Mark Williamson wrote:
On 26/03/06, Alin Dosoftei <desiphral(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Mark, this a perfect example of why Roma get sick
and tired of non-Roma
trying to organize their lives by thinking they finally find some exotic
puppets to play with. They come with cut and dried ideas and they try to
impose them irrespective of the ground reality by not listening to the
people.
If you think I discriminate against you, you are wildly mistaken. In
my life I don't have a lot of personal experiences with Roma people,
so I don't have any of the biases you may encounter with non-Roma
people in your own environment. To me, Roma people are just like any
other people. Not "exotic puppets to play with".
No-one is suggesting bias or bad faith, only well-intentioned
ignorance. That's what the image of the [[Ugly American]] has been all
about ever since that book was written in 1958. Most Americans who have
regularly involved themselves in Wikipedia have learned that lesson.
They have learned that people from other countries prefer to solve their
own problems without recourse to the presumption that American solutions
are necessarily the best. Regretably, some few Americans here, like
you, have never grasped this.
What worries me is the prospect that you will call
yourself the
"Romani Wikipedia" while at the same time being inaccessable to a
large portion of Roma, including but not limited to readers of Ursari.
Why should that worry YOU? I saw no evident Roma involvement in the
decision that there should be one English Wikipedia to unite the British
and American languages. Why shouldn't the Roma sort out their own
problems? There are more ways to have people come together than having
them unite to repel a meddler who has decided that he has better
solutions to their problems than they do themselves. If the Ursari
speakers feel that they have a problem with the rest of the Roma
community it's up to them to seek help; it's not up to a stranger to
imagine a problem and impose his own gratuitous solution.
Ec