I personally don't consider it appropriate, but it's very confusing. Mo.wiki already exists and is being used for Cyrillic already, but Ronline wants the Cyrillic content to either be moved to mo-cyr:, or have mo: in both alphabets. This situation is different from Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian for one reason especially. Linguists and scientists from these countries (Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia) like to make all sorts of claims about the distinctness of their respective languages, while in Moldova, the official Academy of Science declares on its website even that Moldovan and Romanian are identical, and a man who published a "Romanian-Moldovan dictionary" was mocked on national television. What I mean is, only 30% of Moldovans claim they speak the "Moldovan language", and that is possibly a question of naming - even less would tell you "Moldovan" and "Romanian" are different languages. What you say about not having Cyrillic content at ro: is totally missing my point there. I personally believe that Romanian and Moldovan are close enough that in most pages on Wikipedia, there would only be differences in spelling with a few minor differences in terminology (Moldovan also has a tendency to use less French and Italian words). Most people who speak Moldovan or Romanian agree that they are identical. I am claiming a double standard on the part of some main anti-Cyrillic people such as Danutz, who say "Moldovan and Romanian are the same thing. All Moldovans speak Romanian. There is no such language as Moldovan. Anybody who says they speak Moldovan must be a communist", then "Indeed 10% of speakers of "Moldovan" use Cyrillic" and then "Nobody who speaks Romanian uses Cyrillic". If Moldovan _is_ Romanian, then some speakers of Romanian use Cyrillic. And it should be emphasised that this is not merely a question of nationality - plenty of Moldovans (the majority, in fact) claim to speak "Romanian". This includes the majority of users of the Cyrillic script, who also call it "Romanian" (probably a little less than half of Cyrillic users - I don't mean "enthusiasts" who want to restore a dead script, I mean people who learnt this as their first alphabet in school, and still prefer to use it today and often do - call it "Moldovan"). This means that some people who visit a "Romanian Wikipedia" might prefer to read content in Cyrillic - after all, 1% of all speakers of Romanian/Moldavian combined prefer the Cyrillic script to the Roman script - and I believe that is significant enough that we should provide content for them. So the way I see it is: It is preferable that ro.wiki is bi-scriptal, but of course this will not happen in a million years because of such contradictory beliefs as illustrated above (it should be noted that Ronline believes - at least it would seem he does - that Romanian and Moldovan are truly separate languages), so we can just stick to the status quo which is changing the letter infront to an "m" if you want Cyrillic, and if you end up at mo: wanting Latin content, you click in to get it immediately. I do not appreciate the involvement of Ronline, Danutz, and other ro.wikipedians in what I see as a relatively petty issue. As you can see from usage statistics, mo.wiki gets less than 100 visits a year, and I can tell you that most of those are from me and Vertaler and Danutz and Ronline and devs and stewards and the like. And, all those complaining are Romanian citizens who mainly use ro.wiki and claim their mother tongue as "Romanian", and it is my guess that most have never been to Moldova and that most have seen only a couple of texts in their lives spelled in a Moldovan fashion. These people aren't so upset about a language they claim to use or have as their mother tongue or even a language which has some attachment to them at all, they are interfering on a nationalist basis in an entirely separate Wikipedia. So far the only reaction from Moldovans on mo: has been tiny but it has been supportive and positive. Many Serbians (though certainly not all) believe Bosnian is a dialect of Serbian or is identical, but there is no interference with Serbians complaining about the Bosnian Wikipedia or vice-versa, and Serbian is bi-scriptal even though Latin is mostly used for "Montenegrin" which is in a similar situation to Moldovan (except it isn't officially recognised as a separate language). To be fair Ronline does not focus on the fact that mo.wiki is currently separate from ro.wiki, but this seems to be a main focus for most of the other people interested. Another question that may arise is: Is Romanian spelling convertable by computer to Moldovan spelling and vice-versa? The answer is yes. But, is Latin alphabet of this language convertable to Cyrillic alphabet for this language by computer? No, because there are not exact correspondences. "ia" can sometimes be "i-ya" in Cyrillic and other times "i-a" (not using actual Cyrillic letters, just a transcription), "iu" can be "i-yu", "i-u", "`-yu", and most importantly there are 3 possible conversions in Cyrillic for the Latin "i". Also, in some words (almost all foreign), the "g" sound in "gi" or "ge" can be transliterated as a "zh" with a breve over it, and it others (both foreign and non-foreign) it is written without due to an actual difference in pronunciation. There are however a system of complex situational rules that can cover perhaps 80% of the ambiguities, but these might require computer parsing, needing to know how a word is actually pronounced, and for complete accuracy you would need a lexicon of "exceptions". I only talk about the computer conversion because the question has arisen in the past over script diffferences (Kurdish, Serbian). Mark On 4/13/05, Wouter Steenbeek <musiqolog(a)hotmail.com> wrote:

Hi Milos, Thanks for your message. The problem is indeed similar but there is an added problem. Imagine for a moment that Serbian was only written in Cyrillic, but that there was another language, let's call it "Naibres", which was basically identical to Serbian except for political purposes. Now, Naibres is officially written in the Cyrillic alphabet, but 10% of Naibres users use the Latin alphabet. Now, with a Serbian Wikipedia already existing and being relatively large, would users wanting to add Latin-script content (in this hypothetical case, not in the real world) be allowed to add it to the Serbian Wikipedia since no "Serbian" speakers would use the alphabet, or should a separate Wikipedia be created for Naibres? And if a separate Wikipedia were created for Naibres, should it only be written in Latin because any Cyrillic content would be a duplication of the Serbian content? I know the hypothetical is confusing, but if you can work your mind around it that is basically the situation on the ground with Romanian and Moldovan. ro.wiki has over 11000 articles, but there is no willingness to accept content in the Cyrillic alphabet, which is fine. So people started having content in both scripts at mo:, but the very small community at mo: (two or three people) has decided to redirect all Latin-script pages to ro.wikipedia because the text is basically identical and we don't want to create a content fork. Ronline believes we should move Cyrillic pages to a separate subdomain since Cyrillic is not the official or majority script of "Moldovan language", but I believe that, since we already have two separate Wikipedias, we can use ro.wiki for /all/ Latin-script content, and mo.wiki for /all/ Cyrillic-script content, as long as there is a prominently-placed link on the mo.wiki mainpage (see http://mo.wikipedia.org , where it says "click aici" is the link) Mark On 4/14/05, Milos Rancic <millosh(a)gmail.com> wrote:

We had the similar situation with Serbo-Croatian standard language (divided into Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian standard). We solved that with separation of Wikipedias. However, I think that Wikipedias are (standard) language-based, not national-based (in general, I am sure that we can find some national-based Wikipedia). So, solution is (as I see) very simple: 1. Moldavians who think that their language is Romanian should write into Romanian Wikipedia (only in Latin alphabet). 2. Moldavians who think that their language is Moldavian should write into Moldavian Wikipedia. Also, those Moldavians can implement Chinese (and future Serbian) solution for them: they will have tabs (where "edit", "dicsussion" and "history" tabs are) where they can choose script. Also, they would have possibility to choose their interface (Cyrillic or Latin). Also, note that content on Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian Wikipedia can be treated as "duplicated content". On 4/14/05, Mark Williamson <node.ue(a)gmail.com> wrote:

And I would also like to add the same for the Indonesian/Malaysian Wikipedias. I think it's sad that these nearly-identical languages are spreading their resources thin over multiple projects based more on nationality than actual linguistic differences. Mark On 4/14/05, Mark Williamson <node.ue(a)gmail.com> wrote:

By accident I sent an e-mail to Node only which was intended for the mail list. Its content was that the Balkan wars ended to recently to make a common Serbocroatian tenable. Wouter _________________________________________________________________ Spreek vrienden en familie met MSN Messenger http://messenger.msn.nl/