" ro.wiki este doar pentru limba română, cu mo.wiki pentru limba moldovenească. Singurul mod în care noi vom accepta ca legătura să meargă la Română/Moldovenască (Latin) va fi când mo.wiki va deveni o Wikipedie de dezambiguizare şi conţinutul chirilic se va muta la un subdomain nou. Până atunci, ro.wiki nu este numită Wikipedia pentru română/moldovenească în latin, fiind că este doar pentru limba română, care întotdeauna se scrie în Latin. Nu vreau să sun arogant - dar dacă voi nu vreţi să vă faceţi mo.wiki ca o Wikipedie numai pentru alfabetul chirilic, care efectiv discriminează pe majoritatea care foloseşte alfabetul latin, atunci nu aştepta ca ro.wiki să vă facă concesii."
I just received this in Romanian on my talkpage on mo.wiki. Most people can probably understand it but I will help some: "limba romana" = Romanian, limba moldoveneasca = Moldovan, "ca legatura sa mearga la Romana/Moldoveneasca (Latin)" = "link that merges them as Romanian/Moldovan (Latin)", "ro.wiki nu este numita Wikipedia pentru romana/moldoveneasca in latin" - "ro.wiki isn't the Wikipedia for Romanian/Moldovan in Latin", " doar pentru" = " it's only for", "care intotdeauna se scrie in Latin" = "which is always written in Latin", "care efectiv discrimineaza pe majoritatea care foloseste alfabetul latin" = "which is effectively discriminating against the majority which uses the Latin alphabet", "atunci nu astepta ca ro.wiki sa va faca concesii" = "in light of this ro.wiki isn't going to make any concessions".
Now, this is solely in response to my changes on the mo.wiki mainpage, rather than me doing anything on the Romanian Wikipedia or making requests of Ronline.
But in doing this, Ronline is making the statement that Moldovan and Romanian are separate languages, which is doubtful at best and laughable at worst.
Also, he is purposefully attempting to exclude Wikipedians from ro.wikipedia based simply on their nationality, and is unwilling to make any accommodations at all for that 14% of the Romano-Moldovan speaking population which lives in Moldova.
He conveniently excludes the fact that, discrimination or not, there is already an accommodation for Latin users on mo.wiki - there is a prominent link to ro.wikipedia, saying that "if you would prefer to use the Moldovan Wikipedia in the Latin alphabet, go here".
Instead he suggests that Moldovans who prefer the Latin alphabet can go to mo.wiki instead of ro.wiki, and that they will not be welcomed at ro.wiki based solely on their nationality.
Now, not only is that "incorrect", but it is entirely unacceptable from a Wikimedia point of view because it separates two populations more on the basis of nationality rather than actual linguistic differences.
In addition, ro.wiki is only hurting itself by turning away that 14% of possible content writers whose contributions would barely be noticed as using a slightly different spelling.
At the same time, the pages on ro.wiki state in parenthesis - all over - that Moldovan = Romanian. So, if Ronline feels that this is not the case and that they are in fact separate languages, why doesn't he fix his native Wikipedia pages like http://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rom%C3%A2na_moldoveneasc%C4%83_estic%C4%83 which say POV things like "Româna moldovenească estică (denumită şi limba moldovenească din motive politice) este o ramură a românei moldoveneşti, un grai al limbii române, vorbită fiind în Republica Moldova." = "Eastern Moldovan Romanian (called "Moldovan language" for political motives) is the Moldovan variety of Romanian, a branch of the Romanian languages, spoken in the Republic of Moldova". How is that POV, when over 1 million people clearly state that their mother tongue Moldovan? For your Wikipedia to write these people off as insignificant or to pass judgement on them as only renaming their speech for political motives is at best not NPOV, and at worst an attempt to promote a Romanian nationalist agenda.
Mark
On 18/04/05, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
Again I would like to point out that you are
emphasising >what is
"right" or "correct". Why does that matter? Why
should >we care?
I am emphasising what is right because that is what we should be striving towards. Just because any Moldovans, who you seem to think are the only ones who have an authoritative right to a say in this, haven't complained, doesn't mean that the idea of is right.
Why should we be striving towards it when the current solution works just fine and we have only received complaints from foreigners?
Now, you're going to say again something along the lines of "Yes, you keep on using the word right. Who cares what's right". Well, we *should* care about what's right! For example, we couldn't go ahead now and form a Romanian Wikipedia without diacritical symbols, just because the Romanian community supports it, even when it is incorrect. In this example, writing Romanian with no diacritics would be easier and, hypothetically, let's say it would be supported by the community, which , hypothetically, is made up of 1 person. Does that mean we should actually implement that proposal? Just because the "community" agrees to something doesn't make it right, doesn't mean that it's correct for, in the example, the ro.wiki to be written without diacritic symbols.
Actually, if the entire community supports it, it's fine. The thing is though the system is self-correcting. If you have a community of 3 people, as in the case of mo.wiki, who vote unanimously to do something that's "wrong", if it's truly a problem eventually somebody will come along and complain, or try to fix it, or whatever. That just hasn't happened yet.
The same goes for mo.wiki. There is basically *one* Moldovan Cyrillic contributor, and you're saying that just because he hasn't complained, then it's OK, because no Moldovan contributor has so far complained. Why? Because *there is no Moldovan wiki community*. There is just one person! I think there might have actually been a Moldovan contributor at ro.wiki which is no longer active. But that's about all. For that reason, we can't base ourselves here on "we do what the Moldovans think, because they're the ones who should have the most say." If we go by that principle, then we won't get anywhere, because there isn't yet, unfortunately, a Moldovan Wikipedia community.
Why? As I noted above, it is a self-correcting system.
Every time a Wikipedia is started, the founding contributors make important decisions. Sometimes these are bad decisions which, when more people join, are struck down democratically. But so far this has not happened. As they say, "if it ain't broke don't fix it". And it ain't broke, at least not according to the only Moldovan user to weigh in on the issue. When more Moldovans arrive, if they have a problem with it, that issue can be addressed /then/ and it can be "fixed".
So, as you keep on blaming the ro.wiki community for, there's nothing wrong with us getting involved. The same goes in your case - there's nothing wrong about you getting involved, as a non-Moldovan, in this issue. We *all*, as Wikimedia contributors, have a right to involve ourselves in *all* Wikimedia issues as long as we are adequately informed. And I think both of us, and many other people who have given an opinion, have done so in an informed, comprehensive manner.
The difference is, I have actually contributed my time and effort to mo.wiki. I have transliterated articles, reverted vandalism, and the like. ro.wikipedians, on the other hand, only heard about it just now from your userpage, and as you can see on the talkpages on mo:, all they ever do is come over and write "This is wrong, it shouldn't be this way. --Romanianfromrowiki" and then retreat back to ro.wikipedia never to appear again.
Thus, even though I am not a Moldovan I consider myself a part of the community, and I see you and other ro.wikipedians as outsiders - you come along and complain about the status quo without giving anything, and on top of that you're not Moldovans.
At the moment, mo.wikipedia is my temporary home. As you can perhaps observe from my activity on various Wikipedias, I'm not really active much on en.wiki anymore, but I make tiny contributions here and there to other Wikis. However I have recently focused a bit on mo.wikipedia, writing new content, transliterating existing content, replacing content duplication with interwiki redirects, etc.
There have been no complaints from actual Moldovans, only from Romanians, and they are all politically motivated.
I don't think you can actually say that all the comments are politically motivated. If you read the discussion page at ro.wiki, you will see that many Romanians actually enforce the idea of having a Moldovan Wikipedia, and recognise the need for one. I don't think you can blame most of the community for being either superficial or politically-motivated. Most of us have said that - yes, having a mo.wiki is OK, even in Cyrillic script, but it needs to be at a separate subdomain, due to all the reasons that I've mentioned in my numerous past messages.
What, then, do these Romanians say about the fact that any Latin-script content is sure to be a near-duplication of Romanian content?
mo.wiki started out as a biscriptal Wikipedia, but following complaints from Danutz, the policy was re-evaluated and it was decided that we should only use Cyrillic because Latin script-users needs are already satisfied closely by ro.wikipedia.
My solution is practical, and currently it is working fine.
True. By the way, don't think I'm trying to argue with you just for the sake of it. Your POV is actually a very legitimate one on this issue and it is the most practical. I "admit" that as you said. And it's working fine. At the moment. What I mean by at the moment is that 1) it will get more problematic in the future and it's better to solve the problems now and 2) you can't really call it working, because the is 1 contributor! There is basically no community yet.
We can go down that road when we come to it. We don't need to deal with future problems now. And you are wrong - while there is only one actual Moldovan, I have worked a lot on mo.wiki, and there have been minor contributions from a couple of others as well.
I see there have been people (it may be the same user as the Cyrillic one, actually I think it is) who have already made Latin script contributions. Already it's starting to become problematic. What happens if a user comes and makes Latin script contributions? Should we simply move them to ro.wiki? Or should we keep the mo.wiki a biscriptal confusion?
Move them? Why not redirect them? In every one of these cases,
There have been many cases where a single contributor has started something, which is not technically right, and then when a larger community came, the project had to be moved somewhere. You must realise that by putting only Cyrillic content at mo.wiki, we become terribly biased towards that script? Why should Wikipedia, the free, NPOV encyclopedia, be like that? And why should we then have to change everything when Moldovan Latin users come over and start adding content to the mo.wiki?
If it's NPOV, then why does Cyrillic get the short end of the stick? You say it's because it's a minority and it's not official. But in the world of NPOV, it doesn't matter whether or not a POV is widely held or officially endorsed. What matters is that it's POV.
And I don't see the problem with crossing that bridge when we come to it.
the only people who have a problem with it are Romanians who are trying to meddle in the affairs of the Moldovan Wikipedia for political reasons and replace the perfectly working status quo with some sort of cumbersome change that they say is technically correct, which will make the URL longer and require the assistance of a developer.
You're saying this as if it would require registering a new domain, setting up a new interface and writing new software! It's really not that hard to make a new subdomain! It's being done all the time, when new language projects are being launched. So what if we require the assistance of a developer? I think that you really are too practical - just for the sake of easiness and practicality, it doesn't matter how wrong something is, or how biased it is, you won't support it just because it requires more work. I believe that we must first be correct, then practical. Being practical now will just cause more problems later on.
All the time? Do you have any idea how extremely infrequently new language subdomains are set up? And for the last 4 or 5 new ones, I had to request it personally from a developer, sometimes a few times before it actually got done. It would require a new subdomain, yes, which would be longer than the existing one and would take developer time that is currently being spent on much less frivelous issues. A new interface would be needed, yes, but that would happen even without a new subdomain. New software? No, mediawiki 1.4 works just fine.
Finally, I'm not happy with the status quo. I've tried until now numerous ways to negotiate, I started writing on this mailing list, and yet nothing has worked. The status quo has just been maintained, and you haven't considered the point of view than anyone else. Honestly, that's really frustrating. I mean, I've written many messages that just basically say the same thing over and over again -- we've covered no ground here. And you can't say I haven't been reasonable. I've proposed something that doesn't denigrate Moldovan Cyrillic, that is perfectly fair to it, gives it space to grow, but at the same time doesn't put it in favour of Moldovan Latin. Yes, it's practically harder, but I don't see anything theoretically wrong with it. On the practical side, I will go and contact a developer to do it if we reach concensus. That's not that hard a move. Neither is the whole setting up. It's not as if you now have to go and waste a week's work on setting up a new subdomain!
Ahh, but there's where our opinions differ majorly. I see the using of a separate -and longer - subdomain for Cyrillic not as making it so it the situation is fair and balanced. I see it as making it so that it puts Moldovan Latin on a pedestal compared to Cyrillic. So what if it's majority and official? That doesn't mean it should get the mansion while Cyrillic gets the one-room apartment.
And actually, it would probably take well over a week for me to be able to get somebody to set up a new subdomain.
You say you're not happy with the status quo. Not to be disrespectful, but why should I care? You have not contributed your time to mo.wiki, and you are not Moldovan. You are speaking entirely from a Romanian point of view, and I strongly believe that the decisions made at a Wikipedia shouldn't be able to be second-guessed by other Wikipedia communities.
Why aren't you happy with the status quo? Evaluate this, with your Wikipedia usage habits, for whom does it cause a problem? You. Do you visit mo.wiki a lot? No. Do you read it or edit it a lot? No. Have you contributed a lot to it? No. Do you even consider your mother tongue to be Moldovan rather than Romanian? No. So why, then, should we give your opinion more than a microscopic weight? You not being happy with the status quo doesn't count for a lot if the status quo doesn't actually have any impact on your Wikipedia usage.
Mark
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