Thursday, February 1, 2007, 12:49:01 AM, David wrote:
OTRS has received a request for this wiki to be taken
down, stating that
Moldovian is just Romanian written in cyrillic, in a way imposed by the
Communists. (I'm not saying this is true, I have no opinion on the
issue, I'm just reporting.)
The main issue is not that it was imposed by the Communists, but
that nobody wants to use it anymore. It was used before 1989 in
Moldova, but since, they switched back to Latin, so they're contributing
to Romanian Wikipedia.
A small part of Moldova declared its independence and with the help of
the Russian Army, they have a non-recognized government. A part of the
schools in this region still use the same textbooks printed 20 years
ago, in Cyrillic alphabet.
This usage is imposed by the region's government (whos human rights
record is quite bad) and nobody wants to use the alphabet, there or
elsewhere. An interesting fact on this is that there were *no*
books or newspapers published in the last 15 years using this alphabet.
The international press usually ignored this subject from this corner
of the earth, with just a few exceptions:
http://www.liberation.fr/actualite/monde/230766.FR.php?rss=true
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3936991.stm
I have yet to meet a Moldovan who wants to use Cyrillic alphabet in
Wikipedia -- the people who support Cyrillic Moldovan are almost
exclusively Russians and Ukrainians, with some Serbians and other
panslavists.
As, such, with no actual native speaker, the Moldovan Wikipedia lived
exclusively out of transliterations from Romanian Wikipedia.