Hi!
Sort of -- people will accuse us of being
pro-government and/or
pro-Soviet if we support Narkamauka over Tarashkievitsa.
And they will accuse us of
being pro-western if we do the opposite. It's a
conflict, whatever you do, someone will cry you help the opposite party.
About half of Belarusan bloggers use Tarashkievitsa;
svaboda.org and a
couple of newspapers are written in it...
And... how many people is this? I quite
doubt you get even close to the 9
million mark :) It's very difficult to judge a distribution from this, since
most bielorussian speakers have no access to the internet whatsoever...
You may not think it makes much sense to mix, but
plenty of other
Wikipedias do it.
@ pms we do it, too, even if there IS a recognized standard since
the end of
the 18th century, which is used for the interface. Anyway, it's normal for
endangered languages to have a numer of "experimental" ortographies, which
are supposed to make the use of the language easier. I never noticed a
positive result from any of them, so I simply stick to the standard, but
that's not a reason for us to ban someone else's creativity.
It's different when (as it in lumbaart), you actually speak of different
dialects of the same language. Here I suppose the only criteria is to ensure
mutual intelligibility. As long as everyone can use the wiki, then it's
okay, when differences among the dialects are too big, it makes little sense
to speak of dialects. They actually are separated languages and should be
treated as such. It does not seem to be the case in bielorussian, though.
Here it's mostly a political game, that mostly mirrors what is happening in
the country.
I do agree that if they really want it, we should give
them a chance.
It makes little sense to start an internal conflict or to override
the
admins. Yes, there should be two wikis, and the official code should be
assigned to those who use an official standard, no matter what is their
political position. Other scripts may simply use their own names, since they
have definite names. Then it will be the people to choose what version is
more suitable for them to use.
Bèrto