On 1/8/06, Daniel Mayer <maveric149(a)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.