The Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia was reopened in June after a request from a single user of the Serbian Wikipedia - [[sr:User:Покрајац|Pokrajac]]. This was not announced beforehand in any way on the three Wikipedias that are most affected by this issue – Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian, there was no public discussion or a vote. The idea was supported here by people who weren't part of the growing communities of the three Wikipedias.
The "phenomenal growth" (1,019 articles) of the Serbo-Croatian is mostly a result of people (some of them with little or no knowledge of the three languages) copy-pasting articles from Serbian (converting those to Latin alphabet), Croatian or Bosnian Wikipedias. The sole exception has been an anonymous user 213.202.x.x who wrote several longer articles in almost perfect Croatian and posted them to the Serbo-Croatian wiki.
My question is this: Why aren't Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian Wikipedias provided the same treatment as e.g. Danish and Bokmal (Norwegian) which are also mutually intelligible in the written form? There is no common Dano-Bokmal Wikipedia with well-wishing but mostly misguided non-native- speakers copying articles to it.
Serbo-Croatian has been dead as a political collection of standard languages for 15 years now (30 years in Croatia), it is slowly disappearing, except as a historical footnote, even in international linguistic circles because the name itself is insulting to most Bosniaks and Croats and not used by most Serbs (who prefer the term Serbian).
I'd like to propose a relocking of this Wikipedia or at least a name change (Serbian - Latin, as a temporary bridge to the Latin conversion system now being tested for the Serbian Wikipedia).
Elephantus (from Croatian Wikipedia, 10.042 articles and growing!) :-)
Hi Elephantus!
Let me just try to answer a few of your points here:
The Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia was reopened in June after a request from a single user of the Serbian Wikipedia -
[[sr:User:Покрајац|Pokrajac]].
This was not announced beforehand in any way on the three Wikipedias that are most affected by this issue Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian, there was no public discussion or a vote. The idea was supported here by people who weren't part of the growing communities of the three Wikipedias.
Generally speaking, only opening all-new Wikipedias requires public discussion, prior announcement, voting or the like. Reopening a previously locked wiki is not a comparable process. Locking a wiki is only a temporary measure because of some specific reason, e. g. vandalism and it can be upheld only as long as that reason persists to exist. SH had been locked because of inactivity. As soon as there were people willing to edit it there was no alternative but to unlock it.
The "phenomenal growth" (1,019 articles) of the Serbo-Croatian is mostly a result of people (some of them with little or no knowledge of the three languages) copy-pasting articles from Serbian (converting those to Latin alphabet), Croatian or Bosnian Wikipedias.
I wasn't aware that most of the editing at SH is done by non-native speakers. Hmm ... you have any idea were they come from? But there is one fact that one must admit: the Wikipedia is active now, no matter where that activity comes from.
My question is this: Why aren't Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian Wikipedias provided the same treatment as e.g. Danish and Bokmal (Norwegian) which are also mutually intelligible in the written form? There is no common Dano-Bokmal Wikipedia with well-wishing but mostly misguided non-native- speakers copying articles to it.
Well, this type of comparison is always a little bold. But I'm getting your point. I guess the main reason is because a "Dano-Bokmal" WP was never requested by anyone. Interestingly though, there seems to be some kind of common Scandinavian project going on.
Serbo-Croatian has been dead as a political collection of standard languages for 15 years now (30 years in Croatia), it is slowly disappearing, except as a historical footnote
I must admit I'm not competent to evaluate the current situation of Serbo-Croatian and it's future is even harder to predict. All I can see is that there seems to be some kind of interest in it here at WP (actually, even more than in 130 other languages).
I'd like to propose a relocking of this Wikipedia
I am well aware that the whole situation is not perfectly ideal yet. But all things considered, I think the current solution is a fairly just and neutral one. There is a minority that wishes to write in Serbo-Croatian. Even if you don't like their standpoint, why exclude them? "Live and let live!"
or at least a name change (Serbian - Latin, as a temporary bridge to the Latin conversion system now being tested for the Serbian Wikipedia).
As a total outsider I could imagine that naming it "Serbian-Latin" would not really be helpful because that name makes reference to one nation and one ethnicity exclusively. "Yugoslav(ian)" has just crossed my mind - would that be an option?
Best regards,
Arbeo
P.S.: My congratulations for your 10,000th article at hr!
___________________________________________________________ Gesendet von Yahoo! Mail - Jetzt mit 1GB Speicher kostenlos - Hier anmelden: http://mail.yahoo.de
I am well aware that the whole situation is not perfectly ideal yet. But all things considered, I think the current solution is a fairly just and neutral one. There is a minority that wishes to write in Serbo-Croatian. Even if you don't like their standpoint, why exclude them? "Live and let live!"
I wish this attitude was held in relation to more languages like Cantonese etc.
Waerth/Walter
Arbeo M pravi:
As a total outsider I could imagine that naming it "Serbian-Latin" would not really be helpful because that name makes reference to one nation and one ethnicity exclusively. "Yugoslav(ian)" has just crossed my mind - would that be an option?
No, former Yugoslavia (the SFRY, that is) had three official languages: Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian and Macedonian.
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.
Now, if anybody wants to accuse me of spelling and grammatical errors, there are a number of other people they should blame first: 1) The people who wrote the original article, since I have only been copying articles from other Wikipedias; 2) The people who wrote the Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian spellcheckers for MS Word since I often use them to make sure the source-article has no glaring errors.
Now, perhaps you're referring to the fact that the majority of the articles I copy are using Ekavski, which is not used in Croatia. Well, as a form of Serbocroatian, it would hardly be considered incorrect. To be fair, some of the articles I make use Ijekavski, and a couple dozen use a mix of the two. Terms which are obviously split between Serbia and Croatia, like Spanija/Spanjolska (spain), or Jevreju/Hebreju (jewish person), I try to be careful with as well.
As regards your wish to lock the Serbocroatian WP:
According to you, Serbocroatian was an artificial political construct. That is true to a certain extent, but it is undeniable that Stokavian dialects of Croatian, and all dialects of Bosnian and Serbian are all over 99% mutually intelligible when spoken, but especially when written.
These are the only "languages" for which that is the case, with the exception of Moldovan and Romanian, and Dari and Farsi (The Moldovan WP redirects users wanting content in Latin alphabet to the Romanian WP, the Farsi WP includes Dari as well).
I recall something about a Croatian law requiring all Serbian movies to be subtitled (or vice-versa?). Rather than reacting with nationalistic pride when seeing these subtitles for a language that is basically identical to their own, moviegoers generally laughed at the attempts of "translation".
Now, if the majority of Croatian WPdians do not want a united Wikipedia, that's fine. I think it should be everybody's choice. If you want to work at the Croatian WP and keep pretending that your language is somehow extremely differentiated from Serbian and Bosnian (and the emerging Montenegrin), I have no problem with that, although I think it is counter-constructive.
Already, there are Croatians at the SH.wiki, I think...
Now, perhaps a good example is Macedonian.
Although Macedonian (FYROM, that is, just so we don't offend any Greeks) is very similar to Serbo-Croatian, and it would take little effort to make a unified language, since Macedonian is a bit further from Serbocroatian, I don't hold a hope of Macedonian WP being united to Serbocroatian WP.
With Croatian, it seems that people try hard to make it a different language from Serbian, but it isn't really except in a sociolinguistic sense (and even then, not all Croatians perpetuate the idea of a separate Croatian language). Macedonian, on the other hand, has truly different words and spellings, rather than artificial divisions created by linguists for political purposes.
Mark
On 09/10/05, Arbeo M arbeo_m@yahoo.de wrote:
Hi Elephantus!
Let me just try to answer a few of your points here:
The Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia was reopened in June after a request from a single user of the Serbian Wikipedia -
[[sr:User:Покрајац|Pokrajac]].
This was not announced beforehand in any way on the three Wikipedias that are most affected by this issue – Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian, there was no public discussion or a vote. The idea was supported here by people who weren't part of the growing communities of the three Wikipedias.
Generally speaking, only opening all-new Wikipedias requires public discussion, prior announcement, voting or the like. Reopening a previously locked wiki is not a comparable process. Locking a wiki is only a temporary measure because of some specific reason, e. g. vandalism and it can be upheld only as long as that reason persists to exist. SH had been locked because of inactivity. As soon as there were people willing to edit it there was no alternative but to unlock it.
The "phenomenal growth" (1,019 articles) of the Serbo-Croatian is mostly a result of people (some of them with little or no knowledge of the three languages) copy-pasting articles from Serbian (converting those to Latin alphabet), Croatian or Bosnian Wikipedias.
I wasn't aware that most of the editing at SH is done by non-native speakers. Hmm ... you have any idea were they come from? But there is one fact that one must admit: the Wikipedia is active now, no matter where that activity comes from.
My question is this: Why aren't Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian Wikipedias provided the same treatment as e.g. Danish and Bokmal (Norwegian) which are also mutually intelligible in the written form? There is no common Dano-Bokmal Wikipedia with well-wishing but mostly misguided non-native- speakers copying articles to it.
Well, this type of comparison is always a little bold. But I'm getting your point. I guess the main reason is because a "Dano-Bokmal" WP was never requested by anyone. Interestingly though, there seems to be some kind of common Scandinavian project going on.
Serbo-Croatian has been dead as a political collection of standard languages for 15 years now (30 years in Croatia), it is slowly disappearing, except as a historical footnote
I must admit I'm not competent to evaluate the current situation of Serbo-Croatian and it's future is even harder to predict. All I can see is that there seems to be some kind of interest in it here at WP (actually, even more than in 130 other languages).
I'd like to propose a relocking of this Wikipedia
I am well aware that the whole situation is not perfectly ideal yet. But all things considered, I think the current solution is a fairly just and neutral one. There is a minority that wishes to write in Serbo-Croatian. Even if you don't like their standpoint, why exclude them? "Live and let live!"
or at least a name change (Serbian - Latin, as a temporary bridge to the Latin conversion system now being tested for the Serbian Wikipedia).
As a total outsider I could imagine that naming it "Serbian-Latin" would not really be helpful because that name makes reference to one nation and one ethnicity exclusively. "Yugoslav(ian)" has just crossed my mind - would that be an option?
Best regards,
Arbeo
P.S.: My congratulations for your 10,000th article at hr!
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Ahh, and I'd like to add a little bit of advice for Elephantus:
Rather than letting politics blind you, why not try to look at things from the point of view of "What will be best for the Wikipedia in my language?". I think that the answer to this, is a merger of these 3 Wikipedias, because it will result in a much larger workforce and much more power and capability.
Currently, Croatian WP has just over 10000 articles, Serbian WP has just over 14000 articles, and Bosnian WP has almost 5000 articles. Now, imagine, if all people from all 3 Wikipedias had been working together from the start, maybe we'd have 30000 articles in a unified Serbocroatian WP already.
Mark
On 09/10/05, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com 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.
Now, if anybody wants to accuse me of spelling and grammatical errors, there are a number of other people they should blame first: 1) The people who wrote the original article, since I have only been copying articles from other Wikipedias; 2) The people who wrote the Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian spellcheckers for MS Word since I often use them to make sure the source-article has no glaring errors.
Now, perhaps you're referring to the fact that the majority of the articles I copy are using Ekavski, which is not used in Croatia. Well, as a form of Serbocroatian, it would hardly be considered incorrect. To be fair, some of the articles I make use Ijekavski, and a couple dozen use a mix of the two. Terms which are obviously split between Serbia and Croatia, like Spanija/Spanjolska (spain), or Jevreju/Hebreju (jewish person), I try to be careful with as well.
As regards your wish to lock the Serbocroatian WP:
According to you, Serbocroatian was an artificial political construct. That is true to a certain extent, but it is undeniable that Stokavian dialects of Croatian, and all dialects of Bosnian and Serbian are all over 99% mutually intelligible when spoken, but especially when written.
These are the only "languages" for which that is the case, with the exception of Moldovan and Romanian, and Dari and Farsi (The Moldovan WP redirects users wanting content in Latin alphabet to the Romanian WP, the Farsi WP includes Dari as well).
I recall something about a Croatian law requiring all Serbian movies to be subtitled (or vice-versa?). Rather than reacting with nationalistic pride when seeing these subtitles for a language that is basically identical to their own, moviegoers generally laughed at the attempts of "translation".
Now, if the majority of Croatian WPdians do not want a united Wikipedia, that's fine. I think it should be everybody's choice. If you want to work at the Croatian WP and keep pretending that your language is somehow extremely differentiated from Serbian and Bosnian (and the emerging Montenegrin), I have no problem with that, although I think it is counter-constructive.
Already, there are Croatians at the SH.wiki, I think...
Now, perhaps a good example is Macedonian.
Although Macedonian (FYROM, that is, just so we don't offend any Greeks) is very similar to Serbo-Croatian, and it would take little effort to make a unified language, since Macedonian is a bit further from Serbocroatian, I don't hold a hope of Macedonian WP being united to Serbocroatian WP.
With Croatian, it seems that people try hard to make it a different language from Serbian, but it isn't really except in a sociolinguistic sense (and even then, not all Croatians perpetuate the idea of a separate Croatian language). Macedonian, on the other hand, has truly different words and spellings, rather than artificial divisions created by linguists for political purposes.
Mark
On 09/10/05, Arbeo M arbeo_m@yahoo.de wrote:
Hi Elephantus!
Let me just try to answer a few of your points here:
The Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia was reopened in June after a request from a single user of the Serbian Wikipedia -
[[sr:User:Покрајац|Pokrajac]].
This was not announced beforehand in any way on the three Wikipedias that are most affected by this issue – Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian, there was no public discussion or a vote. The idea was supported here by people who weren't part of the growing communities of the three Wikipedias.
Generally speaking, only opening all-new Wikipedias requires public discussion, prior announcement, voting or the like. Reopening a previously locked wiki is not a comparable process. Locking a wiki is only a temporary measure because of some specific reason, e. g. vandalism and it can be upheld only as long as that reason persists to exist. SH had been locked because of inactivity. As soon as there were people willing to edit it there was no alternative but to unlock it.
The "phenomenal growth" (1,019 articles) of the Serbo-Croatian is mostly a result of people (some of them with little or no knowledge of the three languages) copy-pasting articles from Serbian (converting those to Latin alphabet), Croatian or Bosnian Wikipedias.
I wasn't aware that most of the editing at SH is done by non-native speakers. Hmm ... you have any idea were they come from? But there is one fact that one must admit: the Wikipedia is active now, no matter where that activity comes from.
My question is this: Why aren't Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian Wikipedias provided the same treatment as e.g. Danish and Bokmal (Norwegian) which are also mutually intelligible in the written form? There is no common Dano-Bokmal Wikipedia with well-wishing but mostly misguided non-native- speakers copying articles to it.
Well, this type of comparison is always a little bold. But I'm getting your point. I guess the main reason is because a "Dano-Bokmal" WP was never requested by anyone. Interestingly though, there seems to be some kind of common Scandinavian project going on.
Serbo-Croatian has been dead as a political collection of standard languages for 15 years now (30 years in Croatia), it is slowly disappearing, except as a historical footnote
I must admit I'm not competent to evaluate the current situation of Serbo-Croatian and it's future is even harder to predict. All I can see is that there seems to be some kind of interest in it here at WP (actually, even more than in 130 other languages).
I'd like to propose a relocking of this Wikipedia
I am well aware that the whole situation is not perfectly ideal yet. But all things considered, I think the current solution is a fairly just and neutral one. There is a minority that wishes to write in Serbo-Croatian. Even if you don't like their standpoint, why exclude them? "Live and let live!"
or at least a name change (Serbian - Latin, as a temporary bridge to the Latin conversion system now being tested for the Serbian Wikipedia).
As a total outsider I could imagine that naming it "Serbian-Latin" would not really be helpful because that name makes reference to one nation and one ethnicity exclusively. "Yugoslav(ian)" has just crossed my mind - would that be an option?
Best regards,
Arbeo
P.S.: My congratulations for your 10,000th article at hr!
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(Sorry to send 3 messages in rapid succession, but I have something I'd like to add, again).
I think the same goes for Indonesian and Malay, which are quite obviously the same language. Currently, both the Malay and the Indonesian WPs are quite large. Imagine, Indonesians, Malaysians, Singaporeans, how much larger it could be if these two were merged?
As you can find out on the English WP, differences between Malay and Indonesian are comparable to differences between US and UK English: some minor terminological differences, and a few minor orthographic differences, none of which prevents them from being over 99% mutually comprehensible with little to no difficulty.
As a test, I copied an article from the Indonesian WP into MS Word and used the Malay spellcheck on it... it told me all words were spelt correctly. Then, I took an article from the Malay WP, and spellcheck'd it with Indonesian spellcheck in MS Word, and got the same result: perfect spelling.
These were not short articles.
Last time I inquired about a merger of Malay and Indonesian WPs, the answer I got was that someone (don't remember who) thinks it's better separate. Again it seems to me to be more a case of politics than real linguistics.
Mark
On 09/10/05, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
Ahh, and I'd like to add a little bit of advice for Elephantus:
Rather than letting politics blind you, why not try to look at things from the point of view of "What will be best for the Wikipedia in my language?". I think that the answer to this, is a merger of these 3 Wikipedias, because it will result in a much larger workforce and much more power and capability.
Currently, Croatian WP has just over 10000 articles, Serbian WP has just over 14000 articles, and Bosnian WP has almost 5000 articles. Now, imagine, if all people from all 3 Wikipedias had been working together from the start, maybe we'd have 30000 articles in a unified Serbocroatian WP already.
Mark
On 09/10/05, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com 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.
Now, if anybody wants to accuse me of spelling and grammatical errors, there are a number of other people they should blame first: 1) The people who wrote the original article, since I have only been copying articles from other Wikipedias; 2) The people who wrote the Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian spellcheckers for MS Word since I often use them to make sure the source-article has no glaring errors.
Now, perhaps you're referring to the fact that the majority of the articles I copy are using Ekavski, which is not used in Croatia. Well, as a form of Serbocroatian, it would hardly be considered incorrect. To be fair, some of the articles I make use Ijekavski, and a couple dozen use a mix of the two. Terms which are obviously split between Serbia and Croatia, like Spanija/Spanjolska (spain), or Jevreju/Hebreju (jewish person), I try to be careful with as well.
As regards your wish to lock the Serbocroatian WP:
According to you, Serbocroatian was an artificial political construct. That is true to a certain extent, but it is undeniable that Stokavian dialects of Croatian, and all dialects of Bosnian and Serbian are all over 99% mutually intelligible when spoken, but especially when written.
These are the only "languages" for which that is the case, with the exception of Moldovan and Romanian, and Dari and Farsi (The Moldovan WP redirects users wanting content in Latin alphabet to the Romanian WP, the Farsi WP includes Dari as well).
I recall something about a Croatian law requiring all Serbian movies to be subtitled (or vice-versa?). Rather than reacting with nationalistic pride when seeing these subtitles for a language that is basically identical to their own, moviegoers generally laughed at the attempts of "translation".
Now, if the majority of Croatian WPdians do not want a united Wikipedia, that's fine. I think it should be everybody's choice. If you want to work at the Croatian WP and keep pretending that your language is somehow extremely differentiated from Serbian and Bosnian (and the emerging Montenegrin), I have no problem with that, although I think it is counter-constructive.
Already, there are Croatians at the SH.wiki, I think...
Now, perhaps a good example is Macedonian.
Although Macedonian (FYROM, that is, just so we don't offend any Greeks) is very similar to Serbo-Croatian, and it would take little effort to make a unified language, since Macedonian is a bit further from Serbocroatian, I don't hold a hope of Macedonian WP being united to Serbocroatian WP.
With Croatian, it seems that people try hard to make it a different language from Serbian, but it isn't really except in a sociolinguistic sense (and even then, not all Croatians perpetuate the idea of a separate Croatian language). Macedonian, on the other hand, has truly different words and spellings, rather than artificial divisions created by linguists for political purposes.
Mark
On 09/10/05, Arbeo M arbeo_m@yahoo.de wrote:
Hi Elephantus!
Let me just try to answer a few of your points here:
The Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia was reopened in June after a request from a single user of the Serbian Wikipedia -
[[sr:User:Покрајац|Pokrajac]].
This was not announced beforehand in any way on the three Wikipedias that are most affected by this issue – Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian, there was no public discussion or a vote. The idea was supported here by people who weren't part of the growing communities of the three Wikipedias.
Generally speaking, only opening all-new Wikipedias requires public discussion, prior announcement, voting or the like. Reopening a previously locked wiki is not a comparable process. Locking a wiki is only a temporary measure because of some specific reason, e. g. vandalism and it can be upheld only as long as that reason persists to exist. SH had been locked because of inactivity. As soon as there were people willing to edit it there was no alternative but to unlock it.
The "phenomenal growth" (1,019 articles) of the Serbo-Croatian is mostly a result of people (some of them with little or no knowledge of the three languages) copy-pasting articles from Serbian (converting those to Latin alphabet), Croatian or Bosnian Wikipedias.
I wasn't aware that most of the editing at SH is done by non-native speakers. Hmm ... you have any idea were they come from? But there is one fact that one must admit: the Wikipedia is active now, no matter where that activity comes from.
My question is this: Why aren't Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian Wikipedias provided the same treatment as e.g. Danish and Bokmal (Norwegian) which are also mutually intelligible in the written form? There is no common Dano-Bokmal Wikipedia with well-wishing but mostly misguided non-native- speakers copying articles to it.
Well, this type of comparison is always a little bold. But I'm getting your point. I guess the main reason is because a "Dano-Bokmal" WP was never requested by anyone. Interestingly though, there seems to be some kind of common Scandinavian project going on.
Serbo-Croatian has been dead as a political collection of standard languages for 15 years now (30 years in Croatia), it is slowly disappearing, except as a historical footnote
I must admit I'm not competent to evaluate the current situation of Serbo-Croatian and it's future is even harder to predict. All I can see is that there seems to be some kind of interest in it here at WP (actually, even more than in 130 other languages).
I'd like to propose a relocking of this Wikipedia
I am well aware that the whole situation is not perfectly ideal yet. But all things considered, I think the current solution is a fairly just and neutral one. There is a minority that wishes to write in Serbo-Croatian. Even if you don't like their standpoint, why exclude them? "Live and let live!"
or at least a name change (Serbian - Latin, as a temporary bridge to the Latin conversion system now being tested for the Serbian Wikipedia).
As a total outsider I could imagine that naming it "Serbian-Latin" would not really be helpful because that name makes reference to one nation and one ethnicity exclusively. "Yugoslav(ian)" has just crossed my mind - would that be an option?
Best regards,
Arbeo
P.S.: My congratulations for your 10,000th article at hr!
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-- SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM POSSIT MATERIARI ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE
-- SI HOC LEGERE SCIS NIMIVM ERVDITIONIS HABES QVANTVM MATERIAE MATERIETVR MARMOTA MONAX SI MARMOTA MONAX MATERIAM POSSIT MATERIARI ESTNE VOLVMEN IN TOGA AN SOLVM TIBI LIBET ME VIDERE
On Sun, Oct 09, 2005 at 06:35:12PM -0700, Mark Williamson wrote:
Rather than letting politics blind you, why not try to look at things from the point of view of "What will be best for the Wikipedia in my language?". I think that the answer to this, is a merger of these 3 Wikipedias, because it will result in a much larger workforce and much more power and capability.
Currently, Croatian WP has just over 10000 articles, Serbian WP has just over 14000 articles, and Bosnian WP has almost 5000 articles. Now, imagine, if all people from all 3 Wikipedias had been working together from the start, maybe we'd have 30000 articles in a unified Serbocroatian WP already.
Yes, you might have 30K articles, but you also wouldn't have an encyclopedia, because the articles would fluctuate in language/style/whatever randomly. And as an added bonus, you'd have a massive potential for an edit war in every single article, as people couldn't agree on the norm used.
I myself have complained at the sh: editors already for being silly and combining things that were never combined even during SFRY, but I'm not particularly interested in shutting their version down. It's clutter, but it's fairly harmless. Combining all four into one, now that would be a particularly ghastly idea.
Hi Josip,
In the future sh.wiki hopes to implement an automatic converter between Cyrillic, Latin, Ijekavski, and Ekavski, so these stylistic/dialect/variety issues won't be a problem anymore.
Now, with such conversion, you wouldn't have to worry about edit wars over what norm is used, because no matter what norm it is written in, it is displayed in the chosen norm (possibly based on IP range-- users in Croatia and Bosnia get Ijekavian, users in Serbia get Ekavian; users in Croatia, Bosnia, and Montenegro get Latin alphabet, users in Serbia get Cyrillic, but of course you can change these preferences).
Mark
On 10/10/05, Josip Rodin joy@srce.hr wrote:
On Sun, Oct 09, 2005 at 06:35:12PM -0700, Mark Williamson wrote:
Rather than letting politics blind you, why not try to look at things from the point of view of "What will be best for the Wikipedia in my language?". I think that the answer to this, is a merger of these 3 Wikipedias, because it will result in a much larger workforce and much more power and capability.
Currently, Croatian WP has just over 10000 articles, Serbian WP has just over 14000 articles, and Bosnian WP has almost 5000 articles. Now, imagine, if all people from all 3 Wikipedias had been working together from the start, maybe we'd have 30000 articles in a unified Serbocroatian WP already.
Yes, you might have 30K articles, but you also wouldn't have an encyclopedia, because the articles would fluctuate in language/style/whatever randomly. And as an added bonus, you'd have a massive potential for an edit war in every single article, as people couldn't agree on the norm used.
I myself have complained at the sh: editors already for being silly and combining things that were never combined even during SFRY, but I'm not particularly interested in shutting their version down. It's clutter, but it's fairly harmless. Combining all four into one, now that would be a particularly ghastly idea.
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On Mon, Oct 10, 2005 at 03:14:57AM -0700, Mark Williamson wrote:
In the future sh.wiki hopes to implement an automatic converter between Cyrillic, Latin, Ijekavski, and Ekavski, so these stylistic/dialect/variety issues won't be a problem anymore.
Now, with such conversion, you wouldn't have to worry about edit wars over what norm is used, because no matter what norm it is written in, it is displayed in the chosen norm (possibly based on IP range-- users in Croatia and Bosnia get Ijekavian, users in Serbia get Ekavian; users in Croatia, Bosnia, and Montenegro get Latin alphabet, users in Serbia get Cyrillic, but of course you can change these preferences).
It's possible to convert those things, but it's much more troublesome to convert expressions and phrases which also differ, let alone style. I never heard of anyone making such a comprehensive converter work.
(Sorry for the slow reply.)
Expressions and phrases, as far as I know, are not mutually exclusive in the two countries.
One expression or phrase will certainly be more common in one country or another, but ultimately I think there are relatively few phrases which differ.
Now, if you're referring to such terms as Zemljopis/Geografija or Spanija/Spanjolska, these are quite easily convertable although perhaps difficult to gather a comprehensive list.
A good list of vocabulary differences can be made quite easily by any native speaker with good experience in all varieties (presumably yourself -- not sure of your exact experience, but you seem like the sort of person with well-rounded experience in Bosnian and Serbian as well as Croatian), but it will of course still be far from complete.
Whatever terms they miss will, however, be noticed in a testing phase by editors who will notice that, in actual usage in actual articles, a particular word sounds distinctly "Croatian" or whatever, and it will be added. Even after this, it would be impossible for the list to ever be complete, but it would be good enough hopefully that words needing conversion but still unconverted would be rare, and there would be a prominent link for people to report errors in conversion, as on zh.wiki.
Mark
On 04/11/05, Josip Rodin joy@srce.hr wrote:
On Mon, Oct 10, 2005 at 03:14:57AM -0700, Mark Williamson wrote:
In the future sh.wiki hopes to implement an automatic converter between Cyrillic, Latin, Ijekavski, and Ekavski, so these stylistic/dialect/variety issues won't be a problem anymore.
Now, with such conversion, you wouldn't have to worry about edit wars over what norm is used, because no matter what norm it is written in, it is displayed in the chosen norm (possibly based on IP range-- users in Croatia and Bosnia get Ijekavian, users in Serbia get Ekavian; users in Croatia, Bosnia, and Montenegro get Latin alphabet, users in Serbia get Cyrillic, but of course you can change these preferences).
It's possible to convert those things, but it's much more troublesome to convert expressions and phrases which also differ, let alone style. I never heard of anyone making such a comprehensive converter work.
(Sorry for the slow reply.)
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On Sun, Oct 09, 2005 at 06:30:04PM -0700, Mark Williamson wrote:
I recall something about a Croatian law requiring all Serbian movies to be subtitled (or vice-versa?). Rather than reacting with nationalistic pride when seeing these subtitles for a language that is basically identical to their own, moviegoers generally laughed at the attempts of "translation".
You recall wrongly. A similar incident is described at en:Differences in the official languages in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia or whatsitcalled, but there was never a law requiring subtitling anything.
With Croatian, it seems that people try hard to make it a different language from Serbian, but it isn't really except in a sociolinguistic sense (and even then, not all Croatians perpetuate the idea of a separate Croatian language). Macedonian, on the other hand, has truly different words and spellings, rather than artificial divisions created by linguists for political purposes.
It is actually awkward for us in .hr to listen to foreign words, accent and style, regardless of how similar they are to our words, accent or style, and the consensus is that we shouldn't have to do it. Nothing more, nothing less.
The country didn't collectively hire linguists to invent words, and then hire gorillas to force four million people to stop using old words and use the invented ones. That simply never happened, not by a long shot. There were politicians and linguists who had an agenda of modifying their speech and the speech of others, but their influence has always been finite, and generally minor.
Recent nationalism has caused many outsiders to treat Croatians as some sort of excessively xenophobic people who now go out of their way to be different. However, the way we speak, and how that is different from the people in Serbia, dates much further back than the creation of the Croatian state. We have always spoken a bit differently, hence the variance in Serbo-Croatian/Croato-Serbian. The official sanction of a Croatian language is merely a different type of an acknowledgement of the existing situation, not an attempt to construe something out of thin air.
2005/10/9, Arbeo M arbeo_m@yahoo.de:
Generally speaking, only opening all-new Wikipedias requires public discussion, prior announcement, voting or the like. Reopening a previously locked wiki is not a comparable process. Locking a wiki is only a temporary measure because of some specific reason, e. g. vandalism and it can be upheld only as long as that reason persists to exist. SH had been locked because of inactivity. As soon as there were people willing to edit it there was no alternative but to unlock it.
No, sh had been locked because it had been replaced by sr+bs+hr. It was unlocked because I was pressured to unlock it. I still think that my first decision was the right one. Let's put this simple:
EITHER Serbian and Croatian are the same language, and then we should not have separate Wikipedias for them, OR they are not the same language, and then we should not have a combined Wikipedia.
Doing both is silly. And that's about the weakest expression I can think of.
-- Andre Engels, andreengels@gmail.com ICQ: 6260644 -- Skype: a_engels
Andre, sh.wiki was locked because of inactivity, or at least that's the reason you listed.
So long as it is active, no matter how illogical its continued existence may seem, I don't think it would be wise to up and lock it.
Now, practically speaking, Serbian and Croatian aren't separate languages, rather they're regiolects (not quite dialects -- Serbocroatian *has* dialects, just that most are spoken in Croatia).
However, the events of the 90s created such deep divisions between the peoples of the region who previously would've thought it preposterous to suggest that they spoke different languages, that people slowly began to decide that they wanted to have nothing to do with Serbia, and so changed their languages, first in name and then in orthographical conventions and to a certain extent vocabulary, as well as emphasizing differences that already existed.
I think that, in time, the people of the region will be willing to share a Wikipedia, but that sh.wiki is currently not well-enough developed: it has just barely 1000 articles, and what sort of crazy person would leave a Wikipedia with over 10000 articles to work on a much smaller one?
If sh.wiki has more articles, I think a merger will be a more realistic possibility.
Similarly, the Minnan Wikipedia was so widely opposed when first requested that it wasn't created. However, when it demonstrated its viability offsite (as Holopedia), people began to see that it was alright.
I think that if the structure already exists, it will be quite a different decision -- "Should we use one WP or not, the only consequences being the people with whom we must interact?" will be the question, rather than the current "Should we move in with these other two groups to a small, undeveloped Wikipedia, when the Wikipedias we're at now have 5, 10, or even 15 times more articles?"
The conversion difficulties mentioned should also be solved soon, and when that infrastructure is in place as well, it will provide an additional layer of "oh, now that I see it in action, it's a better idea than I'd thought".
So currently, while they are redundant (we should have 1 WP rather than 4), having 4 right now means that in the distant future we may be able to have a single one. If you close sh.wiki, any hopes for that will become much less feasible.
Cheers Mark
On 12/10/05, Andre Engels andreengels@gmail.com wrote:
2005/10/9, Arbeo M arbeo_m@yahoo.de:
Generally speaking, only opening all-new Wikipedias requires public discussion, prior announcement, voting or the like. Reopening a previously locked wiki is not a comparable process. Locking a wiki is only a temporary measure because of some specific reason, e. g. vandalism and it can be upheld only as long as that reason persists to exist. SH had been locked because of inactivity. As soon as there were people willing to edit it there was no alternative but to unlock it.
No, sh had been locked because it had been replaced by sr+bs+hr. It was unlocked because I was pressured to unlock it. I still think that my first decision was the right one. Let's put this simple:
EITHER Serbian and Croatian are the same language, and then we should not have separate Wikipedias for them, OR they are not the same language, and then we should not have a combined Wikipedia.
Doing both is silly. And that's about the weakest expression I can think of.
-- Andre Engels, andreengels@gmail.com ICQ: 6260644 -- Skype: a_engels
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Andre Engels wrote: <snip>
EITHER Serbian and Croatian are the same language, and then we should not have separate Wikipedias for them, OR they are not the same language, and then we should not have a combined Wikipedia.
Doing both is silly. And that's about the weakest expression I can think of.
I agree. It would be like having an American English Wikipedia, a Commonwealth English Wikipedia, a Generic Other English Wikipeida, and our current English Wikipedia.
Does anyone ever wonder where the phrase "Balkanisation is evil" came from? We're staring it in the face. We've got duplication of effort where we don't need it. Either they're the same language or they're not. Time to stop pretending that it's some weird quantum superposition of both states at once. On a macroscopic scale, it just doesn't happen.
- -- Alphax | /"\ Encrypted Email Preferred | \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613 | X Against HTML email & vCards http://tinyurl.com/cc9up | / \
...
Speaking of duplication of content.
On 13/10/05, Alphax alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
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Andre Engels wrote:
<snip> > EITHER Serbian and Croatian are the same language, and then we should > not have separate Wikipedias for them, > OR they are not the same language, and then we should not have a > combined Wikipedia. > > Doing both is silly. And that's about the weakest expression I can think of. >
I agree. It would be like having an American English Wikipedia, a Commonwealth English Wikipedia, a Generic Other English Wikipeida, and our current English Wikipedia.
Does anyone ever wonder where the phrase "Balkanisation is evil" came from? We're staring it in the face. We've got duplication of effort where we don't need it. Either they're the same language or they're not. Time to stop pretending that it's some weird quantum superposition of both states at once. On a macroscopic scale, it just doesn't happen.
Alphax | /"\ Encrypted Email Preferred | \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613 | X Against HTML email & vCards http://tinyurl.com/cc9up | / \ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
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