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.