Hoi, Every relation is unique. There may be similarities but they are differences at the same time. What you call Romanian is about people / country what we are doing in the WMF is about language.
When there are some people that like to read Moldovan, there is no reason why we should discriminate against them. The political relevance it has, it has only because you making it relevant. The fact that many people say the same thing does not mean that they are right. The fact that politicans say things does not mean it is true.
On a larger scale, should it really matter what you or Mark believe about nationality and ethnicity. What matters is that we allow the other to have his or her POV. The main thing relevant is this POV in the way of writing NPOV articles. If you argue that it cannot be NPOV because of the language used, the argument would be a two-sided affair and it would make everything you have written suspect as well.
I am interested in words, in lexicology. Having words that are used or have been used makes sense. When Moldovan literature exists, there is the possibility to get enough words in a digital way so that we can do things. We could build spellcheckers for instance. Where you would argue that nobody wants to write Moldovan, I would argue that Moldovan has been written and therefore there is enough that can be OCR'd and spellchecked. There is enough to want to collect Moldovan words and find the words that have a different meaning in that context.
In the Netherlands there was this period where the protestants destroyed religious imagery because of reasons of religion. Roman statues in the Vatican have missing genitalia because of the insistence of prudety. The attitude of denial of others is what destroys a heritage that may be thought important in 100 years time.
Thanks, GerardM
On 3/19/06, Wikipedia Romania (Ronline) rowikipedia@gmail.com wrote:
2006/3/19, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com:
If we had such poor function in articles related to Bosnia, IE, that they were dominated by Serbian ultranationalist trolls, they would very likely say "Bosnian is essentially the same as Serbian" -- there *are* relatively few differences, many of them are artificial, etc.
I think this links in to what I believe is the source of a lot of the confusion related to Moldova(n) - the fact that the relationship between Moldova and Romania is unique in the world, and there is no comparable case. The Bosnia-Serbia case is different - Bosniaks are undoubtedly a separate nation from Serbs, whereas Moldovans are still engaging in the process of nation-building (or maybe moving away from it... the problem is that even in the current confusion over nationality, the country is being pulled both ways, one way towards a Romanian national identity, the other way towards a separate Moldovan identity). So, this is why a lot of Romanians feel they have authority to write about Moldovan subjects, because they consider Moldovans to be the same nation as them.
Mark, of course, believes, from what I know, that there really is no Romanian nationality, that the present "Romanian" ethnicity is really Wallachian, and that Moldovans are hence different to Wallachians/Romanians, and hence any form of Romanian intervention into Moldovan affairs is (Wallachian) irredentism (consider, however, that current Wallachia is just one of three regions of modern Romania, and is neither the most prosperous nor the most significantly over-represented region in Romanian culture and politics).
I think a similar situation to Moldova is that of Kosovo. That is, Kosovo is to Albania as Moldova is to Romania, in many ways. Many people in Kosovo would consider themselves Kosovars about 15 years after independence (or maybe even now). Also, Just imagine for a second that during Yugoslav times, the Kosovars had been taught that their language was called "Kosovar" and made to write it using Cyrillic letters. That's sort of the situation we have in Moldova now.
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