On 1/8/06, Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com wrote:
An on-the-fly script converter is already working on the Chinese Wikipedia. It does not, I am told, require more than one version of an article and does not fork articles. What it does is display whatever script a person wants w/o needing separate articles written in the different scripts.
It is not only a matter of scripts. Only Serbian Wikipedia will have FOUR variants, not two. Possible united Wikipedia would have at least TEN versions (maybe more). We are working on it.
So it appears that there is no valid reason to have separate wikis for each country that was formerly part of Yugoslavia. One Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia will do, IMO.
Until we would have a good implementation of software, separate Wikipedias are needed. Serbo-Croatian is, again, offensive term to 90% of inhabitants of Serbia and Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia.
We are here to build encyclopedias that everybody in the world can read and use. That does NOT mean that we need to have encyclopedias in every single dialect spoken in the world. In fact, doing that will only hamper our goals since it needlessly breaks-up communities that could combine their effort into creating one encyclopedia that respects all the various mutually-understandable dialects of a single language.
We (the community from Serbian Wikipedia) have very good cooperation with the community from Croatian Wikipedia and I am going to Zagreb in the first part of Februray to see them.
That Serbian, Croation, and Bosnian are separate languages appears to be a politically-convenient fiction that wants to enforce differences that don't really exist. That can only tend to enforce component-nation-specific POVs and thus violate NPOV (as would having separate Wikipedais for Simplified and Traditional Chinese).
POV is present on English Wikipedia, too. There are no chance to add free about USA foreign politics on English Wikipedia. For example, there are a number of articles named as "incidents" even US soldiers were killing a lot of civilians. Pushing POV is very usual on Wikipedia.
Shut down Serbo-Croatian? No. Shut down Serbian, Croation, and Bosnian and then merge them into Serbo-Croatian? Yes.
And shut down three communities and one formed local chapter and one local chapter in the process of forming.
If need be we can reduce to just two wikis until/if a Latin/Cyrillic script converter and be created.
You are not introduced in the problem well.