Some of my thoughts on this: I of course, think that the vote is
totally invalid. I voted just to show that you can't close a Wikipedia
which is active.
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.
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?
Creating Serbo-Croatian language, and identity to an extent, is as
political as recreating Croatian and Serbian, Bosnian and possibly
even Montenegrin.
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.
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).
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).
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.
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?
Most people who won't like it are POV pushers anyway (who simply don't
want to cooperate with other ethnicities - I can't justify it
otherwise).
Wikipedia is not a cultural project, it's an encyclopedia, aimed at
bringing information to people.