Just remember that if you want to merge projects, you need to merge communities. And differences between communities are not only political based. (For example, the main reason why I don't want to merge Serbian Wikipedia with Serbo-Croatian is that their community, as I see, is too much authoritarian.)
On 10/10/05, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Milos Rancic wrote:
Just to say that at least very small minority (maybe one contributor on sr: ) agrees to merge sr, hr and bs Wikipedias into one. Even it is so, Serbian and Croatian communities cooperate very good.
There are some ideas how to make cooperation better, but, please, don't force talks about merging because such ideas make cooperation harder.
And about sh: Wikipedia: Yes, Elephantus is right when he says that our communities (Serbian and Croatian) have problems with sh: Wikipedia. People who want to cooperate would prefer sh: Wikipedia and we would have only strong nationalists on our projects. Unfortunately, there are more strong nationalists then people who want to cooperate in Balkans. The consequences are: big Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian Wikipedias with a lot of nationalist POV and small Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia with specific NGO POV from Balkans.
Also, I want to say again: sh: Wikipedia was reopened too early. It is opened and I don't think that it would be better to close it again. But, we have some problems and I don't know how to solve it... And, please, don't make pressure for merging sr:, hr: and bs:.
I basically agree. I think that there is a big difference between encouraging the Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia, and insisting that the other three be merged into it. Before a merger can be possible the partisans need to be shown that co-operation can work. It's hard to say whether the sh:wikipedia was opened too early; for some any opening would be too early. The challenge at this stage is for those on the combined project to find ways of co-operating. I'm sure that all three projects have some relatively uncontroversial articles that can be copied into the combined project. Can an active edit history be copied as well?
For a merger to happen (and all three do not need to happen at the same time) the participants in the separate projects need to feel that their participation there is a waste of time, and just let that project fade away. When it is obvious that a project has no participants, and all the contents have been copied into the sh project it can be allowed to fade away. That will take as long as it needs to take. Until then it is an individual option to work on the separate or combined projects.
Ec
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