Ray Saintonge wrote:
I absolutely agree. At this stage a merger may be nothing more than an intellectual ideal. It could be years before the conditions are right, if ever. The most that can be done now is to make the opportunity available.
Is it really a good precedent to separate Wikipedias based on political differences among groups of people? By that notion, we should've split up traditional and simplified Chinese long ago, but based on the principle that splitting effort should be avoided as much as possible, a partly-technical solution to keep them in the same Wikipedia was found instead.
Plus, forcing political opponents into one Wikipedia should lessen the tendency of ideologically-uniform Wikipedias to stray from a neutral point of view. If, for example, en: were split up into en-us: and en-everyone-else, I could see both of those being worse than the current unified one on many areas---the tension between American and non-American editors forces some sort of more neutral synthesis.
-Mark