On 4/14/05, Wikipedia Romania (Ronline) rowikipedia@yahoo.com wrote:

Mark, you said: "But I think that the majority of users of mo.wikipedia will, no matter what, always be primarily users of Cyrillic, and I think that it should be dominant there until such time as there are more Moldovan users there who use Latin, if that is ever the case."

I think that is not at all right. I mean, Cyrillic is a minority script in _all_ circumstances. Only 10% of speakers of Moldo-Romanian in Moldova use it, and only around 33% of people who say they speak Moldovan use it. So those who say they speak Moldovan, will be looking actually mostly for Latin content, especially since many of the Cyrillic speakers are also used to Latin content because that's the script they use in public institutions, at work, etc.

Yes, but the thing is, most of the Moldovans who claim to speak "Moldovan" only see it as an issue of naming of the same language. It is a nationalistic matter - they don't want to call their mother tongue after a foreign country. But the vast majority of these people already go to "Romanian" websites, check out "Romanian" books from the library, have told at least one person that they speak "Romanian", and don't deny that the languages are almost exactly the same.

As I have noted before, I think the use of the name "Romanian" all over ro.wikipedia is very biased and cruel. 1 million people speak Moldovan. That is 1/28th of the population. A minority, yes, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be represented. It is even plastered all over your Wikipedia that Romanian is spoken in Moldova, that it is official in Moldova, etc, all calling it "Moldovan", and nearly all people from Moldova are placed in dual categories - one for "Moldovan Poets" and another for "Romanian Poets" - and I hope you realise that this alienates an entire nation (with the exception of Romanian reunificationists - note that, in addition to patriots and nationalists, it also alienates moderates who at least feel they are "Moldovan" but not "Romanian"). And 1/28th is not as small a minority as 1/100 (the ratio of Romanian/Moldovan speakers who use Cyrillic).

I don't see mo: as the Moldovan Wikipedia. I see it as the Moldovan Cyrillic Wikipedia, which is the only script used extensively there because the Moldovan Latin Wikipedia, written in the official, majority script, is located at the exact same location as the Romanian Latin Wikipedia - and for good reason.

Even very few of those 33% of "Moldovan" speakers who use Cyrillic would deny that Romanian and Moldovan are basically one language, although the percentage would be higher than among other "Moldovan" speakers because anti-Romanian feeling is greater among Cyrillic users.

Also, "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"

I've kept on saying that this is a practical solution, but it isn't really a correct solution - While the interesting context of the Moldo-Romanian language would state that a mo.wiki in Cyrillic only would be the most practical solution, it would basically be very biased, despite the prominent link. The prominent link is just a redirect, the interface would still be in Cyrillic, the interwiki links would still go to Cyrillic articles. We can't nominate a Wikipedia for Cyrillic content, even though the case of Moldo-Romanian would say that perhaps logically it is a way to go, simply because we can't nominate a language subdomain for a certain script when that script is a minority script.

So what if it is "correct"? So far, nobody who claims to speak "Moldovan" as their mother tongue has challenged it. All of the visitors this year, to the best of my knowledge, are Cyrillic users or from ro.wikipedia. You and your ro.wikipedian goon squad may care, but so far nobody else has. My guess is that the first time an actual "Moldovan" speaker who wants to view content in the Roman alphabet visits mo.wikipedia, they won't give a second thought to it and will click the link as instructed. This remains to be seen, so I still think we should wait to see if what you are saying will happen actually ever does happen, and if it does, we can deal with the problem then.

That's what needs to be understood here - Cyrillic is a minority script in all cases - for Moldo-Romanian speakers worldwide, for Moldo-Romanian speakers in Moldova and for Moldovan speakers in Moldova. So we need content to first cater for the majority, which could be either at mo.wiki or ro.wiki, but I think ro.wiki would be the more practical solution, unless some Moldovans would actually have a problem with being redirected to a Romanian Wikipedia, which they might have. We need to hear their side of the story too, but there are as of yet barely any Moldovan Latin users. There should be a very prominent link on the mo.wiki page redirecting Cyrillic users to their subdomain. Interwiki links would then go to mo-cyr: and be put in the form of "Moldoveanească (Chirilic)" in the Cyrillic alphabet.

Why not "Moldoveneasca" in the Cyrillic alphabet? Only a dunce would think, without some prior experience, that a link to "Moldoveneasca", /in the Cyrillic alphabet/, would get them to non-Cyrillic content. You may counter that the same is true vice-versa - but it was not requested by the mo.wiki community that interwiki links read "Moldoveana" in the Roman alphabet.

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Do you Yahoo!?

Sort of - I have a Y!IM account which I rarely use anymore, and I have a couple of different e-mail addresses there. However, to be fair, I go to the Taiwanese Yahoo! site more often than the English, and when I do it's for convenience.

Yahoo! Small Business - Try our new resources site! http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/resources/

No thanks, I don't own or work for a small business.

Mark