I don't think the issue here is the legitimacy of the Moldovan Wikipedia, but rather the integrity of the vote.

Secretlondon's point was that she thought it was very possible that the Moldovan Wikipedia had been "invaded" by Romanian Wikipedians.

And, that is largely true.

9 people voted on Ronline's proposal and subsequent additions by others.

In my opinion, only 3 out of those 9 can be considered legitimate members of the Moldovan Wikipedia community -- myself, Ronline, and Dmitriid. The reason for this is that these three people have made extensive contributions, including writing new content, fixing old content, etc.

The rest, have either 1) edited only on talkpages or 2) edited on talkpages only except for two or three edits to the main namespace, where they just fixed a number or made a link, because we were considering requiring a certain number of edits for being able to vote.

That 9 is only including the people who met the pre-established criteria for voting. There were actually 12 people who voted.

Out of those 12 people, only 3 of them had made any significant contributions to the Moldovan Wikipedia. The rest were bullies from the Romanian Wikipedia.

HOWEVER, let me emphasise again that I don't think final result of the vote would've been different, had only these 3 people been allowed to vote. Perhaps the margin by which certain proposals passed would've been different, but I don't believe the final result would've been.

Having said that, there has since been the addition of a new, very active user on the Moldovan Wikipedia, Gabix. I think that if only him and these 3 other people were allowed to vote, the results might be tipped the other direction -- if I thought there was a chance, I'd vote against the parenthetical "chirilica" for reasons upon which I've already expounded.

Cheers Mark

On 23/08/05, Wikipedia Romania (Ronline) rowikipedia@yahoo.com wrote:

Hi.

I think we shouldn't turn this into a debate about the legitimacy of the Moldovan Wikipedia and the perceptions of Romanian contributors on the Wikimedia network.

What is important is that a proposal was approved, fairly, by the majority of Moldovan Wikipedia users which explicitly states, among other things, that the interwiki descriptor should be changed. This change is basically from "Moldovan" to "Moldovan (Cyrillic)".

Hence, I see no reason how that ties into Moldovan not being a language or something like that. The reason behind the change was to affirm the fact that the Moldovan Wikipedia only really contains content in Cyrillic script, and that Cyrillic script is neither the only, nor the majority script in use. Unfortunately, this mailing list doesn't support Unicode it seems, so the characters couldn't be displayed.

See http://mo.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ronline/Propunere to see how the change should be. I will file a report at bugzilla about this - it seems this is the most efficient way to change interwiki descriptors.

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