Hi, I have just joined this mailing list so excuse me if I'm posting in the wrong place by not "continuing" the thread about the disputes regarding the Romanian and Moldovan Wikipedias.

I think, as Mark (Node) highlighted, people are arguing two separate issues here which should not be combined. One is whether Moldovan or Romanian is the same language, the other is over what to use mo.wiki for. Now the first issue could be argued for forever, and that's not really the focus of the discussion.

The actual dispute is due to what to use mo.wiki for. I think the fundamental idea lies in this: Mark wants to use mo.wiki for Cyrillic only, with an explanation redirecting people to Latin content on the Main Page. I think the logic behind this is that since we already have mo.wiki, and it's no use putting up Latin content because it would be nearly identical to the ro.wiki content, we should use mo.wiki for Cyrillic. I believe that this is a practical reason, and I would agree that this is the "easiest" solution because it would require simply maintaining the status quo.

My proposal has been that we actually make the mo.wiki a disambiguation Wikipedia, sort of like the Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia, not in the sense that theMoldovan issue is similar to Serbo-Croatian issue, but just technically. There would be two columns there, one redirecting users to a Moldovan Cyrillic subdomain the other to ro.wiki. Now, the subdomain should be mo-cyr not ro-cyr simply because out of the people who write Moldovan-Romanian in Cyrillic, most of them will say they speak Moldovan, and nearly all of them live in Moldova. So it's only correct to call that language Moldovan and set up the subdomain. The reason why I think my proposal would work best is because mo.wiki cannote be Cyrillic-only, even with a Latin script redirect, simply because Cyrillic is the minority script. We should provide content for that minority, but not as if they were the majority. Those who want Moldovan in Latin script, which is the majority of speakers, even who say they speak Moldovan not Romanian, can go to ro.wiki. If there is actually demand, then perhaps we could form a Moldovan Wikipedia in Latin script, even though practically that would be a tad pointless due to the near-identicality of Ro-Latin and Mo-Latin.

Just to clear something up here about language separation - I believe that Romanian and Moldovan are not separate languages lingusitically. However, I do believe that we can regard them as separate languages politically. The definition of a language is not only scientific, or purely linguistic, but rather has a human/political element to it. Because the Moldovan government constitutionally recognises "Moldovan" as their language, then Wikipedia should recognise the existence of the

So when Mark said, "it should be noted that Ronline believes - at least it would seem he does - that Romanian and Moldovan are truly separate languages", he was half-right. I mean, I don't believe they're separate languages, but I'm not saying that we shouldn't regard them as such. Basically, I'm not going to argue any side in that issue of whether ro and mo are separate because that's not really the key to the so-called conflict.

Now, about meddling into the affairs of other Wikipedias. Mark made a very valid point about Romanian users involving themselves in Moldovan affairs. What I'd like to point out is that our involvement in the Moldovan issue is not so much in our role as ro.wiki contributors but rather as members of the broader Wikimedia community. We're involving ourselves because we're close to Moldova, our language is the same, or at least very similar, and the Romanian wiki communities and Moldovan communities have a considerable degree of overlap. It's true though that I haven't visited Moldova and that perhaps we're not all that knowledgeable on Moldovan affairs, but in any case we're much closer to them and therefore know a lot more about them than probably any other nation in the world (don't want to sound arrogant here, but Moldova's "closest" country in Romania, not politically but culturally, linguistically, etc).

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