I know that this issue has come up one or two times this list
before, but from what I saw in the archives the discussion
attracted only a small audience, while the issue itself does not
show any signs of going way. I post this now hoping that there
will be a bigger discussion, hopefully followed by a resolution
of the matter.
The background of the issue and some comments on it are
available at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28policy%29#Moldovan_W…
and more information is at
http://mo.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ronline/Propunere
In short,
http://mo.wikipedia.org/ is a version of Wikipedia
written in Romanian with Cyrillic characters. This combination is
used nowhere in the world except in Transnistria which is a
breakaway region of Republic of Moldova without international
recognition and with a rather dubious regime. It is a relic from
Soviet times, when in Republic of Moldova people used Cyrillic.
There are two views on this matter. Some people think that
nothing is wrong with having Wikipedia in all languages/character
sets possible. The number of potential readers and editors of
this particular version of Wikipedia is very small, but it still
could be useful. And deleting a language version of Wikipedia
would be against the Wiki spirit, would make Wikipedia
politicized, etc.
The other view is mostly reflected by people in Republic of
Moldova itself and neighboring Romania (again, we are talking
about the Romanian language here, the issue is the set of
characters - in Romania proper they use the Latin alphabet). To
us (I am from Republic of Moldova) writing our language in
Cyrillic is a symbol of what was wrong with the Soviet Union, a
totalitarian regime which did not give us even the choice of how
to write our own language, and of all the tragedies which
happened after Republic of Moldova was annexed to the Soviet
Union in 1940 and then again in 1945.
The discussion of this issue has been going on since June; see
again
http://mo.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ronline/Propunere
Neither side of course has any power to do anything about it (an
administrator is not enough to close it down, for example). I
would like to again express my hope that this discussion will
attract a wide audience, and that the issue of existence of this
Wikipedia will eventually be settled.
Thank you,
Oleg Alexandrov
CAM assistant professor, UCLA
aoleg(a)math.ucla.edu