contributions and a diversity of opinion necessary for a successful
Wiki. If we were to create, say, a German-Marxist Wikipedia, would
that be welcomed by the majority of contributors to the German
Wiki?
As for the politics of the issue, I don't really care one
way or the other. I cooperate well with the folks
on the Serbian Wikipedia who don't try to convince me that
I'm wrong and they're right. But I really think that you should
respect the will of a great majority of the three peoples
and not try to force a common identity or language upon us.
Proclaiming the many contributors to the three Wikipedias
and other ordinary folks "nationalists" because they decided
to go their separate ways shows a certain lack of respect or
detailed and nuanced knowledge about things. It's not
a simple copy/paste/merge operation, as shown in the past
90 years or so. Sorry.
Elephantus (from Croatian Wikipedia)
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