--- Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote:
I won't vote because I am not part of that
community, but the recent
changes does show that the project is active. Assuming that the vote
succeeds there would still be enough active and involved people to pass
the criteria for starting a new wiki. Under those circumstances
wouldn't it be much easier to argue that a dissolution vote is invalid
if it would leave enough people behind to start a new wiki in that same
language.
Having an active community is NOT the most important reason to have a separate wiki. FAR
more important, given our goal to having encyclopedias that everybody on the planet can
read, is to make sure we consider how closely the proposed wiki's language is to other
languages we already have wikis for.
It is my understanding that Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian are mutually intelligible
dialects of Serbo-Croatian and that the bigest difference is the use of scripts between
and/or among them (which MediaWiki can deal with on the same wiki without forking
articles).
In fact, our article on this confirms my suspicion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differences_in_standard_Serbian%2C_Croatian_an…
So a far, far better question is this: Why do we have separate Bosnian, Croatian and
Serbian Wikipedias instead of just one Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia?
Splitting things up purely for purely political reasons is a grave, let me repeat, GRAVE,
violation of NPOV and does not serve our goal to provide an encyclopedia that the peoples
of the Former Yugoslavia can use and understand.
We need to create a clear policy on the creation and shutdown of Wikipedias and apply that
retroactively to fix this and other similarly horrid mistakes.
If the situation had been my call at the beginning I would have had no
problem saying that we should have only a single Wikipedia to cover all
these, but it wasn't my call, and we need to cope with the reality in
front of us. It is a fact that we have four projects, and none of them
suffer from a lack of interest and activity. Nobody would benefit by
trying to undo the past.
There is ample support for the notion that setting up the separate wikis
was a grave violation of NPOV, but adopting retroactive policies for
anything is never good without an overwhelmingly strong reason. There
is no such overwhelming reason. So unluss one of those communities
collapses form a total lack of interest, or there is a merger agreement
by any two or more of these communities we will probably have to live
with the fact of four communities for the forseeable future. My crystal
ball cannot see farther than that.
Ec