Well, Elephantus apparently hasn't been monitoring the growth of the Serbocroatian WP.
The top contributors recently are:
OC Ripper, Dejvid, Myself, Pokrajac, Belirac, anonymous user.
Now, of all these people, the ONLY ONE who is not a native speaker is ME.
[[sh:User:Dejvid]] is also not a native speaker and his main activity was also copy/pasting articles from the other three Wikipedias. So two out of the top three contributors aren't native speakers and what they're doing is basically making an internal fork.
From the standpoint of the Croatian Wikipedia, there are two main
problems about Serbo-Croatian Wiki:
1. User confusion. Nontechnical, casual passers-by who stumble upon Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia and, in many cases, automatically assume that there is no Croatian (or Serbian, for that matter) Wikipedia. I tried to make a partial fix for this by adding a banner to the top of the S-C Main Page pointing people to the other 3 Wikis, but you and Pokrajac removed this.
2. Fragmentation of user base. The people who consider their language to be Serbo-Croatian form a small minority, with political views which are usually at the left end of the political spectrum. By providing these people with their own Wiki you're possibly depriving the three of small, but potentially valuable contributions and a diversity of opinion necessary for a successful Wiki. If we were to create, say, a German-Marxist Wikipedia, would that be welcomed by the majority of contributors to the German Wiki?
As for the politics of the issue, I don't really care one way or the other. I cooperate well with the folks on the Serbian Wikipedia who don't try to convince me that I'm wrong and they're right. But I really think that you should respect the will of a great majority of the three peoples and not try to force a common identity or language upon us. Proclaiming the many contributors to the three Wikipedias and other ordinary folks "nationalists" because they decided to go their separate ways shows a certain lack of respect or detailed and nuanced knowledge about things. It's not a simple copy/paste/merge operation, as shown in the past 90 years or so. Sorry.
Elephantus (from Croatian Wikipedia)
Before you reply next time, please read the entire e-mail.
Nobody is trying to force anything on anybody.
I said it is my hope that the 3 wikis will DEMOCRATICALLY merge.
That means that if there is a vote, and the majority of Croatians votes against it, then of course Croatian WP won't merge.
But the vast rest of my e-mail you didn't reply to, namely the parts about that you're fooling yourself when you say that you speak a different language from the Serbians, and that it is harmful to Wikipedia because it limits possible number of articles. This is just a suggestion, I don't want to force anything on anyone, but I really think that everybody would be better off here with a single WP where all standards is converted and/or accepted.
Mark
On 10/10/05, elephantus elephantus@net.hr wrote:
Well, Elephantus apparently hasn't been monitoring the growth of the Serbocroatian WP.
The top contributors recently are:
OC Ripper, Dejvid, Myself, Pokrajac, Belirac, anonymous user.
Now, of all these people, the ONLY ONE who is not a native speaker is ME.
[[sh:User:Dejvid]] is also not a native speaker and his main activity was also copy/pasting articles from the other three Wikipedias. So two out of the top three contributors aren't native speakers and what they're doing is basically making an internal fork.
From the standpoint of the Croatian Wikipedia, there are two main
problems about Serbo-Croatian Wiki:
- User confusion. Nontechnical, casual passers-by who stumble
upon Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia and, in many cases, automatically assume that there is no Croatian (or Serbian, for that matter) Wikipedia. I tried to make a partial fix for this by adding a banner to the top of the S-C Main Page pointing people to the other 3 Wikis, but you and Pokrajac removed this.
- Fragmentation of user base. The people who consider their
language to be Serbo-Croatian form a small minority, with political views which are usually at the left end of the political spectrum. By providing these people with their own Wiki you're possibly depriving the three of small, but potentially valuable contributions and a diversity of opinion necessary for a successful Wiki. If we were to create, say, a German-Marxist Wikipedia, would that be welcomed by the majority of contributors to the German Wiki?
As for the politics of the issue, I don't really care one way or the other. I cooperate well with the folks on the Serbian Wikipedia who don't try to convince me that I'm wrong and they're right. But I really think that you should respect the will of a great majority of the three peoples and not try to force a common identity or language upon us. Proclaiming the many contributors to the three Wikipedias and other ordinary folks "nationalists" because they decided to go their separate ways shows a certain lack of respect or detailed and nuanced knowledge about things. It's not a simple copy/paste/merge operation, as shown in the past 90 years or so. Sorry.
Elephantus (from Croatian Wikipedia)
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2005/10/10, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com:
Before you reply next time, please read the entire e-mail.
Nobody is trying to force anything on anybody.
I said it is my hope that the 3 wikis will DEMOCRATICALLY merge.
Still, the situation is now that there are separate wikis AND a merged one. Apparently I am not the only one who thinks that that is a strange and unwanted situation. Either Serbocroatian has to go, or the other three have to go (after moving the articles of course), in my opinion. The democratical thing seems to be to not merge - there seem to be more people interested in the Serbian and Croatian Wikipedias than in the Serbocroatian one.
That means that if there is a vote, and the majority of Croatians votes against it, then of course Croatian WP won't merge.
That's nice, but what will this mean for the Serbocroatian Wikipedia? Will it mean that it will remain as it is, will it be put out of existence or will it become the serbocroatian-except-croatian wikipedia?
But the vast rest of my e-mail you didn't reply to, namely the parts about that you're fooling yourself when you say that you speak a different language from the Serbians, and that it is harmful to Wikipedia because it limits possible number of articles. This is just a suggestion, I don't want to force anything on anyone, but I really think that everybody would be better off here with a single WP where all standards is converted and/or accepted.
I don't know how much different the languages/dialects are. I do know that from both sides people are moving towards separate languages. If we consider languages to be variations with at least a given amount of difference, they are indeed dialects of the same language. But if we consider languages to be dialects with a special formal status, they're different languages.
If, as seems to be the case, the users themselves prefer to go separate ways, there is not much gained by having an extra Wikipedia where you may write in both forms.
-- Andre Engels, andreengels@gmail.com ICQ: 6260644 -- Skype: a_engels
Still, the situation is now that there are separate wikis AND a merged one. Apparently I am not the only one who thinks that that is a strange and unwanted situation. Either Serbocroatian has to go, or the other three have to go (after moving the articles of course), in my opinion. The democratical thing seems to be to not merge - there seem to be more people interested in the Serbian and Croatian Wikipedias than in the Serbocroatian one.
Yeah... the people who agree with you are, lets see, Elephantus, and, Elephantus. Josip said that he thinks they shouldn't be merged, but he doesn't mind sh.wiki's existance.
Now, it seems natural to me that more people are interested in the Serbian and Croatian Wikipedias, after all they are much, much, much bigger.
That's nice, but what will this mean for the Serbocroatian Wikipedia? Will it mean that it will remain as it is, will it be put out of existence or will it become the serbocroatian-except-croatian wikipedia?
It would mean that Bosnian and Serbian would merge into it. Remember, Serbocroatian encompasses 3, not 2, other Wikipedias' "languages". So, unless only 1 votes to merge (which would make it almost pointless), it could still be a better solution than 3 separate Wikis, with 2 instead of 3.
I don't know how much different the languages/dialects are. I do know
Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian have only a handful of differences in vocabulary.
Serbian _usually_ uses the Ekavian standard, and Croatian and Bosnian _always_ use the Ijekavian standard. However, lossless conversion between the two is easily possible.
Now, if the languages have only been diverging since the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, prior to which most people would've thought it outrageous to claim to speak "Serbian" or "Bosnian", that would mean that there are almost no changes. Those changes which do exist since then are partly artificial, as Croatian linguists try to get people to use "authentic Croatian words" which are mostly artificial.
that from both sides people are moving towards separate languages. If
That's actually not really true. It's a very complicated question. Although many Serbs, Bosnians, and Croats will tell you they speak "Serbian", "Bosnian", or "Croatian", most will hesitate if you ask them "Is that a different language than (one of the others)?". Obviously, some nationalists will immediately and proudly respond "yes", but the majority is unsure. So, while they're sure that the language they speak isn't called "Serbocroatian", they're often not so sure as to whether their language is a single language as the other members of "Serbocroatian".
we consider languages to be variations with at least a given amount of difference, they are indeed dialects of the same language. But if we
It seems that's how we're doing it now. Only exceptions are Serbian/Bosnian/Croatian, Malay/Indonesian, and Moldovan/Romanian (though that is partly a division along the boundaries of scripts which cannot lossless conversion).
consider languages to be dialects with a special formal status, they're different languages.
That's definitely not how we're doing it. Some linguists would say that Yiddish is a dialect (or at least a sociolect) of German. Yiddish has no special formal status of any kind; however, we treat it as a separate language.
If, as seems to be the case, the users themselves prefer to go separate ways, there is not much gained by having an extra Wikipedia where you may write in both forms.
Note that so far, the only people who have weighed in are 2 Croatians. No feedback so far from Serbians, Bosnians, Metohijans, or Montenegrins, or any of the other... well, let's just call them "places". And 2 is definitely a small number -- for all you know, the two who have weighed in so far might be the only two opposed out of all Croatian Wikipedians (although that is _extremely_ unlikely statistically). And one out of the two seems to oppose for the reason of differing reguls, which is an issue easily resolved...
Cheers Mark W
Mark Williamson wrote:
Serbian _usually_ uses the Ekavian standard, and Croatian and Bosnian _always_ use the Ijekavian standard. However, lossless conversion between the two is easily possible.
For those who find Mark irritating, and who may tend not to listen to him on those grounds, I would like to say: listen to him on this point. He's right on the factual matter here, as far as I have been able to determine.
Milos has been patiently working to have software put together which will handle this conversion. This provides us a nice easy way forward so that *everyone* can read the *same* information in the way that is most comfortable to them.
This situation is parallel to the situation with Traditional and Simplified Chinese characters. Yes, there are two ways of writing the language. But yes, they are machine translateable, losslessly.
--Jimbo
Andre Engels wrote:
Still, the situation is now that there are separate wikis AND a merged one. Apparently I am not the only one who thinks that that is a strange and unwanted situation. Either Serbocroatian has to go, or the other three have to go (after moving the articles of course), in my opinion. The democratical thing seems to be to not merge - there seem to be more people interested in the Serbian and Croatian Wikipedias than in the Serbocroatian one.
I absolutely agree with Andre that the current situation is undesirable in the extreme. Having three separate wikis *and* a merged one is really not very helpful in the long run.
I visited this region some months ago, and one thing I am happy to report is that all the wikipedians I met there, both Serbian and Croatian, were exactly the same in every essential respect as Wikipedians I have met everywhere.
They are reasonable, they are thoughtful, and they are thinking really hard about this situation. At the present time, it seemed to me that the majority viewed seemed to be best summed up as "It is bad to have all 3, but it is probably necessary for now."
Milos has been working on software tools to allow for full support in *one* Wikipedia of all 4 major ways of writing this language.
I don't know how much different the languages/dialects are. I do know that from both sides people are moving towards separate languages. If we consider languages to be variations with at least a given amount of difference, they are indeed dialects of the same language. But if we consider languages to be dialects with a special formal status, they're different languages.
Opinions about this matter seem to vary a significant extent. Nationalists (and I do not use the term pejoratively here, only as a label of convenience) tend to desire/believe more in separate languages.
But at some point, there is this simple matter of objective fact: when I went with a group of Croations to Serbia, and we had a big friendly happy meetup at Milos' house, everyone just laughed and joked and talked to each other, and they didn't have to use English to do it. :-)
--Jimbo
On 10/16/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
Milos has been working on software tools to allow for full support in *one* Wikipedia of all 4 major ways of writing this language.
Actually, four variants are only for Serbian standards :) There would be more variants if we include Croatian and Bosnian standards and sub-standards. Bosniaks have two more standards (just Latin and Cyrillic) and two more sub-standards (they have Ikavian sub-standard written in both alphabets) and Croats have one more sub-standard (Ikavian, too; written in Latin alphabet only).
(As well as we should have three more Wikipedias in the (far) future: so called "dialects" Chakavian, Kaykavian and Torlakian are language systems with more difference between each other and between Shtokavian dialect (and all standards which are based on Shtokavian dialect) then all standards are different between each other. But, this is completely another story.)
But, we have to finish Serbian version, first. BTW, if some person responsible for WMF/Mediawiki reads this, may (s)he introduce me how can we implement finished work on Serbian Wikipedia; i.e., what is the formal process? We finished the first part of the work and that work may be implemented on sr:.
I have an idea how not to waste three/four times more time on a lot of articles AND how not to hurt anyone's feelings (or feelings of the great majority of Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian Wikipedians). But, one of the important element of this idea is that we need to work a lot on software and communication before we start to talk about "the final solution".
Milos Rancic wrote:
On 10/16/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
Milos has been working on software tools to allow for full support in *one* Wikipedia of all 4 major ways of writing this language.
Actually, four variants are only for Serbian standards :) There would be more variants if we include Croatian and Bosnian standards and sub-standards. Bosniaks have two more standards (just Latin and Cyrillic) and two more sub-standards (they have Ikavian sub-standard written in both alphabets) and Croats have one more sub-standard (Ikavian, too; written in Latin alphabet only).
(As well as we should have three more Wikipedias in the (far) future: so called "dialects" Chakavian, Kaykavian and Torlakian are language systems with more difference between each other and between Shtokavian dialect (and all standards which are based on Shtokavian dialect) then all standards are different between each other. But, this is completely another story.)
Sounds like some people work very hard at keeping things sub-standard.
Ec
elephantus wrote:
But I really think that you should respect the will of a great majority of the three peoples and not try to force a common identity or language upon us.
I do think we should try to respect the will of a great majority of the three peoples, but my sense of it is that the great majority of people do not think that it is wise that we have three separate wikipedia editions. The language is written in different ways, but by any rational standard, it is the same language, it is mutually understandable with some words pronounced differently.
I strongly support Milos in his efforts to provide a technical solution to the question of different ways of writing.
Proclaiming the many contributors to the three Wikipedias and other ordinary folks "nationalists" because they decided to go their separate ways shows a certain lack of respect or detailed and nuanced knowledge about things.
It is indeed unfair to call anyone "nationalists" for such a flimsy reason. But it is also worth nothing that no one "decided to go their separate ways". The reason we have Serbian and Croatian and Bosnia(n/k) Wikipedias is simple historical accident and unfortunate blind following of the ISO language codes, which we had hoped would give us good guidance.
--Jimbo
On Sun, Oct 16, 2005 at 02:35:42PM +0200, Jimmy Wales wrote:
I do think we should try to respect the will of a great majority of the three peoples, but my sense of it is that the great majority of people do not think that it is wise that we have three separate wikipedia editions.
Milos has previously stated something that cannot be stressed enough: all attempts which try to unify Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian would be treated as an attack by all communities (and not only by Wikipedian communities). That is, I do not believe your impression is correct.
I think the remedy to this is to not attempt to unify Croatian, Bosbian, and Serbian, but _only_ their Wikipedias.
Thus, there would still be separate subdomains for bs.wiki, sr.wiki, and hr.wiki, and even separate mainpages, but they would all use the same database and bulk of articles.
Mark
On 04/11/05, Josip Rodin joy@srce.hr wrote:
On Sun, Oct 16, 2005 at 02:35:42PM +0200, Jimmy Wales wrote:
I do think we should try to respect the will of a great majority of the three peoples, but my sense of it is that the great majority of people do not think that it is wise that we have three separate wikipedia editions.
Milos has previously stated something that cannot be stressed enough: all attempts which try to unify Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian would be treated as an attack by all communities (and not only by Wikipedian communities). That is, I do not believe your impression is correct.
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Josip Rodin wrote:
On Sun, Oct 16, 2005 at 02:35:42PM +0200, Jimmy Wales wrote:
I do think we should try to respect the will of a great majority of the three peoples, but my sense of it is that the great majority of people do not think that it is wise that we have three separate wikipedia editions.
Milos has previously stated something that cannot be stressed enough: all attempts which try to unify Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian would be treated as an attack by all communities (and not only by Wikipedian communities). That is, I do not believe your impression is correct.
I sounds to me as though you oppose not only the implimentation of a single sh:wikipedia, but anything that might make it easy for anyone who would like to work at one.
Ec
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