Joao, I wanted to express my full agreement with all of the principles that you discuss. I repeat that I don't know enough about the differences in language to be able to say anything about what the right answer is, but I will say that I think that the approach you are taking is the right one in terms of the _principles_ involved.
We developed rules to prevent conflicts between Brazilian and Portuguese users:
- Edits that change an article from a flavour to another are
prohibited unless more than 50% of the content of article is improved. 2. Articles can't be moved from a title prevalent in one flavour to a title prevalent in another. 3. When an article has two possible titles both are mentioned in the first sentence of the article. 4. Words unfamiliar to one of the sub-communities may have a link to a entry in the wiktionary.
One additional etiquette guideline that you might consider is something like our rule on en: "Articles which focus on a topic specific to a particular English-speaking country should generally aim to conform to the spelling of that country." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#Usage_and_spelling
Presumably on topics that are particular to Portugal or Brazil, it can be an easier read if that flavour of language is followed.
I hope we will soon implement a new rule that allows changes to a more neutral language every time a word or expression causes conflicts. In summary, we applied the neutral point of view to our problem.
Whenever possible, this certainly seems wise.
There are of course, people with good intentions that want to fork.
Yes, of course, and these people must be respected and accomodated, and their legitimate concerns addressed as much as possible.
In my opinion, forking is, for the moment, a bad option from the point of view of any well intentioned wikipedian. In the Portuguese speaking world, conventional encyclopaedias (commercial encyclopaedias) are written in a neutral flavour of the language that is pleasant both to the Brazilians and to the Portuguese. That's precisely the flavour of the language that must be adopted by an encyclopaedia writer. A neutral flavour is also the most adequate to an encyclopaedia.
Additionally, the pt.wikipedia is still a weak community. A large number of users still need to absorb some of the most fundamental wikipedia policies like the neutral point of view and the copyright issues. And we have only about 13 000 articles, most of them stubs or incomplete articles. A fork would produce two smaller and even weaker communities. Our common resources would be wasted in a duplication of efforts.
These last two points are particularly worthy of emphasis. The first is that neutral language and flavor is the most adequate to an encyclopedia anyway. The second is that a split of a young community like this would likely delay the achievement of major milestones by many years.
--Jimbo